The most Insane AAA Game made in Unity has arrived in Closed Alpha

Good thing there is nothing normal about game developers.

It's a desperate business model. At this point they're having to completely restructure their business and hope they can stay afloat long enough to come up with a new business model that won't fail as any failure at this point is practically a game over for them.

 

"Normal people" do not use any game engines, and work in different industries.

Unreal 4 had very poor C++ documentation and was obsessing over blueprints last time I seriously worked with it. This may have changed since. CryEngine was rumored to have the worst documentation, but that's hearsay. Unity does not give source code access by default. There's a gotcha in every engine.

There are also opensource engines and frameworks. Lemme see... Ogre and Irrlicht come to mind, and I saw them being used in commercial products. There were some proponents of "Godots", then there's also cocos-2d framework, then we have Qt, which could be used for making 2d games. Then there are barebones frameworks, like libSdl, Allegro, SFML, etc. Basically, you could totally develop a game without paying a cent (and only spending yoru time), but using established product with a company backing it is a bit safer.

Oh, wait, that's right, previous engines developed by ID software are available for free. For example, idtech 4 is under Gnu GPL right now.

 

Don't show him SEGI!

 

Tarkov looks good, but a little bit struggling graphically.

Probably the best thing I've seen in Unity, and it uses SEGI:

That's the first time I've really gone "That's what I'm looking for" with a Unity video/screenshot. You just can't beat a good foundation, no matter how good the artistic skill.

 

Great article. I'll never be the next Inigo Quilez, but I swear I could happily spend the rest of my life doing nothing but writing shaders.

 

Yep, it is great;
but it can't block injection of DLL certificate signed. Believe it or not, ppl are buying Microsoft certificates to make cheats on Windows Kernel lol, certs are like 100$ a year.

 

Tarkov is a game, where you can play in multiplayer.
Your movie is just a movie, not a game.

 

Not my movie, found it on artstation - one of the very few Unity 5 showcases on there. I think it's from a group of game dev students.

That it's a movie doesn't change the fact that it's a far better example of AAA graphics in Unity than Tarkov. There's a huge gulf between those two, and it has everything to do with the lighting tech. Stuff made with SEGI is the only example I've seen of graphics on par with the usual blockbuster AAA games.

If ex-Battlefield devs can't produce AAA art, I don't know who can ... Project Wight is a perfect example of AAA art in sub-par lighting:



So in case it wasn't obvious, I really hope Unity end up implementing SEGI or something similar, it would be the perfect way to top off an otherwise great engine.

 

Have you watched their Unite talk from LA? A great deal of of their AAA art is from the Asset Store...

 

I had a quick listen a while ago - I thought they'd used some tools from there?

Anyway, I've seen a slew of beautiful looking games lately, Project Wight, Prey for the Gods, Escape from Tarkov, and they all suffer from flat lighting.

Either there is some kind of epidemic where artists lose their skills when making stuff for Unity, or the lighting is not up to scratch, and I find it much easier to believe it's the latter. Sure, most of use aren't experts but you'd think being such an available engine you'd be able to find thousands of screenshots of stuff people had done for fun.

I go daily to Polycount and I see endless amounts of top-notch AAA-level art there, usually inside an engine other than Unity. I have no doubt that there are droves of indie artists who can match the quality if not quantity of AAA art. Yet I don't see any screenshots of it in Unity that could compete at the top level.

Except for the example I posted. It gives me hope ... SonicEther seems to be single-handedly bringing Unity graphically to to the races. Not to take anything away from such a brilliant feat, but being such a fundamental thing I doubt it would be more than one patch away from breaking if it ever stopped being supported.

 

I think it is not a good idea to place "hope for better future of unity" onto one person.

If anything, what Unity really needs is scriptable rendering pipeline, because as of now fully customizing lighting system is difficult.

Standard shader also could use some restructuring (includes used in standard shader are quite messy).

One more thing you should keep in mind that Unreal 4, for example, does not even include realtime GI functionality (that is present in unity) by default. Lightmass is simply traditional lightmaps (well, there's also LPV, but by default it is off and it is experimental).

 

That's kind of my point, I wish Unity would implement this sort of thing themselves. I can appreciate how much work goes into developing an asset store product like this, but by default asset store product support can be a shaky business, often not for reasons of the author's choosing.

I definitely can appreciate Unity's realtime GI (I suppose at the cost of horrific baking times at least until lately), but from a naiive point of view the graphics is just not up to par with other engines. I haven't spent an incredible lot of time finding out how lighting works but going by the screenshots I see (and I see a lot - I literally go looking for graphics examples daily) I'm always a little disappointed.

Not to get sidetracked but I'm more and more relying on shape, lighting and materials rather than modelled/baked detail as a key factor in making my graphics look good, so I'm very keen to see things improve. In the meantime SEGI seems to be the only thing that gets graphics on par, and as you say, it's hardly ever a great idea to rely on one person for such a core part of the engine.

 

I looks like thousand of free online FPS, models looks coming from a model pack; the lighting ,materials and post effect doesn't shine. I would not qualify it as AAA

 

Saying this game doesn't look great is delusional.

 

I agree that this may not be AAA in the pure definition, but come on. It's still quite an achievement for an indie developer working in Unity. At least give credit where it is due.

 

You make it sound like you haven't seen the Adam demo, specifically the full extended complete version that shows more of the exterior. As far as I'm concerned that's more than up to par with other engines and Unity has already released a lot of the content from that demo.

 

I've seen it. I'm impressed by many things about it and I'm extremely happy they've done it, but to put it bluntly, it also suffers from flat lighting.

I guess the best way to describe the problem is that I find it a lot harder to evaluate depth in the image than, for example, the SEGI demo I posted above. I cherry-picked the worst example I could find to illustrate my point.



If you can't see the issue with that, well I don't quite know what else to say. There's a flatness to the lighting that robs the scene of a sense of volume.

This is my favourite example of very nice lighting (in a different engine) that transforms an environment that would probably otherwise look relatively ordinary.



There's no flatness whatsoever, and there's a very pleasant sense of depth and volume.

Anyway, my point is not to 'bash unity' but we cannot get an improvement if we don't quite know what we're looking for. I think what SEGI brings is essentially what I'm looking for and I would like to see it implemented as a core part of the engine. As @neginfinity said scriptable rendering might be a good idea which might enable us to fairly easily adjust things to suit the type of game or platform that we're aiming for.

 

This could really be an AA game

 

Frankly no, I don't see an issue with it. That very screenshot you just posted looks less realistic and cinematic than that same Adam screenshot and looks more like a videogame. This "depth" you describe sounds more like contrast and exposure and simple personal preference for a particular style or look.

You're putting the blame on Unity's lighting capabilities, however what you're talking about has nothing to do with that and everything to do with composition, camera angle, photography, color correction, creator's intent, stylistic choices, etc. Real life lighting sometimes is flat, especially cloudy/hazy outdoors with fewer artificial light sources--that's why hollywood studios hire expensive directors of photography to pick the perfect angle, use literal smoke and mirrors to get the right lighting, etc.

In that Adam shot you picked for example, if the lighting is flat it's because it's the shot immediately before this one, when the characters were still standing in the shadows and from a different angle.




As far as I'm concerned these shots have plenty of "depth". Either way though, I'd say we're getting off topic since the thread is about Escape From Tarkov, but I just wanted to point out that if a game has lighting issues, the problem generally isn't on Unity's end.

 

When I say that it's hard for me to judge depth in the Adam demo, I'm talking about a sense of inaccuracy, not simply fogginess. To exaggerate the point, it feels like those characters were somewhat painted onto the background because the relative distance of objects in the scene, judged a) by the lighting and b) by an estimate of the distance due to knowledge of the approximate sizes of the objects in the scene, don't correlate very well.

In the first shot you posted, it's very nicely composed but the issue is still evident particularly in the foreground terrain as well as the mid-ground wreckage. The last shot you posted is not illustrative of much since there's not a lot of variety of distance in there, and it's possible a lot of the characters are wearing baked lighting. In any case I don't think they fit in too well with what I can see of the background.

In regards to flatness, here's a shot of great lighting in flat conditions (not unity) that doesn't give a sense of confusion:



I wish I could find a good vegetation example (or even Adam demo itself) in SEGI but can't find one, but I think it would show a clear difference for the better.

Anyway, you're right, it's not the place for a back and forth on this topic, but I think there's a bit of confusion about what Unity is capable of vs what it could be capable of. Although, with people bringing up Hearthstone left and right as an example of how Unity can make any AAA game you like, I don't know if I should be surprised.

 

Well, it certainly looks not bad....

But am I the only here that is hard to impress with military shooters nowadays that there seems to be one around every corner on Steam? We have seen so many amazing military shooters in all kind of engines, I don't know if I am that impressed by the looks of this game.
Sure, ticks most boxes, nothing BAD standing out. And I guess if I understood russian and looking at those screens with the tons of customization options, the game might add something above and beyond the CoD-mainstream.

As for the looks. The impressive thing is that if shown any cryEngine-huggin FPS kiddie, without showing the Unity logo, they wouldn't instantly scream "I smell Unity! craaaaaap!". The devs certainly made good use of the power at hand in Unity, had some good art assets to work with, and made a good looking game with that.


Now, optimized. Ugh. Unless I have it running on my PC at 60 FPS, I am not sure about optimized. Going with just a vid, that might run on an insane rig with GTX 1080 and a fat CPU in it, running at 1080p/60Hz barely. We really have only glimpses of scenes to judge, the view distance might be insanse... or insanely small.
Its probably a little bit early to judge a games optimization when you cannot play it yet yourself. Even then, in CBT you probably should give the dev some slack as the game might not be 100% optimized.


Why are you surprised that its a russian company though? Russia, and eastern europe have become powerhouses when it comes to game dev. Low wages, low cost of living and a big amount of well educated tech people (at least traditionally, don't know what is the state of their education today) thanks to the soviets investing big into that in the past...
Seems like some enterpreurs over there really kicked things into high gear, and nowadays many big names in gaming come from the CIS region or easter europe.
The Witcher (Poland), Wargamings "World of ..." games (Belorussia, Russia, only for the consoles its developed in the US), Metro 2033 (Russia). Given how some of this regions are still way beyond the western world when it comes to productivity in other sectors, I'd say the success of these titles are highly impressive.

 

I was confuse by your assertion, as it's not precise enough to know what parameter should change, but here is the catch, the only thing SEGI do is handling "bounce light" (only close, not at a far distance), so maybe that's the problem? The question is, do the adam demo make used of unity's global illumination? It would allow me to narrow the specifics better, because that's an interesting problem, I don't really have an eye for realistic lighting.

 

When you have an hour to spare, they went into a lot of detail about the demo at Unite LA.

 

speed x2, Anyway they use lightprobe and cubemap ... also he only talk about the interior part.

The next step is to set up the adam scene in unity and test it vanilla vs SEGI vs enlighten baking. Then summoning Billy!

But SEGI don't have cascaded GI yet, so it don't work for afar elements(who know maybe it's enough).

 

This is the first I've seen of this game. 3 things. 1. I'm a firearms owner and very familiar with real firearms and the functionality of real accessories. 2. I've been playing ArmA since its birth under the name of "Operation Flashpoint"
maybe 15 years ago now. Safe to say as far as Mil sims go im a dedicated ArmA fan, 3.. What this game has done with guns is mind blowing.. The level of realism shown in the functions and options of the scopes and other accessories is just Amazing... I think this game for many wont be about looks. This is the kind of game that if it looks good enough its goona be great.. Because it seems to me this game is about the realism/functionality of the firearms and the accessories.. When I saw the guy changing the style and color of his Holo reticle, and folding the stock on the bus, and all sorts of other stuff I forgot all about how it looks and found myself so much more interested in the guns themselves. I don't think the main priority for this game is "eye candy".. This game is all about "gun candy"... and wow am I impressed.

 

It would definitely be nice to see the Adam demo in SEGI, and see what we see. Unfortunately my computer is definitely not up to the task.

 

Come on! 1fps is all we need, it's about screenshot.

I intended to buy it in the future though, priority has to be made, I need to start investigating a crappy material reflectance scanner first ...

 

You are not suggesting that INSIDE is a AAA game, like Tarkov do you?

 

Neither are AAA if you look at what AAA actually means on wikipedia, they are made by medium sized indies and have medium sized indie production values. A few nice graphics honestly doesn't mean AAA which also includes endless professionally mastered audio, cutscenes, content, support and more.

Horizon is fully open world and doesn't make a single sacrifice. Please understand what true AAA is and how good it becomes even with hardware limitations: http://www.vg247.com/2017/05/13/hor...d-photo-mode-has-produced-some-lovely-images/

 

You should quit trying to make understand what it is lol

 

This issue seems to be coming up a lot but no one seems to dig down into the lighting side of things to find why some people think Unity scenes end up with a flat/dull look.

So is the flatness issue just the differences in lighting calculations, lighting engine solutions, material shaders or post rendering effects?

Must admit I thought the scenes in Blizzards Overwatch just looked amazing, and wanted to know why they looked so good?




Could you get similar 'gorgeousness' from Unity, I have not seen anything this WOW in Unity and would love to know the difference gap between glorious technicolour and the default dull unitycolour, and of course how to jump the gap (without changing engine).

 

Yeah that's some pretty amazing lighting. I should have a test case soon, for everyone to go crazy with trying to make it look as good as possible. In the meantime, I've had more than enough of posting random images off the net, but if I find out what the problem is believe me you'll hear about it

 

It's called:

a) nice art direction
b) using nice post fx

Specially when you consider that the feature set of overwatch is around UE3 / Unity 4 level. Yep, it's doing nothing particularly special. It does not even have dynamic lighting, it is all just baked

Even your guns do not illuminate anything. It's just bloom and particles.

It's designed to run fast on a toaster at 60fps.

Blaming Unity in this case should be limited only to Unity's performance. Scriptable Render Pipelines won't make games look like Overwatch. You already have much much much much more than that in Unity right now. What SRP will do, is bring the performance gap closer.

Basically the decisions blizzard made for overwatch are comparable decisions to what you would make for VR in Unity. So, ask yourselves how would you make a VR game beautiful but still run well?

 

I have seen a lot of 'gorgeousness' come out of Unity. Can you do more with a custom engine? Maybe, but then it is a custom engine, costing tons of money. It is supported by that tons of money. Same with big companies that do use Unity...they have the bucks to add.

However, with Unity, a bit of money to build or buy assets, and you can get some really nice stuff. I was at a Unity User group meeting last week and saw an amazingly beautiful game. I also showed off some of my stuff and the people there loved it.

"Gorgeous" is really over rated anyway in games. An immersive environment, regardless of whether it is space or terrain, good game mechanics that make the game fun, and smooth game play really is what counts. Some of the best games out there, even AAA, are those that focus on what keeps us coming back. Others, like Witcher III are criticized for the using the same dialogue and NPCs over and over, breaking immersion.

I think we need more posts that focus on what makes a good game overall, not just on the most high quality graphics for those with the most powerful graphics cards. I will admit to being a bit of a graphics snob myself when choosing games, but I have been slowly learning that sometimes, it is the overall experience that is more important. I have passed over some of the pretty ones and have not regretted it.

 

I just think there might be a subtle difference in the default Unity shaders or Lighting model that would make it easier to make a Unity scenes 'pop'.

Or if you converted the above overwatch scene to Unity and used the default shaders and lighting model it might not look as good.

Going a bit off topic but do we need a great PBR scene and models that will work in Unity and any other engine so we can truly compare and contrast, the lighting models?

 

I'm not going to 'get going' again like in the last thread, but that lighting is 110% not possible in Unity, from everything I've seen so far. Pretty much every single screenshot of that game I've looked at, is clearly doing something beyond anything I've seen in Unity.

I have to admit though that I'm much more enamored by the workflow efficieny of realtime GI, so I don't consider stuff like UE's baked lighting to be anywhere near worth the trouble despite being quite pretty. But I'm not going to go around saying stuff in Unity looks just as good, or that the difference is simply due to some kind of artistic ether that for some startling coincidence, nobody seems to be able to move around in when using Unity ...

 

I don't see anything special there -> it is pretty much 2004 level tech with higher texture resolution and maybe with a pbr upgrade (although pbr upgrade is doubtful).

Visuals also slightly remind me of cities skylines, which was a unity game.

 

I have successfully resisted the urge to post a comparison of cities skylines and overwatch, but if anyone is interested to google it, you will see things that, well, are not all that hard to believe actually.

Overwatch lighting is 2004 tech? Not sure what to say.

 

I totally agree. Russian games are excellent, and tend to prefer realism and challenge.

Man, why did this thread devolve so quickly?

Tarkov is the best looking game produced in Unity to date and it has the possibility of being the first game that really improves Unity's reputation with respect to high fidelity graphics.

Hope it's good.

 

Yep it's lot of stuff to buy and manage: Alloy, Uber, RTP3, MegaSplat, Scion, Gaia, Gena, Node Canvas etc ...
Most artists showcasing take UE4 because of that.

I found it good about Witcher 3, indeed they used procedural to avoid having to manually make thousand dialog scene, but it still look good and ways better than Adromeda lol

lol

Unity produces good games like that, but if you try to compare to UE4 you will fail.
On videos or pictures, at first sight this is clear the lighting is not as good as UE4 lightmass, and materials shaders are not as good, as post effects.There is the same brightness and specular issues or bloom not natural like in most Unit games.

Anyway it's just some opinions, no one here is making a AAA in solo right ?

 

So here is a gameplay video. Tarkov is definitely not AAA visually.

That said, the gameplay really looks amazing, I think it will be immensely successful. They truly merged competitive FPS and RPG item collection, including trading and stuff.

It looks like a great game, but the screenshots aren't representative. It's not the lighting that's the problem, it's super low poly geometry that makes the visuals not look so great in practice. Texturing is really good but seem very low res up close sometimes.

They were definitely targeting lower spec machines but it seems as though they did an excellent, excellent job. Game looks fun as hell.

 

Another gameplay video showing outdoor scenes.

Pixel error on the terrain is low. You see terrain pops at very close range (like 5-10m).

Visual glitches on edge of surface.

The little white lines on the edges here don't look awful in screenshot, while playing they're very, very distracting.

We are not talking $30m levels of polish, and again, they're clearly making significant efforts to enable lower end hardware.

I think the game looks great, but it is not mega polished for sure.

The stills look far better than the game in motion which is odd, usually I find it's the other way around for most games.

 

What I meant to say is that I don't see anything that "couldn't be done in unity" on those overwatch screenshots. The lighting (as in "shaders") is run of the mill at best. The rest is art direction, colors, etc.

 

Sorry but it looks about a decade out of date to me and the lighting is pretty poor to say the least. This has to be Unity 4.X right?? PAMELA is so far the most visually impressive game I've seen come out of Unity, not the most impressive indie FPS I've seen out of all engines but for Unity it's very good.

Although I can't say it matters that much as I recently played Nier Automata which looks somewhat retro and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

 

I was originally judging more from screenshots which were showing off the best of the baked lighting (I assume).

The visuals in game play video are underwhelming for sure.

Still, it looks like a killer game. I think they nailed the gameplay, and I expect it to be very successful.

 

Maybe you did, but there were many who did not. I would prefer a less big world to one that feels fake and artificial.

 

But...UE4 is not perfect either. If it were, people would not be here complaining about Unity. They would all be busy with UE4. Even those using UE4 can't seem to stay away from here. So Unity has something...and I guess we all have to make that choice.

If your goal is a game that looks AAA, then use UE4. I would honestly prefer Unity work on the terrain and the speedtree shaders and the networking. So many things get set aside to please the "wanna look like UE4 but be easy to use like Unity" folks. It is a choice we all make.

 

I'm not sure about Zengarden, but I am busy with UE4.. I started with Unity, it didn't work for me so I moved on.. Not that I don't appreciate how good an engine Unity is for many projects, but game engines are a means to an end and there is no such thing as a "perfect engine"..

I've always liked this community, so decided to stick around..

 

Agree with pretty much everything you said, except for this bit. I don't think Unity have done anything specifically to please the 'Unity vs UE' people (and probably never will), rather they simply needed to make an upgrade to stay competitive, the same way that Unreal did. I think to have Unity 4 level rendering in an age of VR (not just for games but stuff like virtual shops or house inspections), as well as advancing hardware and visual expectations, would have been a pretty bad place to be business-wise.

So I don't personally see the Unity 5 rendering upgrade simply as some attempt to make Unity competitive with AAA engines graphics-wise, but rather just to keep Unity at the front as a general purpose tool for interactive graphics.

It's kind of frustrating, but I don't doubt Unity could produce a AAA graphics pipeline if they chose, and the fact that all the other AAA engines seem to be quite good at keeping up with eachother is telling, Unity is just always going to compromise so as to cater to everybody at once without driving noobs away with too many controls. Maybe, just maybe, this scriptable rendering thing will do something to reduce that, we'll see.

 

The other thing that is not said is that indie (and maybe unity itself it seems) just look at a reference photography and try to replicate it by eye.

AAA actually measure the lighting parameter and have a complex calibration pipeline (If you have never heard of a Macbeth you are out of the loop) that measure, and verify mathematically, tons of resources that a whole dedicated team assemble. A lot of that trickle down (pbr or megascan) but only conceptually, ie nobody goes do the original works and interpret the concept as they understood them (see liberal use of substance data in pbr by anyone not AAA).

Unreal have a legacy of doing that, and you can feel it down in their document. I have seen nothing in unity that go beyond the technical implementation of the concept according to how they understand, but who knows?