Spectra GI - dead or alive?

Concerning Enlighten

I got a better understanding of what's going on by reading this old document ( http://www.geomerics.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/radiosity_architecture.pdf ). There might be some changes since then, but the concept is the same I think.

Also, this thread I made to try and find out what Unity 5 and Enlighten can do together
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/en...s-along-with-unreal-4-enlighten-video.277415/

 

Set the mode to iterative and select the lightsource such as directional to real-time GI. You still have to "Pre-compute" the scene based on automatic proxy geometry, once Enlighten has clustered the geometry render then you can move about lights free will and it will run everything dynamically.

But if you move any geometry it has to re-pute, if you change shader properties it has to re-pute.. So on etc.

 

No, it is not safe to assume that at all. Its working, but clearly we have yet to find a shared language that enables us to talk about all this stuff, and expectations of what should be happening, without going down the wrong path.

 

I don't understand ? Unity proposes Enlighten for UT5 and everyone should be happy and already we have same story as UT4 repeating : UT5 GI will not be enought and some people will have to buy again on the Asset Store.
It means : Using Unity -> Purchase on Asset Store automatically for replacing Unity weakness of it's features already contained in ?

 

Unity 5 contains numerous features which make things look a lot nicer 'out of the box'.

Thats not the same as pleasing every person and every scenario. That never happens, especially when some people want to achieve more in realtime than tends to be practical.

So, long live Unity improvements and long live both experiments and more robust solutions that may appear in the asset store. I like to play around with 3rd party stuff and for example just recently purchased Jove 2.0, but I'm not placing the same level of faith in it, when it comes to things like longevity, as I will with core Unity stuff.

For me personally, buying Unity 5 was a no-brainer, for me right now a much more obvious choice that pays for itself instantly than I got with Unity 4, at least to start with.

 

How do I actually do this?

 

Actually, it does work. I'm using the version 11.The problem is, as someone mentioned, it is too static. Moving objects look horrible next to static objects that affects gi.
Baking done right, the scene will look gorgeous. No argument on that.
But
you have to up the res if you want some decent results.
I have a scene where there are three houses with dozens of pieces of furniture inside and sime other stuff. Whose lightmaps take up nearly 1gb.....
If you bring down the res, it looks blend and small objects look horrible.
so the best way to handle this is, focus only on large objects and bake the lighting once you are happy with how your level looks.
This is why bf3 used enlighten only for baking. If if was possible, they would've included TOD in the game.
And the higher the lightmaps' res, the longer it takes to update gi.
It is possible to amortise gi update over few frames instead of every frame.
But its just a dirty work around,, dosent solve the issue.
I think unity made a mistake because in a few years time, hardwares are going to be strong enough to handle realtime gi methods such as VXGI,,Right now, it's impossible.
But aftrr a few years, who would wanna use enlighten when there are other options available? ofcourse thats only for PCs.
Enlghten is light in mobile platforms and runs well.
But who cares about gi when people play mobile games? Most of the mobile gamers are casual gamers who don't even know what gi is.
well, its better than nothing. But if the size of the lightmaps is bigger than the game itself, its kind of useless especially on mobile platforms where download size does matter.
Seriously, I wish they had improved some other parts of the engine or adopted a different solution.

 

That's why Asset Store will provide better solutions as always.
The only drawback is money, as each time Unity license is not enought , as you need to put lot more cash to replace some provided features already in, or to buy features that should be out of the box (shader editor, visual programming, LOD tools ...)

 

Just go to the lightmapping option and change it to iterative, middle tab there is a drop down box to select iterative, on demand and legacy.

@HappyCoder84

CryEngines been rocking real-time GI via LPV for years, yes it does have quite a few limitations and we know there is better looking tech out there today. But still it's been possible for a long while..

In defence of Unity for a sec, real-time GI is not an easy or practical thing to achieve. I know for a fact Unity can't be finished with Enlighten, due to FB3.. Do we think Dragon Age inquisition is going to need a separate 100GB download for the lightmaps? ..

In a perfect world if consoles rocked 780TI's and everyone else with a PC did the same, none of this would be an issue. I'd probably actively say Enlighten isn't worth it as in 2014 there is a lot better looking tech out there, but due to console and base PC markets we'll be stuck with crappy hardware for many years to come.

 

im using cryengine for my pcproject now.
anything you put in just looks amazing. u dont have to do much to make your materials look good. looks even better than ue4, imo.
they use ibl, ssdo, ssr and ssao for gi.
it's super light-weight and easy to work with except for when u have models with complex interior designs. In which case, u have to fake gi by placing lights.
still, its much better because u can redesign your level on the fly without having to bake.

unity is a good engine. I've used it for quite some time. But having used cryengine for 4 months, i now understand why many aaa games(star citizen, monster hunetrr, evolve) are being developed using this engine.
Unity , although powerful, as it stands, cant compete with aaa engine like cryengine for bells and whistles..
But it certainly has its place.


Type "cryengine quixel" in google.
all the metarials in the video were made using quixel. The scene dosent have any super large lightmaps. just ibl probes and some dynamic lights. that's all.

unity has skyshop and third party ssao solution. But it would be very difficult to make a scene look as good as the video without lightmaps. unity's shaders are iptimized for mobile platforms so they dont look as good.

I wish unity had chosen a similiar approach which costs much less to develope and dosent have to rely on third party plugins.

Depending on what kind of deal you've made with plugin providers, sometimes you dont have right to change the source code or access to it, which i think is one major problem unity has to solve.
hav a nice day fellow developers~

 

Actually they use LPV for GI, SSAO (Which is ambient occlusion) doesn't have anything to do with GI. But I get you, it is a miracle of a rendering tool. Shame about the actual engine itself, when you want to make a game..

The UE4 Quixel demo is impressive as hell as well, still it's only shinies! We need games.

 

You are right about the cryengine`s workflow. It`s a pain in the ass even when you know what you are doing.
Animation import and compression process is cumbersome, on top of that animation related logics are purely done in c++, making it very hard to work with.
But once you master the engine, you can do pretty much anything you want to do.
Also, since most of the runtime editing(code-related) stuff is done through either LUA or XML, you can make your game moddable pretty easily.

But.. yeah.. I agree that cryengine is very hard to work with especially with the limited amount of the source code.
Here`s Kindom Delieverance teaser, recently released.

 

They don`t use LPV anymore. Their recent game Ryse used environment probes and dynamic lights for GI.
LPV is still available as a legacy feature, though.

There are some indie cryengine games about to be released this year.
Lichdome has already been released. It started out as an indie project. And then it got huge(by huge I mean more than 10 people).
Miscreated is going to be released this year.. it uses Cryengine as well.
There some other games which haven`t been announced to the public.

I`m using it myself, It`s not impossible to make a cryengine game like most people in the unity forums say.
I`ve spent 3 months just reading the game SDK code,, it`s very overwhelming even to experienced programmers because there`s so much stuff going on.
But,, those over-the-top bloated looking codes are what makes smooth gaming experience possible.

I myself have been frustrated countless times,, But it`s worth it.
At the end of the day, you would want to give both a try and see which fits your game better.
I still like Unity and would use it anytime for my mobile project.

 

Just outta curiosity, is any part of the rendering code available? Is there a public API or something like that or no access at all?

 

I used CE for well over a year, I did like it. The main thing that really goes against them, is you hit a bug there's nothing you can do about it and you couldn't report it to anyone anyway. The workflow was restricted and contrived (UI needed an old version of scaleform, animation a pain etc.) and the amount of pain in general was un-necessary, if you're after a small platform outlet (PC, PS4 / Xbox) you can just use a rendering and SDK template with PhyrEngine. It'd be much simpler to crack something together yourself, most of the tech in it isn't a mystery. The licensing was touch and go, the way indies got treated back in the day isn't something I'm willing to forgive either.

UE4 isn't worlds away from CE, sure it needs some tweaking but it's as easy to use as Unity with all the out the box rendering power one could want. So I'd rather just add a DFR+ pass to the grid and then I can use UE just like CE.. At that point UE becomes much more powerful at openworld / sandbox games than CE does.

I'd even much prefer to bolt on to Unity..

 

Dear livenda. Hate to have this question asked again in teh same thread, but its on topic lol.. Is spectra GI dead? Seems like you have given 4 or 5 release dates and missed all of them. Did you give up on the project?

 

It's quite impressive to miss every single self set deadline and release date...think they should get an award of some kind

 

a spectracular fail

 

Well it's not a shock, multi-million dollar 500+ employee companies haven't solved the one fits all GI problem across the board yet. I'd of thrown money so hard at the screen my monitor would of smashed, maybe I should of thrown notes at it instead of change.

Anyway, even if they did finish the product. I'd be doubtful it would stack up..

 

Honestly I don't even care about the GI portion of it. I just want those textured area lights.

 

Same here.

 

nope, unless you have the source code only given to licensees.
and ce is behind its peers when it comes to ease of use.
its one thing cryengine should improve upon.

honestly i dont care about spectra area lights.
it wont have as much of visual impact if u actually use it.

nothing against spectra..
but dont fall for the marketing videos. its just a video. u dont know if it will work until u actually use it under many lighting conditions.

 

i agree with every thing u said.
but i've already gotten used to its workflows..
its true that u hav to wait for them to fix the bugs,,

 

Hey happy, did u check out htat other link i sent u? they actually show a demo of theirs and it looks awesome.. realtime reflections and realtime gi.

 

Have you sent me a link? What link? I haven`t received it.
Which demo is it?
Why don't you post it here so everybody can see it.

 

I`m no expert at rendering tech, though I know bits and pieces.
When I see rendering algorithms utilizing DX or OpenGL, I can understand it.
But I`m not good enough to come up with my own.

As far as I`m concerned, realtime GI, which doesn`t affect performance but somehow takes into account depth buffer, lighting on pixels,and so forth is pretty much impossible to achieve.
Even if you have a super efficient algorithm, which is very unlikely in most cases, you can`t avoid performance hit as long as your rendering algorithm is based on rasterization, which every current game engine is built on.
It will never be as fast as baked lightmaps or IBL, which basically just does streaming textures in and out.

I studied image processing in university. The most challenging part of any imaging related tech is how you figure out which object is far from and which object is close to the camera.
In game engines, which rely on rasterization, that is done through ray-casting, which most of us are already familiar with.
Problem is,,, that`s the only way.

think about this,, imagine if there were hundreds of objects stacked up, each having its own unique shape and contributing GI to one another. I don`t think any kind of screen space tech can handle that.
One of the UE4 memebers actually came up with hybrid(screen space + ray casting) GI solution. While it sounds fancy, it`s not quite production-ready, imo. The current technology is just not there.

If you are going to focus on outdoor settings, I think Cryengine`s approach will be most realistic and less headache-inducing method. IBL + good SSDO + dynamic lights(hundreds of lights thanks to deferred rendering).
I think you can do something similar in Unity,using Skyshop. Of course, it won`t be as good,, but with good artwork, I believe you can make a stunning scene.

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/co...nation-using-light-propagations.275808/page-2

Thats the link to the forum page... .. I think page 2 has a video and a unity3d webplayer test that gets 200 fps(maxed out for webplayer).. realtime gi and realtime reflections.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/65183439/SimpleRoomdemo/SimpleRoomdemo.html

Thats the link to the web player.

Thats the link to the video.


@happy...

Is your mind blown? lol mine is.. He also mentions that he is working on a dx11 version that could make the reflections higher res. (these arent cubemaps)

 

i think Spectra GI was never born, how can it be dead or alive if it was not born at all, I've seen promises for videos and release dates for over 4 months now, I don't know what they're trying to do, I hope one day they come in suprise

 

I think they are quietly trying to sweep this under the rug while they try a new approach and focus peoples attention back to reflections lol... but thats just my opinion.

 

I find it interesting how people can actually become quite excited about something, albeit a reflection of the `promises` made by the developer, to then feel rejected and resentful when that thing is not forthcoming. ie the only reason people are upset is because they got their expectations up, and now apparently it's the developer's `fault` for making people upset. People get to choose whether they are upset about something or not. It's true the developer may have `got our hopes up` and `dashes them against the rocks` when they were apparently not met, and it's true that this is not good `marketing`, but as people, let's just remember we're not 2-year-old victims, and maybe this thing will eventually get released and then we'll probably all be ooh-ahh ok I'll take you back, hurt puppies

 

Is it that interesting? No one likes to feel like the wool was pulled over their eyes when they are lookn forward to something. Its one thing to tell them work in progress... quite another to tell them the product is coming and then dash their hopes several times... first few times its like whatever... but after a while its become a joke and people move on to other products and methods. I mean your logic of people choosing what to be upset about is kinda odd since that can be applied to anything... i can choose to be obset if my foot was cut off. Or not... lol

 

A good rule : never expect too much until you have the product in your hands or a complete demo.

 

Well I locked the previous thread by this developer which took 5 months, so it spilled out with frustration here. See, they were given promises and videos and told it was coming soon. This *is* the developers fault. When someone says "please hold for a short while" on the phone and you hold for 30 mins, you get kind of pissed. It's called human nature.

I've locked this thread as it's not going anywhere and isn't even by the developer. I don't want to see more threads about this until the developer actually releases it. No more preview, no more discussion. Product or GTFO