UT Please bring Realtime Shadow on iOS Platform or Risk Becoming Irrelevent !

I know there are countless other thread like this, but I think UT need to get its act together.
UDK now officially supports realtime shadow on iOS.


"God rays and shadows support added on iOS"

http://udk.com/news-beta-oct2011

Infinity Blade 2 with Realtime Shadow

Oceanhorn with Realtime Shadow on iPad

You can clearly see the realtime shadow working on iPhone 4S and iPad 2.

I was totally shocked to see games done on UDK are coming out with beautiful REALTIME shadow like in Infinity Blade 2 and Oceanhorn, that adds so much visual appeal to the game.


The latest UDK (January 2012) even brings color grading to the iOS.


I have asked in the other thread not too long ago that Unity should support Image Effects through enabling Depth Texture support on iOS which is crippled by UT intentionally for some reason.
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/110948-Depth-Textures-support-for-Mobile-(iOS-Android)-platform

UT is risk of becoming irrelevent - UDK is improving on a breakneck speed with monthly improvements that brings major features almost every month. Please, UT, get your act together!

 

Oceanhorn actually runs on inhouse engine and has nothing to do with UDK or Unity

 

Spare us the hyperbole. I have worked with UE3 and it has a long way to go before it even approaches Unity's level of usability. They have shiny features as their selling point while lacking in the basic workflow elements that make a good engine. I am really glad UT don't focus their efforts on graphical features like this.

There is a laundry list of titles which have reached completion with Unity http://unity3d.com/gallery/made-with-unity/game-list I have tried to search for iOS games which have reached completion with UDK but to no avail. Either there a very few or they are well hidden. If you think that UDK is a superior engine for iOS development then why not make the switch?

 

i agree, having moved from UDK to unity because of the ease in which unity allows ground up builds. UDK required me as a coder, to dig into far to many pre-exsisting ue classes. Within minutes, i was able to blow unitys graphics away, but scripting was another story. I realize Kismet is very powerful, but as is with all uscript tools, still limited.

 

It doesn't matter which engine that is running shadows and colour gradients. What matters is that unity currently does not. Therefore I would like to see unity consider it for 3.x. By 4.x it may be too late. I will be upgrading my licenses to 4.x regardless so that isn't why I'm recommending they're coming in 3.x.

It is clear to the entire world - and we are talking about major studios thinking or already investing on mobile, choosing unity or not. The fact that unity does not keep up with competing engines right now, is a massive risk unity cannot afford to take. Shadows and colour grading's absence (and DOF/sunshafts) at reasonable scaling speed, are losing unity serious traction.

TL;DR

Unity's mobile engine needs: shadows, dof, sunshafts at scalable performance levels determined by user. It does not matter if the average indie prefers unity's dev times, because the big studios which influence so much, will not be picking unity.

These effects DO have to be fast as well - an approximation is enough.

I only hope that the mobile team is feeling strong enough to give it a go.

 

far from relations to any company , i still would have to agree with this as well. It would seem very obvious to large companies that do have the resources and time, that UDK is really catering all the right tools. Sadly, most of us casuals just cant handle *all the tools* alone.

 

UT does not have Epics arrogance.
I would like to remind that Epic dropped support for pre SM3 hardware, while Unity finally decided to cut pre shader hardware, thats 6-8 years of hardware that Unity supports that UDK does not.
UDK also at no single point supported OpenGL ES 1.1 and never will

And as others pointed out, there is no single UDK title on the store.
Dungeon Defenders, which was meant to be a UDK title is a UE3 title as a matter of facts (exists on android and other platforms) and has various implementations only possible on the source code level.
Oh and not even DD uses shadows, it actually does not even run at the native resolution unless you enforce it in the settings and if you do, and you aren't on an iphone 4s / ipad2, the whole game will stutter seriously and that although its far from complex.

-> Shadows in UDK are a pr gimmick, the engine is barely able to render in realtime with real games, not consindering 'gpu killers' at all

 

Remember that with Unity, you're not locked into the feature set of the engine, helpless to do anything outside what you are given. I'm pretty sure big studios will have a programmer or two clever enough to add desired features if necessary. People have already added realtime shadows to Unity on iOS on their own. People added light probes on their own before Unity 3.5 did, same with pathfinding.

What you really mean is "I want this built-in!" Fair enough. But adding threats, namely "If you don't add [my pet feature], Unity will die!!!!!" has been tried before a number of times, and never comes across well.

--Eric

 

What are you talking about? There are at least dozens of UDK powered iOS games in App Store.
Besides the obvious Infinity Blade 1 2 there are :

"Save Our Sheep"




"Chicken Coup"






Warm Gun

Dark Meadow

Dream:Scape

Epoc

Batman - Arkham City Lockdown

And the rest I can't be bother to look up....
Darkness Rush: Saving Princess
Dungeon Defenders
Desert Zombie Last Stand
Bizango Blast
Bring Me Down
Arrow of Time
Gyro13
Last Knight
Abattoir of Zombie


And there are heaps more under development!

Afterlife

And another game I just saw (probably not UDK powered) from yet another indie studio with shadow on iPhone :
Ignite




That's a very rudimentary shadowmap (doesn't even have filtering) but even that looks good!

I know I am being dramatic when I say Unity will become irrelvent if it doesn't support x features (I gotta rile you guys up to get response right? ), but seriously, next generation GPU is just around the corner, and the era of realtime shadow on portable device is here. Its what seperates a no shadow/drop shadow game engine of Quake 3 era vs a realtime shadow of DOOM 3 era. Gamers demands visual fidelity and critical features such as these that DEFINED the last generation desktop games are soon becoming standards of portable devices. The whole argument of "visual features" don't make a game is irrelevent because as developer I like to have features for my disposal, especially critical features that could define the look and capture my target audience.

 

Unreal killed their modding community by releasing UDK. Their modding community is where they pool future employees from. Things are going to get more challenging for them, and I will be surprised if UDK4 is released for most at all. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to have the option and would definately consider the UDK for 2 or 3 types of games, but I think without more examples, given the complexity of developing UDK games, Unreal is at a disadvantage.

That said, their % based royalty is an optimal strategy with a few titles pulling the heavy lifting. All it takes is one 'minecraft' (forgive me) powered by UDK and they're gold. The overlap with Unity3d for those kinds of games is not really there. With the exception of Save our Sheep, I can't see many of these games being done on Unity. Ignite, maybe, but it's actually more complex (UDK has a built in vehicle controller).

Also, based upon what Aras just tweeted on his dev blog (no hints), I'd say Unity 4 is close to passing the engine I have. (It matches unity everywhere but usability.... where it is Unity's OPPOSITE... worthless without a game dev studio). I think the situation will change with UDK4(if one exists) and Unity4.