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

I think you modified your reply or something, but I don't think it has anything to do with image compression at all.

 

Well, the other image is 3.5MB and the Enlighten one 700KB~
But I did find a lower resolution one of the same size in Enlighten and yes, it still looks flat.

In fact, most of the things in here look flat:
http://www.geomerics.com/media/gallery/
Even the Realistic Render Room looks totally different.

And I want to know how some of the people in here would rationalize Light Probes having to be manually placed while Unreal Engine 4 does it automatically. The current lighting workflow require UVs to be layed out in an specific way, requires light probes, requires 30 minutes to set up per scene, might end up giving totally different results or get stuck while baking at night even if you made use of the preview lightmapper...
Who in their sane mind...
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/IndirectLightingCache/

 

Yep, without indies or small studios you would play the same games again and again without lot of innovation.

Something is wrong ? rock textures ? Tonemapping , lightmass settings ? I've seen really better lighten on rocks

He only did two characters and two ennemies, and the gameplay, but all other stuff is Unreal 4 assets and engine Fx and graphics. Many people are able to make some characters and good gameplay and drop them in some empty levels made without any level design direction.
Anyway , the game stays a potential AAA if some more guys joined to work on level design and game content.

 

Give us names! That second one in particular seems interesting.

 

How's the game play?

 

I don't know if you read his post or not, but this image you posted has really cheap art while still looking pleasant to the eyes, which is what we are debating about.

But it still looks good contrary to someone trying to do the same 'kitbashing based level design approach' in Unity.
Also, he got funding from Sony and is making the game.

 

Nelo and Lost Soul Aside.

Nelo is a TPS + Shmup.
Lost Soul Aside is a one guy Korean game that got funding by Sony after generating a huge splash on the internet.

Talking about Korean games, I remember the Unity game Little Devil Inside, which is a handbook reference on how good lighting can simplify texture and detail work while still giving a pleasant image like @Billy4184 keeps mentioning:

Unfortunately, the game moved to Unreal Engine because 'The lighting workflow is much easier in there'.

Xenoblade as a Wii game only looks good because their texture artists have been doing lighting inside of textures since the PS1 days. Nier Automata too because Platinum Games engine is still last generation and their Unreal Engine 4 game got cancelled/cut funds by Microsoft.

Good lighting can MASSIVELY simplify the artistic texturing workflow by taking care of things traditionally having to be hand-authored into the art itself.

 

Nope, you actually wouldn't, unless you wanted to.

Someone who only played AAA games might have played Far Cry Primal, Grow Up, Just Dance, The Division, Steep, Trackmania Turbo, or Watch Dogs 2 in 2016--all totally different games. If they decided to play Electronic Arts games as well, they might have added Battlefield 1, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, Unravel, Titanfall 2, and maybe Fifa 2017 if you're into sports games (I played the demo and the story mode was interesting). All with absolutely no overlap in the gameplay. And that's only two publishers.

This idea that AAA games have no variety is false.

 

In most cases great, this is the MMO I was talking about earlier: http://lifelessgame.com/

@EternalAmbiguity

The first project I mentioned made by two people is called Nelo:

The second made by one guy is called Lost Soul Aside:

The Uni project was called god left me, not sure where the vid for that went, but I'll make up for it.. This is another recently released project called The Solus Project.. Although this guy has been developing games in Unreal for 15 years so I mean it's kind of expected no?

 

I mean, you could have said that in 2014 when Dragon Age 3 won most GOTY awards.
But this year alone, in a single quarter, we got Horizon Zero Dawn, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Nier Automata, Prey, Gravity Rush 2... does not compute haha.

 

Where are all indie games touch ? Lot of indies games despite beeing smaller are lot more innovative

This is lot of FPS and TPS, original games like Unravel are very small part produced by the partners studio, and how many you get one each year, while in the indie scene there is bunch of original games each year.

 

It is a matter of density.

If 40 AAA games get released a year, then 10 are innovative.
If 10000 Indie games get released every year (must be 100000 at least going by mobile) then 100 are innovative and the rest are pixel art platformers

It might be surprising but 2014 had less than 20 AAA game releases.

 

Unravel is still a platformer with a gimmick, with had them since 30 years ago

 

At best there are 3 FPS games there, and from what I understand all play completely differently. There are only 2 "TPS" games there, and both play completely differently.

You say indie games have a bunch of original games, but if you look on Steam's new releases that's not really the case.

I would wager the "per capita" original games of indies is no higher (and maybe lower) than AAAs. Reason for this being, an indie can spend a little time and fart out yet another survival sim with horror elements, or another 2D platformer. They aren't dependent on success. While AAA games are, and thus can't simply produce the same exact thing (within a certain range of time at least, maybe a year) without losing sales because it's the same as every other game out there.

Edit: @Frpmta beating me like a red haired stepchild!

 

Does the actual thread not matter, does it only need AAA in the title somewhere to suddenly become a screenshot dumping ground for UE vs UT wars?

Like come on guys

 

LMAO, this is so true! The forums should start censoring "AAA".

 

Pretty pictures, but what makes those games, or MMO games different from the other ones out there?

 

Between "AAA" and "flat lighting" I think we need to expand the word censor list a little bit.

 

This is personnal game opinions, didn't like some TPS or FPS EA games while i really enjoyed many original indies games.

It's for people that are seeking the unicorn lol

 

Whether you like one or another is totally up to you. No one will (or no one should) disagree with you for not liking an AAA game.

Of the games I listed, I purchased Grow Up, Watch Dogs 2, and Mirror's Edge Catalyst. I don't have any interest in FPS games like Battlefield or Titanfall. But that doesn't mean I can't recognize their uniqueness or strengths.

 

I still don't really understand what you mean with "flat". Just when I thought I'm starting to get it you posted Metal Gear Solid screenshots somewhere that you liked, where I thought "that's the flattest and most boring lighting out of all of the examples!?".
Maybe you could take a screenshot and make it either "flat" or "not flat" in Photoshop, depending on what you think it was before? A direct comparison would be very helpful.

Unless someone messed up color profiles along the way it doesn't.




Until I see a plausible argument why Unity should be technically incapable of proper lighting, I'll just assume the default values for lighting and the post stack need to be tweaked properly and no one has found out the best way to do it yet. Just by playing with the scene's ambient light and reflection settings, you get drastically different lighting results. Tonemapping and post also play a huge role. Looking forward to see that example scene you mentioned @Billy4184

 

I am talking about image compression.

Nothing to do with post-process.

Post process can make an image look good but the image must already be pleasant before it is applied else it feels like it is being used to hide image quality flaws.

 

Man, game engines are scary:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/sho...allic-Surfaces&p=461374&viewfull=1#post461374


The problem and the solution are that Unreal makes use of a cheap normal interpolation algorithm that seems to clamp/crush? values within a certain threshold meaning a subdivided enough sphere will start giving you vertices that share the same normal value. Solution is 'use a lower polygon model for better lighting quality' as crazy as it sounds.
I often get the feeling Enlighten is crying for more polygons for better quality and here's this engine that works better with lower polycount.

It seems like Unity does not have that 'optimization' in place. 'Optimization' because it is more like increasing performance through limitations so depending on the precision of your work Unity is the one doing things right.

So even UE4 makes use of that kind of hacks to get a nice performance.

 

Nothing new, Unreal uses many optimisation stuff, textures mip map is set up by default making it even more visible than in Unity for example. Anyway what matters is how good are the graphics as a whole.

 

I've already explained a bunch of times what I mean by 'flat' and it isn't a question of anything Photoshop can do (unless you can find a way of segmenting different objects).

Think of it like this: When you have a scene full of objects at different ranges, when the lighting on each of the objects doesn't make sense according to the distance to the camera or the orientation, suddenly everything seems like a cardboard cutout stacked one on top of the other to make the scene (i.e. flat).

But that's not to say that detail isn't apparent, or that the lighting on any individual object is particularly bad.

I don't want to go around posting too many screenshots and get the thread shut down, but try this one (a bit of an exaggerated comparison, but hopefully it communicates what I mean):

Spoiler: Vacate Et Scire

Tell me what you see between this render:



and this render:

Also, here's something severely lacking post effects, that still is clearly good lighting:

Spoiler

 

You're confusing atmospheric effects with lighting. The two are entirely different affairs.

 

So maybe atmospheric attenuation?
edit: ninjaed By murgilod

 

It has absolutely nothing to do with that. Just look at the first 15 meters of each image, one is clearly not showing cohesive lighting, stuff looks like it could be wearing lighting from a point +/- 2 meters from where it actually is - and the overall quality is not great either.

Here's the thing with lighting, it makes something look great, without actually drawing attention to itself. It's easy to think it was the sun, or the fog, or some god ray or whatever - but it's just a question of how well the reflections and the light values work together to create something very intuitively readable.

The problem really comes down to the fact that we never question lighting in reality - so when it's off in a game, it's very hard to drag the perception out of the subconscious, and into a conscious recognition of what is going on.

PS I find that it's very helpful sometimes to look through some textureless light bakes, here's something that is clearly good lighting, you know for sure that if you add some decent textures to it, it's going to look good, because the lighting is very cohesive and makes judging the distance and the depth of the image very easy:

Spoiler

 

Ha ha.

My post was about actually completing games. Have I completed some games? Sure. They didn't take the world by storm but they weren't intended to. They did above average as far as # of plays, ratings and reviews overall and I was quite happy about that. It was good to see people appreciating my work.

And that is basically my point here. Instead of continually struggling to reach AAA graphics, getting frustrated and bashing Unity (bashing is perhaps a strong word... let's go with expressing unhappiness with Unity's graphics), etc... why not just use the (above average from what I can see) graphics skills to make a game? Not in pixel art (although of course they can if they like) but in 3D HD. Just tackle it and get it done and see what a person can do.

That community RPG is a for fun open experiment. It's always open for people to contribute. You can contribute to it anytime you want to! Anyone can. I should be getting back to game dev sometime later this year... maybe October or November. When I do I think the odds are good I will add some more to the community rpg and the barbarian hack n slash game.

 

The second one looks a photo. (Taken in Oregon)

 

@Billy4184

I do think your graphics comparison is interesting from a technical / troubleshooting perspective.

I'm curious... of these two images... does the second look the same (as "flat") to you as the first, worse or better?

 

Seeing is believing..

Spoiler

It's probably using some monster VXGI or something, I just wanted to show the difference very clearly, because it's quite hard to verbalize what I'm talking about.

 

Looks about the same to me. I'm not sure if you did some image processing or something, but it's not a question of overall flatness - what I'm seeing is like a very subtle version of when people import photographs into their 2d games thinking it will look better, but it just looks like you're stacking billboards because the lighting is never the same between the images. That's what I mean by flat - it's not something you can correct with an overall image effect, and it doesn't mean that the individual objects look horrible - but the overall scene is just nowhere near as pleasant because the lighting isn't consistent.

 

Well, that's clearly a photo!

Anyway, here's the scene on artstation, for anyone interested. Again, I'm not entirely sure that it's ready for being a game environment, but it shows what good lighting can do for a scene, and I just wanted to demonstrate something at the other side of the spectrum.

 

That's actually... interesting... and a bit crazy. So you're saying there is a flaw like in the bounced light I guess. I have little knowledge of this stuff but the only thing that seems like it would maybe explain what you are saying AFAIK is maybe the bounced light is being miscalculated or too intense or something like that and things end up lit unevenly... as far as I mean out of balance with the scene and the other objects as a whole. But like I said that is just my simple thought on it.

 

I think that's what it comes down to. Bounced lighting is by far the most expensive and difficult part of lighting due to how many iterations/calculations are required for good quality - I imagine Enlighten is doing a much more efficient calculation for better realtime performance, whereas most of the great-looking scenes I post, are almost certainly doing baked lighting which can take its time and do a much better job with much more precise calculations.

Something like SEGI is like Enlighten on steroids, but of course comes with its own set of issues especially with performance.

 

I would say I get a 'compressed image' feel from Enlighten or Unity whichever is responsible for the degradation.

Thanks to SEGI now I know that I am not crazy. Baked lighting does not look as good as SEGI in Unity.

Look at this, made with SEGI:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/a1G5z

And this:


I will be using SEGI for visualization while developing.
Unity can take their time fixing their broken lighting.
It must be fixed by the time I finish in 2020

 

My only point is that the Oregon high desert is beautiful.

 

My bad, I misunderstood! It does look very similar too.

 

When I upgrade my computer, so will I. All of that stuff looks great. This is what Unity should always have been capable of:



By the way, if you have SEGI, I think it would be fun to render the Adam demo assets that are available on the asset store in it, and see how it turns out.

 

I can't really claim myself to be a dedicated gamer. But as to the arguable advantage in originality or diversity of indie games over AAA titles, I suppose I can name a few examples.

Such games like Undertale, Cat Lady, Gone Home, Her Story, Stanley Parable, Life is Strange (probably not really an indie), and more, which I believe could be such type of games that are quite original, but can only appeal to specific audiences, so that AAA studios would hesitate to create.

Or if they do, they probably would put some monsters or action sequences in those games, so they can be sold to those who are only interested in 'beating' them, or collecting achievements.

So, I believe that such type of games could be the reason why indie developers are valuable to the gaming community as a whole, because they can provide unique experiences for gamers, while becoming an inspiration to other studios.

 

Not really. Like the others I thought you're missing atmospheric lighting / fog on the "flat" one. Can you maybe find a sponza scene that illustrates it? That must be the most commonly used lighting showcase, so maybe there can be comparable views found. SEGI has used it as well.

 

To be perfectly honest, if you don't see a clear lighting difference between those two scenes I posted, I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to demonstrate it. Anyway, I've got to have posted dozens of examples by now, I think I'd better stop or people will start thinking I'm some kind of runaway spambot that has developed an obsession with 'AAA lighting' ...

 

Oh I see plenty of differences, but the most apparent always is that the images show vastly different lighting and weather conditions.

The main difference I see is that the first one has very clear value separation between sunlit and shadow areas, the second one has a much smaller dynamic range because it is set up to be a scene with less intense sunlight and the difference between directly and indirectly lit areas gets smaller. I'd not be surprised if the enlighten guys in all their demos crank the bouncelight up way beyond reasonable values to show it off. Having bouncelight is the whole point of using enlighten. When they make it subtle enough, people will need more direct on/off comparisons to even see a difference and will be more likely to question whether or not they actually need enlighten. When you look at marketing screenshots it's only natural they exaggerate the one thing they sell their product on. But you can tweak bouncelight intensity in Unity, even per light source iirc.

I see one directly lit scene, one indirectly lit scene, and one mostly indirectly lit scene that seems to have the sun behind a thin cloud or something like that. The latter two also have plenty of fog, which I think makes a big difference at distance. I do see that the first one looks a bit "fractured", like when I squint the lower two form a very consistent terrain shape receding into the distance and the first one has objects that "stick out". But that's something where I would look for the error in the authoring of the textures first, and then the ambient- and bouncelight settings. I'm not really convinced it's an issue of the lighting engines.
I wish I could afford to waste a week on this, I'd throw together a small scene myself, but I can't at the moment.

I find the topic highly interesting because I've studied light quite a lot while learning how to paint, and I really would like to understand what you mean. I think I'm getting closer, but maybe I'm not quite there yet.

 

Not clearly. Something like this can be done with oblivion/skyrim level tech, which is inferior to both unity and unreal.

Also, since there's nothing casting shadows on the scene, dynamic lighting woudln't be required. Can be done as an unlit scene.

 

Well that's the thing I'm talking about, right there. Basically the issue is about how the lighting conveys the position of an object in the scene.

I wouldn't suspect the textures - after all these images are from Enlighten's GDC presentation and it's likely they are going to be textured properly.

When you say ambient and bouncelight settings, well, the question is whether or not there are settings that could solve the problem. If Enlighten don't even know how to show off their own system in the best light that would not be a great start, but I don't think that's the case anyway, since it's consistent with many other enlighten-lit pics I've seen.

In fact if you look at Medal of Honor Warfighter and Battlefield 3 they are both apparently lit with Enlighten. They are definitely 'last gen' being from over half a decade ago, but I don't think it's far fetched to say that (all else being equal) it would be possible to make them in Unity. However none of them come even remotely close to the current state of the art of lighting tech in AAA games.

That looks quite nice. Inferior how though? I'm starting to think that the main issue is simply that non-dynamic lighting is simply way better due to not having to update in realtime, and that barring third party assets, we're stuck with something inferior but realtime (which is probably the best thing to be stuck with, but it's better not to be stuck at all).

Anyway, I'm personally very much in favor of realtime GI as a workflow measure, so I guess I just have to choose between Enlighten and SEGI.

 

Skyrim does not support pbr at all. It uses diffuse/specular lighting models from Doom 3 times, which is why there isn't even one cool looking metallic object in the game, and which is why there are no realistic looking materials anywhere. Skyrim Special Edition failed to address the issue, and instead (as far as I can tell), plugged diffuse materials as they were into a slightly newer lighting engine. As a result everything simply looks dirty in SE.

For example, someone repainted elven armor in substance painter here:
https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/5383000-skyrim-in-pbr-elven-armor/
It is definitely not the best attempt at materal painting but:

Spoiler

Here's unmodded skyrim screen for comparison:

Spoiler

This should get you the picture.

Now, if you fire up, say, dragon age inquisition, they'll make sure to show off their lighting system with every metallic object being shiny and reflective.

Spoiler

The thing is, in outdoor scenes you can get by without complex lighting systems, as was demonstrated in the past by Richard Burns Rally, for example:

^^^ Environments are unlit there. No lighting at all.

This is done via application of photo references and large number of artists... however this is not a high quality lighting solution at all.

 

Well that explains why there is such a huge drop of quality as you go indoors.

As a point of interest, I read in the comments of that scottish highlands UE pic that it is using some kind of 'distance field ambient occlusion'. I guess maybe good quality AO is more important than the overall lighting in a complex vegetation scene with thousands of small objects in close proximity.

Not sure what rendering tech is used here, but this pic from the skyrim mods page looks insane:

Spoiler

Wonder how they get it to look so good?

 

Yep, IBL, GI,shaders, probes system is far supoerior in Unreal 4, it looks really natural.

Shaders and materials in this skyrim picture are not so great, lighting is good , it looks like some EBE or RedShade plugins.