We have these new threads almost daily about Graphics king, crysis, uncharted 2, etc. But nothing ever gets accomplished because each game has a different visual styl.e, crysis has high detail, uc2 has its colorfulness. So i am making a discussion on the superior graphics engine, where the capabilities of producing the best graphics, physics, etc can be discussed in abscene of artistic style to alter people's opinion.
So here are some of the current top engines in terms of graphics.
CryEngine2(crysis, various mods)
- Volumetric 3D Clouds
- Real time Ambient Maps with dynamic lighting and no premade shadows
- 3D Ocean Technology dynamically modifies the ocean surface based on wind and wave direction and creates moving shadows and highlights underwater
- Depth of field to focus on certain objects while blurring out the edges and far away places
- Vector Motion blur on both camera movement and individual objects
- Dynamic Soft shadows with objects casting realistic shadows in real time
- Realistic Facial Animation that can be captured from an actor's face
- Subsurface scattering
- Breakable Buildings allowing more tactical preplanning on the player's side
- Breakable Vegetation (with possibly heavy foliage) enabling players and enemy AI to level entire forests as a tactical maneuver or other purposes
- Advanced Rope Physics showcasing bendable vegetation responding to wind, rain or character movement and realistically interactive rope bridges
- Component Vehicle Damage giving vehicles different destroyable parts, such as tires on jeeps or helicopter blades
- HDR lighting
- Fully interactive and destructible environments
- Advanced particle system with fire or rain being affected by forces such as wind
- Time of Day Lighting, with sunrise, and sunset effects ensuring realistic transition between daytime and nighttime
- Lightbeams and Shafts when light intersects with solid or highly detailed geometry, and can generate "Godray" effects underwater
- Parallax Occlusion Mapping giving a greater sense of depth to a surface texture, realistically emphasizing the relief surface structure of objects
- Long Range View Distance of up to 16km from ingame measurements
- Parametric Skeletal Animation System
- Procedural Motion Warping
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Naughty Dog Game Engine 2.0(Uncharted 2)
- real-time moving environments
- more realistic textures
- animations
- Ambient Occlusion
i wasnt able to find too much info on NDGE2 since it has less documentation but if you can post a link it would be appreciated and i will update the post.
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Unreal Engine 3. (UT3, Gears of War 2, Mirrors Edge, batmanAA)
- 64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.
- Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; custom artist controlled per material lighting models including anisotropic effects; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; directional light maps; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.
- Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for four shadowing techniques:
- Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.
- Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows on the scene using shadow buffers. Shadow buffer filtering takes samples on a jittered disc that are rotated per-pixel to detect shadow penumbras. Dynamic branching is then used to refine shadow coverage in penumbra regions.
- Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.
- Directional Light Mapping enables the static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting of an unlimited number of lights to be precomputed and stored into a single set of texture maps, enabling very large light counts in high-performance scenes.
- All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.
- Volumetric environmental effects including height fog.
- Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.
- UnrealKismet, our visual scripting system:
- Gives artists and level designers virtually limitless control over how a level will play without touching a single line of code.
- By connecting together simple events and actions created by programmers, everything from simple behaviours to complete gameplay prototypes can be assembled quickly.
- UnrealKismetsupports hierarchies of scripts for organizing very complex sequences into manageable units.
- The Unreal Editor (UnrealEd) is a pure "What You See Is What You Get" content creation tool filling the void between XSI, 3D Studio Max and Maya, and shippable game content.
- A powerful browser framework for finding, viewing, and organizing game assets of all types.
- Visual placement and editing of gameplay objects such as players, NPCs, inventory items, AI path nodes, and light sources – with a full realtime view of their appearance, including 100% dynamic shadowing.
- Includes a data-driven property editing framework, allowing level designers to easily customize any game object, and programmers to expose new customizable properties to designers via script.
- Realtime terrain editing tools allowing artists to elevate terrain, paint alpha layers onto terrain to control layer blending and decoration layers, collision data, and displacement maps.
- VisualMaterial Editor. By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.
- Animation tool enables artists to import models, skeletons, and animations, and to tie them to in-game events such as sounds and script notifications.
- In-editor "Play Here" button puts gameplay just one mouse click and a fraction of a second away. Here, you can test gameplay in-editor in one window while modifying objects and rearranging geometry in another.
- Plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and Maya to bring models into the Unreal engine with mesh topology, mapping coordinates, smoothing groups, material names, skeleton structure, and skeletal animation data.
- Fully integrated source control, so that artists and level designers can check out content packages, modify, and check in from within the editor.
- All the other niceties you'd expect from a modern content editing tool: Multi-level undo/redo, drag-and-drop, copy-and-paste; customizable key and color configuration; viewport management.
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MT-Framework( RE5, lost planet)
MT Frameworkis an exclusiveseventh generationgame enginebuilt to be used with "all of theCapcomnext-generation games"[citation needed]on thePlayStation 3andXbox 360, as commented byDead Rising,Lost Planet,Devil May Cry 4, andResident Evil 5. MT stands for "Multi-Thread", "Meta Tools" and "Multi-Target". Originally meant to be an outside engine, but none matched their specific requirements in performance and flexibility. The PC/360 version was developed by 3 people and then 5, and for the PS3 version 4 people were added. Games using the MT Framework are originally developed on the PC and then ported to the other 2 platforms.Keiji Inafunementioned in an interview with 1UP that the lead programmer for MT Framework designed the engine specifically forDead Rising,Lost Planet, and a hypothetical thirdMega Man Legendsgame, which Inafune has been hoping to make for several years.[1]MT Framework 2.0 is being used forLost Planet 2which will provide better graphics over its predecessor.[2]
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X-Ray( STALKER SERIES)
The X-ray Engine is aDirectX8.1/9Shader Model3.0 graphics engine. Up to a million polygons can be on-screen at any one time. The engine featuresHDR rendering,parallaxandnormal mapping,soft shadows,motion blur,widescreensupport, weather effects and day/night cycles. As with other engines that usedeferred shading, the X-ray Engine does not supportanti-aliasingwith dynamic lighting enabled. However, a "fake" form of anti-aliasing can be enabled with the static lighting option; this format utilizes a technique to blur the image to give the false impression of anti-aliasing.[11]The game takes place in a thirty square kilometer area, and both the outside and inside of this area are rendered to the same amount of detail. Some textures in the game were photographs of the walls in the developers' studio.[12]
As of patch 1.0003 the X-ray engine supports "surround screen" monitor setups, including a 16:9 native resolution ratio.
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Source(half life 2, l4d, tf2)
The Source Engineis a 3D game engine developed by Valve Corporation. Its unique features include a large degree of modularity and flexibility, an artist-driven, shader-based renderer, accurate lip sync and facial expression technology, and a powerful, efficient and completely network-enabled physics system.
Renderer
- Version 2.0 (and below) shaders, bump mapping, LOD on models and world
- Author shaders with HLSL
- Cube and environment mapping
- Dynamic lights, vertex lighting and light maps, many light types including flickering, pulsing etc.
- High-Dynamic Range lighting
- Water with refraction and fresnel effects
- Advanced particle system that can emit sprites or models
- Projected shadows allow for a large number of characters per scene
- Occluder entities for visibility blocking
- Indoor/Outdoor environments
- Deformable terrain
- 3D skyboxes extend the horizon and add parallax on distant objects
- Dynamically rendered organics (grass, trees etc)
- Subdivision surfaces, diffuse & specular bump maps
- Real-time radiosity lighting
- Effects include but are not limited to: particles, beams, volumetric smoke, sparks, blood, environmental effects like fog and rain
- Scalability
- Dx6-Dx9 hardware supported
Materials System
- Instead of traditional textures, Source defines sets of materials that specify what the object is made from and the texture used for that object. A material specifies how an object will fracture when broken, what it will sound like when broken or dragged across another surface, and what that object's mass and buoyancy are. This system is much more flexible than other texture only based systems.
- Materials can interact with objects or NPCs such as mud or ice for vehicles to slide/lose traction on.
Multiplayer Network Code
- Time and gamer tested by millions of gamers around the world
- Support for both LAN based multiplayer and Internet based multiplayer games
- Prediction analysis for interpolating collision/hit detection
- Optimizations for high-latency, high-packet loss 56k connections
Advanced Characters
- Detailed and believable characters
- Realistic eyes
- Focus on player/object, not simply parallel views
- Proper eye "bulge" for realistic eye reflections
- Simulated musculature provides outstanding emotions, speech and body language
- Language independent speech, characters can naturally speak in many languages
- Skeletal/bone system for animation
- Layered animation system can synthesize complex animations out of several pieces
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Dunia(far cry 2)
Dunia Engineis agame enginedeveloped by Ubisoft Montreal forFar Cry 2. The game engine was designed forPC,Xbox 360, andPlayStation 3. It is a heavily modified version of theCryEngine, whichUbisoftbought fromCrytekalongside theFar Cry series.Duniameans "world", "earth" or "living" inHindiandArabic.[13]A heavily modified version of the Dunia Engine is used forJames Cameron's Avatar: The Game.[citation needed]Assassin's Creed IIalso usesFar Cry 2's vegetation technology although it won't use the Dunia Engine itself (the game will run onAnvil).[citation needed]
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