PlayStation 4 and Unreal Engine 4: Our Thoughts

The announcement of the PlayStation 4 (as well as the reveal of its DualShock 4 controller) has been pretty exciting and we’re beginning to find out more and more about this particular game console, as Sony continues to reveal additional information almost every couple of days.

We’ve recently looked at some of the upcoming PS4 titles, two of which come from the indie side of the industry. At the Game Developers Conference we’ve also had the chance to learn additional details concerning the future of the Metal Gear Solid series as well as its FOX Engine, and speaking of which, if -like me- you’re always getting a warm and fuzzy feeling whenever you see new graphic-engines being showcased, then you’re definitely one to be interested in the latest Unreal engine.

[chukamachine]

Early days.

[popup]

The following is a quote from a new addition at the bottom of an article from digital foundry about the above demo as it explains some of the errors made in negative comments regarding the recent PC/PS4 comparisons and the demo above.

"Update: Brian Karis, senior graphics programmer at Epic Games adds some more insight in the comments below, explaining some of the more obvious differences - particularly in terms of the very different lighting schemes. At the technical level, the two demos are closer than it seems:

"The biggest changes actually came from the merging of two separate cinematics, the original Elemental and the extended Elemental we showed at PS4's launch event. Each had different sun directions and required some compromises to join them. This resulted in some major lighting differences that aren't platform related but were due to it being a joined cinematic. Another effect, in the original you could see the mountains through the door where in the merged one we made the view through the door white since the mountains outside were no longer the same. Same deal with the mountain fly by. The old mountain range doesn't exist in the new one. These changes from the merge make direct comparisons somewhat inaccurate.

"Feature wise most everything is the same, AA resolution, meshes, textures (PS4 has tons of memory), DOF (I assure you both use the same Bokeh DOF, not sure why that one shot has different focal range), motion blur.

"Biggest differences are SVOGI has been replaced with a more efficient GI solution, a slight scale down in the number of particles for some FX, and tessellation is broken on ps4 in the current build which the lava used for displacement. We will fix the tessellation in the future."

SOURCE:-

http://www.eurogamer.net/ar...

[Cryptcuzz]

Hey thanks for sharing that. It clarifies the differences and assures others that the PS4 will run the engine just as well.

[hakis86]

popup: Thanks so much, I didn't know there was an update to their article. OH BOY what great news :D

[MaxXAttaxX]

It was an early build? That explains why it looks different, since they changed the lighting, sun direction, etc.
Wonder if they'll show the demo again once they fix tessellation and whatnot.

[Arai]

While ease of development and cost effective, UE is far from a great engine.

I hope it's shortcomings drive developers to create their own in-house engines and/or use better alternatives.
The shiny, plastic, bad textures that this engine is famous for needs to go.

Quote from UDK forum:

"Fully dynamic lighting and precomputed lighting are just two tools in our UE4 toolbox. We have games being made like Fortnite that are using fully dynamic lighting, no lighting build times, and the game has full flexibility to change what it desires at runtime. In the case of Fortnite, this is used to great effect with building and harvesting of resources. We don't yet have a solution for dynamic GI in the fully dynamic lighting path, this is something we hope to address in the future."

What that means is that they've cut out SVOGI (real-time global illumination) completely from UE4 because they're incapable of making it work.
This all while other engines have real time global illumination.

Perhaps this has something to do with a lot of people recently leaving Epic.
Either way SVOGI/RTGI won't be in UE4 (not even for the PC version).

It was never a great engine on consoles, but due to the cost and ease of use a lot of smaller developers embraced it like there's no tomorrow.

It's a good thing there are some really great studios out there that have their own engines.
Ones that surpasses almost every aspect of what UE offers.

[DivineAssault]

I think they focused on making it easy to use rather than better looking.. It does look significantly better but not as much as it could have.. Ive read that its a breeze to design games with though

[Pandamobile]

The "signature" Unreal Engine look has nothing to do with the engine itself, but rather the developers that use it.

Games like Mirror's Edge and Bioshock: Infinite paint a completely different picture than the perceived "plastic and brown" default Unreal 3 aesthetic.

[Serjikal_Strike]

Maybe its just me, but I never did find this ue4 demo that great
I think they can do better.

[colonel179]

I never liked Unreal Engine 3. The look of the characters is horrible, it looked like they were made of clay or something. Compared to graphics like Final Fantasy XIII, Uncharted, Battlefield, etc it was really bad. I would always recognize a game made with UE3 because they all looked the same in a bad way. I was only impressed by it when they first showed the first Gears of War.

I hope that UE4 doesn't turn out bad. I still think it doesn't look as great as other engines that have been showed for PS4, but it looks nicer in comparison than what UE3 was. It's a shame that a lot of developers use it. I know the reasons, but seeing how there are other engines much better than this, I wish there as another popular engine for games.

[DivineAssault]

"Cinder! Glacius! Fight off!"

Nice to see it looking pretty good on PS4 that quickly.. Supposedly only using 4GB of memory too because even the devs never knew PS4 had 8.. Cant wait to see a fully built game all polished up & ready to go using this engine.. I bet the worlds will be nice & big while running silky smooth in 720p or 1080p.. Hopefully the latter

[robleroy]

It looking that not so good had nothing to do with the 4GB

[mrmancs]

and in other news the sale of pc's have dropped to a all time low by 14%

[SonyNGP]

>playing sales

[Ninjamonkey82]

Like this gen i hope it all about U4 engine as it is U3 engine are things will get stale :/. Hope many new engines surface. We have slight glimpses of what can be with what naughty dog etc are throwing out. But imo devss get very Generic when it comes to these big engines. Well there are the few exceptions Take two games. Just can't have 100 clones off the one game makes for dull gaming.

[Npugz7]

The PS4 demos were early hardware stages and do not take full advantage of the PS4 hardware! Time and updated PS4 hardware can showcase the exact same quality as the PC version!

[FreakyFox]

What people have to understand is that Unreal Engine is very nice to work with, and as far as a certain look, that is down to devs who choose that type of Artwork/Theme.

The demo below is Sci-Fi/Mass Effect in nature, but with a keen eye shows more of what Unreal Engine can do.

Unreal Engine 4 "Infiltrator" Real-Time Demo

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

With decent amount of RAM and X86 architecture in the up and coming consoles its all down to the creative minded folks now, no excuses.