While real-time lighting effects are getting more common these days, Unreal Engine 5's most unique features seem focused on the idea of massive, automatic scalability of in-game art assets.
"Things can grow and change, and that can all be calculated live." Scaling With Lumen, "things change beyond the release of the game," Epic CTO Kim Libreri said. Real-time lighting also means an entire universe of user-generated content can take advantage of these kinds of effects without special coding. "We're really trying to empower developers here to make next-generation experiences that are unbelievably realistic but also economical and practical to create without a 1,000 person team," Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said in a "Summer Game Fest" interview attached to the demo's unveiling. Instead, artists will simply be able to place a light source with the engine and immediately see how the game will look when running on console hardware. But we haven't yet seen anything like this kind of real-time lighting on console hardware, much less with what Epic says is "diffuse inter-reflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections."Įpic says this kind of dynamic lighting will save developers time by removing the need to design light-maps by hand and to wait for the engine to "pre-bake" that static lighting during development, as in current engines.
Nvidia has been pushing the real-time ray-tracing capabilities of its PC graphics card line for years now, and those effects are currently making even games like Minecraft look spectacular with the right PC hardware. Those kinds of effects aren't all that new in the gaming space. The first pillar of Epic's new engine is what it's calling the Lumen system, a "fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes." And it shows how the state-of-the-art in graphical quality on those platforms is quickly advancing past resolution and frame rate counts and toward new levels of lighting and modeling detail. The engine, which Epic says will launch next year, was shown running on PlayStation 5 development hardware, though the company said the same general level of fidelity should be possible on the Xbox Series X and high-end PCs as well. But those expectations got a significant boost this week with Epic Games' unveiling of a jaw-dropping real-time demo of its Unreal Engine 5 technology. Further Reading Microsoft shows off 13 “launch window” games for Xbox Series XAfter last week's somewhat blasé showcase of in-development Xbox Series X software, our expectations for the coming generation of new game consoles were somewhat tempered.
0 kommentar(er)
