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DNF's engine viable in 2011-2012?

User is offline   The Commander 

  • I used to be a Brown Fuzzy Fruit, but I've changed bro...

#31

View PostSangman, on Jan 2 2010, 02:19 PM, said:

A.k.a the Unreal Engine? Perhaps.

I don't know anything about Bio Shock because the game never got my attention. So yeah
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User is offline   Sangman 

#32

It should, though! It's pretty good. Not great, but good! :lol:
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User is offline   The Commander 

  • I used to be a Brown Fuzzy Fruit, but I've changed bro...

#33

View PostSangman, on Jan 2 2010, 02:22 PM, said:

It should, though! It's pretty good. Not great, but good! :lol:

So are the games I mention on here, but no plays them. :lol:
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User is offline   WedgeBob 

#34

View PostSangman, on Jan 1 2010, 08:19 PM, said:

A.k.a the Unreal Engine? Perhaps.

edit: Yeah looking at the vending machine it's obviously a little shitty Bioshock custom map.


...which is the same exact engine that 3DR was using for DNF, only in a very modified form.
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User is offline   Sangman 

#35

Yeah, and?

This post has been edited by Sangman: 01 January 2010 - 05:54 PM

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User is offline   N64 

#36

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YDEpERP3hg..._rev-rn-6r-4-HM

This post has been edited by angelo86: 01 January 2010 - 06:33 PM

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User is offline   The Commander 

  • I used to be a Brown Fuzzy Fruit, but I've changed bro...

#37

View Postangelo86, on Jan 2 2010, 03:30 PM, said:


Holy shit,
I know the HRP people won't be happy with that video.
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User is offline   WedgeBob 

#38

Not only the HRP people, but I bet that it's against 3DR policy to use Duke 3D material in other games without THEIR permission, so I bet they're gonna have to go through George and Scott on top of the Polymer and HRP people.
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User is offline   Striker 

  • Auramancer

#39

View PostSangman, on Jan 1 2010, 04:38 PM, said:

I wonder what the point is of day-and-night cycles if you need to wait around just to see it in action. I do remember a level where day turned into night rather rapidly though but I have a feeling that one was scripted (it was a level where you had to blow up a ship, I think)


Funny, I know exactly what level you are talking about, and when I played it, it was entirely during the day. It all depends on the pace you play the game at, because Time of Day carries over between missions most of the time, unless you move onto another chapter in the story, also is stored in your save files.
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#40

Never mind.

This post has been edited by Wieder: 03 January 2010 - 10:50 PM

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User is offline   X-Vector 

#41

View PostWieder, on Jan 4 2010, 07:37 AM, said:

Never mind.


"Here we are now, entertain us..."
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User is offline   Raziel 

#42

Sorry, but I'm not going to read all the previous comments on this page, but here's my 2 cents as a graphics programmer.

Much of today's graphics tech is based on the shaders used when rendering the image, these can be updated at pretty much any point. Once you're on the shader route, keeping your engine up to date is really not that hard. Sure, people discover new techniques now and then, some of which might be worth adding into an engine... but basically, the DNF engine as it is right now should hold out for another 3 years with virtually no changes (apart from small changes to the rendering code and shaders to take advantage of newer graphics hardware).

We're basically at the point now where we've almost exhausted the possibilities of triangle-based rendering. From an engine point-of-view, there is not all that much that hasn't been done at this point. Most of the real advances in graphics in the last last few years has all been in the vertex/fragment shader area, some work on enhancing shadows, some stuff on post processing. But more or less, nothing truly ground-breaking. I think that polygon-based engines are pretty much going to stay where they are now for the next while and something else will take over... Yes yes, change is bad, but I think it's on the horizon, perhaps in 5-10 years we'll see either voxel-based engines or ray-tracing being the more common in use.

Carmack is doing a lot of research on sparse voxel octrees at the moment, pretty cool stuff, in theory anyway. The basic idea is that you store the entire level in an octree (the leaves of the tree would be the smallest most detailed point), and the nodes of the tree stores the color of that point. No color means no geometry, if there is a color, you have a voxel there (because of the 3D visualization of an octree, the position is implicit and don't need to be stored). So in essence, the octree is actually both the geometry and the texture all in one. There are lots of advantages to the approach, every node would store the average color of the nodes it contains, so if rendering takes too long, you can scale back to a lower detail level and terminate early and stuff like that. Also, portions of the tree can be loaded and unloaded during runtime. My major concern is in the storage space required to store voxel-based level data... it isn't a small number, think lots of gigabytes per level... it's also very processing-heavy - you can offload some of it to the GPU using Cuda/OpenCL, but I'd be fairly skeptical on what you could achieve there. That's why, despite Carmack's belief that voxels are the future, I still think ray-tracing might be the actual way forward, but who knows... If history repeats itself, in about 7 years voxels will be the in thing (when everyone catches up to THE Carmack :lol: ).

I'm sorry, did I go off topic? Anyway, what does my rant above have to do with DNF? Well, almost nothing, but the short version is, engines are horribly complex beasts these days, but once they've been written, they're typically used for a much longer time by the same studio (of course with some tweaking). In the old days, hardware was changing at such a fast pace that every new game basically needed a new engine. They were also much simpler and could actually be written on a per-title basis, this isn't true anymore... I think we'll see variations of most of the current studios' engines utilized in the next generation and in some cases, the generation after that as well. The next big thing past our current engines will probably be a big shift in graphics rendering technique, most likely, we'll see hardware ray-tracers appearing at some point, or voxel-accelerating hardware... Although, things aren't always black and white, which brings me to an interesting point, it is possible that our current 3D accelerators will retain their current functionality but become so programmable that both techniques will be possible on the same hardware, in which case both techniques might see common use... who knows... Anyway, end of rant, back on topic:

The real problem in DNF's case is the in-game content, that's the stuff that will get dated quickly. Updating a shader or two is simple, but if the levels start looking dated, there is very little you can do to fix it without jumping in and reworking all that content...

Anyway, that's all from me... this got a lot more long-winded than I intended...
EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention another cool thing about this voxel engine technique... if written correctly, you can have virtually unlimited amounts of geometry/complexity without adding to the processing power. The problem is, to actually write one, you need a shit-load of processing power to begin with. A cool voxel demo that uses CUDA to speed it up - don't look at the quality of the image, look at the amount of geometry... give it 5 years and I'm sure something awesome will be possible - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjmRPjnWJ5g...feature=related

This post has been edited by Raziel: 11 January 2010 - 04:33 AM

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User is offline   peoplessi 

  • Honored Donor

#43

Very cool post, and I agree on all accounts. Tim Sweeney has already stated that we are on the edge of what can be done - http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/archive/Sw.../TimHPG2009.pdf . Almost every engine looks alike.

Next console generation will much dictate to where we go in next 5 years - or better where we will be. Consoles will sadly be a big deciding factor there.

Does it scare you when you see Crysis... or, I don't know. What's the biggest competitor in the game engine market? Is it id's stuff, or is it another company?

Tim Sweeney: "Today, it's Crysis. Because Crysis is doing some things on high-end PCs that we're not doing ourselves. That's a tricky case though, because we could do vastly more than we're currently doing if we focused on supporting dual high-end video cards, which have about 10 times the graphics horsepower of a console today.

The thing is, that market is about 2% the size of the overall next-generation game market -- PS3, Xbox 360, and mainstream PC. So there's a real hard business decision: if you go the route that Crytek goes, you can beat us in certain areas in graphics, but you're really sacrificing the larger market. "

source: http://www.gamasutra...php?story=23742

This post has been edited by peoplessi: 16 January 2010 - 01:07 PM

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User is offline   Raziel 

#44

View Postpeoplessi, on Jan 16 2010, 01:05 PM, said:

Very cool post, and I agree on all accounts. Tim Sweeney has already stated that we are on the edge of what can be done....

Glad you liked the post. It probably could have been a bit more to the point though ;)...
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User is offline   Stabs 

#45

after reading your post and doing a look up on where voxels are these days iam just blown away at what they can do now, its just such a different approach to 3d and combined with ray-tracing which is slowly creeping in, i think it could be the future too

todays 3d games will look like pixelated arcade classics when a good voxel / ray-trace engine comes out, its far away but may be closer than we would like to think.
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User is offline   Raziel 

#46

I have to admit, RAGE is looking pretty good, so I guess there is still some ways to go :P.

EDIT: Removed my tidbit since it doesn't really add anything constructive to the thread, other than pointing out that Ken Silverman has been a strong supporter of Voxels for a long time.

This post has been edited by Raziel: 24 July 2010 - 01:45 AM

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