These screens showcase some of the new aspects of what UE4 can achieve. They are not the graphical limit of the engine however. We will see more at E3.
It will streamline game development, allowing studios to do in 12 months what can take two years or more today. And most important, it will make the videogames that have defined the past decade look like puppet shows.
?There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation,? says Cliff Bleszinski, Epic?s design director. ?It is up to Epic, and Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap. They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it?even if they don?t know they want it.?
In previous engines, one floating ember was enough to slow performance considerably; a shower of them was impossible. With Unreal Engine 4, there can be millions of such particles, as long as the hardware is potent enough to sustain them.
In the past, game developers employed a trick known as staged lighting to give the impression that light in a game was behaving as it would in the real world. That meant a lot of pre-rendering?programming hundreds of light sources into an environment that would then be turned on or off depending on in-game events. If a building collapsed in a given scene, all the light effects that had been employed to make it look like a real interior would remain in place over empty space. Shadows would remain in the absence of structure; glares that once resulted from sunlight glinting off windows would remain floating in midair. To avoid this, designers programmed the light to look realistic in any of that scene?s possible situations?one situation at a time. ?You would have to manually sculpt the lighting in every section of every level,? Bleszinski says. ?The number of man-years that required was astounding.? UE4 introduces dynamic lighting, which behaves in response to its own inherent properties rather than a set of preprogrammed effects. In other words, no more faking it. Every light in a scene bounces off every surface, creating accurate reflections. Colors mix, translucent materials glow, and objects viewed through water refract. And it?s all being handled on the fly, as it happens. That?s not realistic?that?s real.Wired
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