[You]

Quote

The game looks unsightly for the most part, with polygon-starved models and poor textures. That said, the scrappy aesthetic works with what the game is trying to achieve. Duke Nukem Forever isn't attempting to compete with the likes of Crysis and Killzone; there's just no point. Instead, it revels in its 90's level design, dated environments and slightly misshapen character models. It's all part of the charm.

Just to remind those worried about the games graphics.

[Micky C]

Also, won't the game run slightly faster than it would with higher polygon models and higher res textures?

[You]

Micky C, on Mar 11 2011, 06:33 PM, said:

Also, won't the game run slightly faster than it would with higher polygon models and higher res textures?

I'd love to agree with this, but unfortunately optimization doesn't work like that.

Once the frame-rate is fine, I'll be happy. Although I don't mind 'slightly off' graphics, a bad frame-rate ruins things for me.

[Raziel]

Micky C, on Mar 11 2011, 05:33 PM, said:

Also, won't the game run slightly faster than it would with higher polygon models and higher res textures?

That's only true in theory, unfortunately DNF is not based on a modern engine. It is actually quite tricky to optimize such an old engine to run well on modern hardware for reasons that are a bit technical. You can rewrite the graphics rendering portion of it so that it supports shaders and casting shadows, but they will most likely still be relying on the core engine that was there to begin with. Think of it as an old engine that's been retrofitted to display modern graphics. They are clearly using a lot of static meshes in DNF, the engine's visibility algorithms might not be able to properly eliminate the ones that are not visible on screen since the original engine was optimized for brush-based geometry. In simpler terms, they may be blindly throwing all static meshes at the GPU that fall within the view frustum, which would pretty much force them to keep the geometric level of detail down.

In short, technology and techniques change and things that worked well during the old days may not make much sense now. Back then, brush-based geometry was the in-thing, it worked well at the time and Unreal used it exclusively for its level content. Jumping forward to Unreal Engine 3, there are almost no brushes in sight, you can still use them, but it's not recommended, so people tend not to use them. It's all static meshes these days, that is what the engine is built and optimized for.

I doubt you would notice it on a PC due to the extra horse power, but the console versions may suffer some lag if they don't keep the detail levels down. I'm just scared in an attempt to optimize for consoles, the PC version will end up taking a quality hit as well.

So not necessarily, game engines are more complicated than that... how much geometry your engine can handle is really dependent on the 3D engine driving it and that will be the ultimate deciding factor with regards to geometric detail. You simply can't throw a lot of geometry at an engine that doesn't properly handle that geometry. I'm not saying that is the case with DNF, but I don't think it's unlikely.

Anyway, night all. I'm off to bed before I ramble more like a mad man.

[DavoX]

I think you'r argument is thrown out of the window with Randy's new comment "The engine changed so much that it's not Unreal anymore". Yes it was based off an old engine but it was changed so many times and updated that your statement doesn't hold true anymore.

[Tea Monster]

Hey, look at it this way, the Duke Nukem Forever HRP can hit the ground running and dosen't have to wait 5 years for the tech to get out of date.

[Honza]

Tea Monster, on Mar 12 2011, 09:00 PM, said:

Hey, look at it this way, the Duke Nukem Forever HRP can hit the ground running and dosen't have to wait 5 years for the tech to get out of date.

Duke Nukem Forerver HRP and unleashing the 2 weapons limit is one of this things I'm betting on in future modifications of DNF.

[Micky C]

DavoX, on Mar 13 2011, 12:22 AM, said:

I think you'r argument is thrown out of the window with Randy's new comment "The engine changed so much that it's not Unreal anymore". Yes it was based off an old engine but it was changed so many times and updated that your statement doesn't hold true anymore.

Yeah I remember George or someone saying that the only parts of the original engine that are still in the game (or at least were at that time) is the event scripting/triggering system, network code, and I think maybe one or two other small things. I'm not tech savvy so I may have mixed up what I was talking about an enraged a lot of people.

[You]

Micky C, on Mar 12 2011, 04:28 PM, said:

Yeah I remember George or someone saying that the only parts of the original engine that are still in the game (or at least were at that time) is the event scripting/triggering system, network code, and I think maybe one or two other small things. I'm not tech savvy so I may have mixed up what I was talking about an enraged a lot of people.

You're correct. I don't believe that myself, but that's what George said.

[JamesCassidy]

Raziel, on Mar 12 2011, 07:35 AM, said:

Anyway, night all. I'm off to bed before I ramble more like a mad man.

It all depends on the GPU of the consoles. PCs are always evolving and the GPUs are updated almost daily. Consoles are a little different. Since they are only made every 2-3 years on average, the GPU stays at the optimum it was when the console was built. Example, look at how Mirror's Edge can change so dramatically with a simple GPU/CPU change.

The game itself just contains the coding of the game, the CPU reads the data and puts it together, and the GPU render's the visuals.

I am more worried about cross platforming. See this is where the PS3 and Xbox360 differ. The PS3s have an awesome CPU, but the GPU is lacking and can't keep up with the CPU. This is why sometimes the graphics look "faded." For the 360 it is the opposite. The CPU is low-powered compared to the PS3s while the GPU is awesome. Which why the colors look richer. Now, developers can develop loops holes for each system to perform excellently on exclusives, which is why exclusives look ten times better than multi-platformers. (Not including timed exclusives for obvious reasons.) (Thanks to my friend in Terminal Reality who more or less explained this to me.)

So I wonder if Duke Nukem Forever will look washed out on the PS3.

I don't really care. As long as the game is fun, I stick with anything. Old School FTW.

[Raziel]

DavoX, on Mar 12 2011, 07:52 AM, said:

I think you'r argument is thrown out of the window with Randy's new comment "The engine changed so much that it's not Unreal anymore". Yes it was based off an old engine but it was changed so many times and updated that your statement doesn't hold true anymore.

I know a lot about engine development, and I can tell you that is just manager talk . His statement is not false however, depending on your point of view, I mean, does BioShock use UE2.5 or the BioShock engine? In reality you could say either. But when it comes down to it, at its core, it's still Unreal Engine 2.5 for BioShock. You can make an old engine do a lot of things and get it looking really modern, but like I said, it might not handle as much geometry as an engine that was built for it out of the box with these things in mind.

To put it bluntly, I do not believe they have rewritten as much of the rendering engine as George's statements seem to suggest. Your engine and tools are very tightly coupled. If they truly did start from scratch for the rendering engine (which would just be stupid imho), the editor would be left completely broken as well, you would almost have to rewrite the entire editor as well. That doesn't even take into account how much of the rest of the engine would have been left broken by such a move. I believe they augmented the engine instead whenever they found a feature they needed that it did not support. That is what makes sense.

If they had me in their office for a month I could probably write a perfectly good visibility determination algorithm for the static-mesh handling, of course, once things start becoming dynamic, like an exploding wall, you really can't rely on a PVS anymore. If they do that kind of thing all the time, your only real option would be hardware occlusion culling and that doesn't work on a PS3 - would ensure a pretty decent frame rate on the 360 and PC though.

[Sinisterambo]

It had it's own tools and editor rewritten more than once I think

[Micky C]

Raziel, on Mar 13 2011, 12:03 PM, said:

I know a lot about engine development, and I can tell you that is just manager talk . His statement is not false however, depending on your point of view, I mean, does BioShock use UE2.5 or the BioShock engine? In reality you could say either. But when it comes down to it, at its core, it's still Unreal Engine 2.5 for BioShock. You can make an old engine do a lot of things and get it looking really modern, but like I said, it might not handle as much geometry as an engine that was built for it out of the box with these things in mind.

To put it bluntly, I do not believe they have rewritten as much of the rendering engine as George's statements seem to suggest. Your engine and tools are very tightly coupled. If they truly did start from scratch for the rendering engine (which would just be stupid imho), the editor would be left completely broken as well, you would almost have to rewrite the entire editor as well. That doesn't even take into account how much of the rest of the engine would have been left broken by such a move. I believe they augmented the engine instead whenever they found a feature they needed that it did not support. That is what makes sense.

If they had me in their office for a month I could probably write a perfectly good visibility determination algorithm for the static-mesh handling, of course, once things start becoming dynamic, like an exploding wall, you really can't rely on a PVS anymore. If they do that kind of thing all the time, your only real option would be hardware occlusion culling and that doesn't work on a PS3 - would ensure a pretty decent frame rate on the 360 and PC though.

Sinisterambo, on Mar 13 2011, 12:48 PM, said:

It had it's own tools and editor rewritten more than once I think

Yes George also said that the editor had been dramatically changed if not completely redone (I can't remember which). I also remember him saying that for the amount of time and effort, and with the amount of things they had to rewrite, they might as well have written their own engine, and that if they could go back in time that's what they would have done.

Edit: maybe I'm just trying to convince myself that the engine's better than it actually is... but we'll see how it handles after the release

[Alithinos]

What's so bad with the graphics ?
From the gameplay footage I saw they seem very good and modern.
When I watched the trailer the only think I didn't liked was some blur that I didn't noticed at all at gameplay videos.
The graphics are fine.

[Kristian Joensen]

Quote

I believe they augmented the engine instead whenever they found a feature they needed that it did not support. That is what makes sense.

While they certainly did that too, they spent 2002 re-writing tech. They really did do the quite dramatical changes that you suggest that didn't do. Yes the editor and tools have also been heavily modified. Rendering? Re-written. Animation? Re-written twice since the E3 2001 version. Indeed in August 2006 they started re-writing both the animation system AND associated tools. Lighting? re-written. Visibility determination/hidden surface removal? Re-written. AI? Re-written. Physics? Replaced with different middleware than what shipped with their UE license. Terrain support? Added by 3D Realms. Multi-threading support? Added by 3D Realms somewhere between August 2006 and April 2007.

Edit:

Some quotes to back the above up:

Quote

Yeah, but just the overall structure. Editor, scripting language, networking etc. We've completely gutted and written our own AI system, rendering, particles, skeletal animation and more so it won't look/feel like an Unreal game at all I don't think. In hindsight, I don't think licensing an engine was a smart move for us. We're pretty uncompromising in what we want to do, so we don't like having limitations. What killed us was not having the programming staff to do what we wanted to do effectively and not recognizing that for a long time. Chalk that up to inexperience.

(Emphasis mine) - George Broussard, January 7, 2004.

Quote

Yes, in hindsight, writing our own engine would have been the way to go, but that wasn't an option once we were so deep into things. We basically stepped back in early 2002, said "This just isn't going to work or be what we want" and spent most of 2002 re-writing things to get us where we needed to be, once and for all. Most of 2003 was spent on content creation and hring new people. Once we were able to make progress, content creation bottlenecks emerged that needed to be dealt with. So, it's been an interesting journey, but one I do not recommend be repeated, by anyone, ever Haha...

Emphasis mine) - George Broussard, January 7, 2004.

Quote

Everything is different. Our visibility, rendering, everything. You could bring in raw geometry, but there's no guarantee it would ever run, as any level made in Unreal may be apples to oranges to what you would do, or how you would do it with out stuff.

- George Broussard, April 13, 2004.

Quote

We have nothing to do with Unreal, 2k3/4 rendering and we've 100% written our own rendering, lighting and visibility for DNF. Apples and Oranges. We will be visually competitive.

- George Broussard, May 14, 2004.

For the next set of quotes keep in mind that Brian Lawson was hired in August 2006, these are the recommendations he got on linkedin.com from George Broussard and Brian Hook:

Quote

Brian L.
Tech Programmer at 3D Realms

To sum up Brian, let me put it this way -- we had two engine programmers responsible for 360 and PC graphics, multithreading, streaming, memory management, animation, performance optimizations, and all the other tasks associated with building core engine tech. And he was one of them. Most companies have eight or more engine programmers, yet we only had two. He built our entire core animation pipeline, both in-game and the associated tools. He worked with the animators on technical and workflow issues, and when he was done with animation he went straight onto some of the most difficult tasks in engine coding -- retrofitting an inherently single threaded engine to have multithreading support, and then getting a predominantly PC engine running on the 360. Brian's a great programmer that never shied away from the hard technical tasks, yet he was never afraid to get the input from others. May 9, 2009

brian (Producer at 3D Realms ) managed Brian at 3D Realms

Quote

Brian Lawson
Tech Programmer at 3D Realms

I can't tell you what a pleasure it was to work with Brian. He's a great programmer who can do anything from the small and mundane to the most complex. I saw Brian replace a bloated, horrible animation system with a streamlined, optimized version that was 1/10th the lines of code. He gets results and produces solid, dependable, shippable work. Add in a great attitude and personality and you have a guy you really need to have on your team. I'd work with Brian again without hesitation. May 7, 2009

George (Co-Owner / Founder at 3D Realms ) worked with Brian at 3D Realms

Quote

Multi-core support is in and quite nice. We all run Core Duo 6600's and 7950/8800, ati 1900 level cards.

Multi-core is the future and the game is pretty much going to require it. You really have to, to make a game competitive with modern consoles, or beyond. One cpu isn't enough anymore.

64 bit will come, but is lower priorty. Vista/64 bit isn't a priority for us at the moment.

- George Broussard, April 19, 2007.

So in other words at this point Brian Lawson had already re-written the animation system and the tools to go with it and had gotten multi-core support up and running

Quote

It's not worth arguing over.

There was a root of Unreal a long, long time ago.

3D Realms rewrote, replaced, rewrote again, replaced again, iterated, modified, rewrote yet again most of the engine over the years.

When we got our hands on it, entire sub-systems were yet again rewritten or otherwise replaced.

It still has the Unreal architecture and the editor (also modified heavily through the years), but there's very little Unreal code left in there.

Duke Nukem Forever is to Unreal Engine what Half-Life 2 or Modern Warfare 2 is to Quake engine.

We've not really worried about labeling it. In the trenches, among developers, it's kind of pointless and, frankly, amateurish to try to talk about the technology in the terms that I'm seeing discussed here.

It's probably most accurate to just call it "The Duke Nukem Forever Engine" and leave it at that.

If someone wants to get in a semantics argument about what bits are Unreal or what bits are other middleware, you better be a programmer who is very familiar with the source code and who is currently working on the project or you will be better off to just STFU.

---------- Post added at 10:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:04 PM ----------

BTW - The fact that is was rooted in Unreal and has the memory of the Unreal architecture, tool path and formats for everything has been VERY beneficial to our development. Our expertise with modern Unreal has been VERY helpful and the quality of Epic's software there and today deserves some credit for the fact that the game is coming out.

Do not interpret the fact that most of the software has been rewritten as anything other than just a natural result of how long the game has been in development and how committed the team has been over the years at 3D Realms to keep attending to and modernizing things and, in some cases (like interactivity), actually pushing things far ahead of the most modern game engines.

(Emphasis mine) - Randy Pitchford, March 11, 2011

Think of it this way every single line of code written(or for that matter re-written) for this game in the last 10 years or so has been original to 3DR(later Triptych, Gearbox and Piranha as well) or has been middleware completely unrelated to the Unreal Engine. Every single line of code! For 10 years!. 10 years of code is a lot and all of it is completely unrelated to the Unreal Engine.

[blackharted]

THE GRAPHICS ARE FINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!! DEAL WITH IT!

[ferran275]

Kristian Joensen, on Mar 13 2011, 04:22 AM, said:

quotes

That was a very cool read, learned a lot, thanks for doing all that investigator work

[Tea Monster]

blackharted, on Mar 13 2011, 03:39 AM, said:

THE GRAPHICS ARE FINE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!! DEAL WITH IT!

The graphics do have problems, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of enjoying the game.

[zwieback]

am i the only one that thinks that the engine has places where the environment looks awesome and others where it looks really bad? - it's a bit like dragon age where some environments look stunning and others look like a game that is at least 8 years old.

anyway, as a regular amiga gamer in the year 2011 i couldn't care less

[Mr.Deviance]

The key to liking DNF's graphics is to think of DNF as a high res sequel to DN3D and not as a modern game for the current times.
If you only expect DNF to look much better than DN3D then you will be very happy.
If you expect DNF to also compete with today's modern graphics then you will end up being very disappointed!

[Tea Monster]

I agree with zwieback (apart from Amigas ) I think some of it is dodgy modelling but some of it the engine just looks weird. They should have used the Dark Places engine!!!!!!

[Micky C]

The darkplaces engine? Isn't that just some fan-made enhancement of the quake engine? I think I've used it in the past and it looks pretty good but I'm not sure if it's capable of the things DNF is trying to pull off, like some of the very large environments.

[Fox Mulder]

Micky C, on Mar 15 2011, 06:14 PM, said:

The darkplaces engine? Isn't that just some fan-made enhancement of the quake engine? I think I've used it in the past and it looks pretty good but I'm not sure if it's capable of the things DNF is trying to pull off, like some of the very large environments.

LOL, the delays in the history of DNF started precisely from the trouble 3D Realms had with the Quake engine not being able to pull the very large outdoor enviroments they were trying to achieve.

[Raziel]

ferran275, on Mar 13 2011, 05:32 AM, said:

That was a very cool read, learned a lot, thanks for doing all that investigator work

Agreed. Excellent post.

[blackharted]

Tea Monster, on Mar 14 2011, 04:05 AM, said:

The graphics do have problems, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of enjoying the game.

There not THAT bad. Plus the trailer was made up of old builds remember?

[Mr.Deviance]

blackharted, on Mar 16 2011, 08:59 AM, said:

There not THAT bad. Plus the trailer was made up of old builds remember?

It was? How do you know?

If anything, the thing that pisses me off the most are not the graphics but the animations.
The thing that I hate the most at fps games are lame character animations...

[zwieback]

Mr.Deviance, on Mar 16 2011, 09:31 AM, said:

It was? How do you know?

If anything, the thing that pisses me off the most are not the graphics but the animations.
The thing that I hate the most at fps games are lame character animations...

lame animations are a killer indeed.

[Micky C]

I remember reading in a review that the animations were ok, but that we shouldn't expect hundreds of frames of animation per character. Character animation in combat isn't that big a deal is it since the ragdoll physics becomes a part of it?

[blackharted]

Mr.Deviance, on Mar 16 2011, 10:31 AM, said:

It was? How do you know?

If anything, the thing that pisses me off the most are not the graphics but the animations.
The thing that I hate the most at fps games are lame character animations...

Its kinda obvious dude.

[Mr.Deviance]

blackharted, on Mar 18 2011, 08:53 AM, said:

Its kinda obvious dude.

Obvious? How? Just judging the 2 different glove textures?
As far as I know, there is no other reason to think that the trailer was made out of old builds.
For all we know, Duke might be able to change his gloves at some point, which might be the reason why we see 2 different gloves in the trailer.