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Guerrilla Games may indicate that they have bigger plans for the Decima Engine

RJMacready73

Simps for Amouranth
So NaughtyDog use their own engine, Sony Santa Monica use their own, Insomniac & GG etc, man that's a lot of seriously good fucking tech engines tbf, are they talking about rolling it out to the other studios? Why?
 
So NaughtyDog use their own engine, Sony Santa Monica use their own, Insomniac & GG etc, man that's a lot of seriously good fucking tech engines tbf, are they talking about rolling it out to the other studios? Why?
I would think the money they would make on licencing the engine is one reason. Also I guess any game made in the engine would be PS5 and PC only.

Would like to see the engine used on a co-op open world FPS.
 

Iced Arcade

Member
The engine can't do VR so should license to Xbox to reboot halo lol.


Jokes aside, it's a beautiful engine, may as well make some coin.
 

squarealex

Member
I prefer the ND Engine, but Kojima made good thing with Death Stranding.

And Until Dawn is still sooo goood at look.
 
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Bragr

Banned
Zero Dawn clearly shows that it was their first attempt with the genre, but Forbidden West gameplay is very good.
I like Horizon, but what a weird combat system they got.

On one hand, it's fast and complex and a very impressive system, but the more enemies you fight, the more you have to use the menu to switch weapons. When you fight a lot of foes, you are switching in and out of the weapon menu and dodging so much that it feels like the gameplay is a Windows error.
 
This is a delusional Take.

Engine is always a priority, you gotta keep evolving that engine to keep with current hardware & graphic trends.

As for Gameplay the combat & movement is top notch, maybe your complaints are about the climbing sections? Those sure need work.
Lol. The only delusional thing here is your reply. Combat itself is far from top notch and as a matter of fact Horizon as a franchise is basically Sony's 3rd person version of the Far Cry formula. Under all those great visuals is a very shoddy experience.

I can forgive the first game since it was the very first entry in a new IP. But I cannot forgive in the 2nd.

The game is Open world with a main questline and a bunch of random NPCs for sidequests.

Gathering mats for supplies, killing random things, finding towers (tall necks) killing animals for meat and so on.

Combat is not very good. You constantly have to go into the weapon wheel to re-craft arrows. You can never really go into a battle in any of the Horizon games and have a super smooth engagement without any menu interrupts or weird slow downs for crafting mid battle.

Melee combat feels very clunky as well. The only cool thing about the combat is how Aloy can pop off certain parts of the robots to cause extra damage or take away their fighting capabilities.

This is coming from someone who has 100% of trophies in Zero Dawn including DLC where you had to beat the game and dlc on hardest difficulty on new game+ or something like that.

The hardest difficulty wasn't really hard, it was just a bunch of jacked up numbers for the damage the machines dealt to you. If anything it was extremely infuriating and annoying and only reason I did is cause I wanted the 100%. That's now how you do good difficulty.

https://psnprofiles.com/trophies/5879-horizon-zero-dawn/Gyrathus

The only thing Horizon really has going for it are the visuals and that's about it. Writing is awful, Aloy isn't really that interesting. There are far better written female characters in other titles like Freya from GoW or Ellie from TLOU and even Chloe from Uncharted.

Horizon is not that good of a franchise as you think it is. It could have been way more interesting if they've had a more interesting protagonist, better writing and most importantly much more fluid combat and good game design that meshes well together. Returnal and GoW Ragnarok are good examples of well designed core mechanics that work well of each other. Horizon sometimes doesn't know what it wants to be
 
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SlimySnake

Flashless at the Golden Globes
So NaughtyDog use their own engine, Sony Santa Monica use their own, Insomniac & GG etc, man that's a lot of seriously good fucking tech engines tbf, are they talking about rolling it out to the other studios? Why?
Game dev times are taking longer and longer. If every studio is wasting years on getting their engine upgraded for next gen, they are wasting time that would otherwise be spent on development.

With UE5 offering so many incredible new features that every single of those devs would have to create from scratch, its best to choose one internal engine so that they dont ahve to share 12% of their revenue with Epic for every game.

In the Sony first party thread, we were talking about how Insmoniac and ND needed to work on transitionary games like Miles and TLOU Part 1 because their pre-production team was not ready to immediately begin development on a next gen title. Well, if the engine was ready, if the tech was there, they would have begun right away.

Epic's lumens tech uses AMD's rt cores, their nanite tech uses primitive shaders in AMD shader cores, their megascan library is massive, their physics system is leagues ahead of anything else out there, their upscaling solution is way better than FSR and checkerboarding, their facial animation/mocap tech is unrivaled. Sony studios simply cannot match that feature set without spending half a decade developing it. If GG is the one studio that sets aside a big team simply incharge of incorporating these features into their engine, that frees up other studios to simply rely upon GG's engine and actually work on making games instead of engines.
 

Aaron Olive

Member
Doesnt Decima already have its own streaming solution that rivals if not bests World Partition.

I thought the physics in Burning Shores was pretty impressive as is.

Whats wrong with their PBR system in Decima?....Especially considering one of Unreals weaknesses atleast in 5.0 was its material system....alot of devs and people coming from other material systems usually critique Unreals material system.....it was one of the hardest things for me to grasp when making materials from scratch. If I use MegaScans or Vray Datasmith that basically automates the process but that still relies on me using another DCC so to speak to actually make the material then Datasmith converts it.....but when i look at the shader graph Datasmith has made in Unreal.....im like what the fuck is this?

What Shader calculations?
Shader Calculation: is improving the realism of the depth of the shaders what you’re looking at relative to the camera positions think of car paint.

World Partition: I know Decima has it’s own world partition system everything I mention is just for them to improve on what they have.

The reason i mention it is because it needs improvement why else do you think you fly 20 MPH on the sunwing and I’ve caught the game trying to keep up the rendering with the camera when I spin the camera too fast or slight hitching and the screen turning black to load a new area on PS5.

PBR: I know what the current Decima engine has shown us on materials and it’s top notch but everything can be improved upon to make even more realism for the future.

I hope this is gives more perspective.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Shader Calculation: is improving the realism of the depth of the shaders what you’re looking at relative to the camera positions think of car paint.

I hope this is gives more perspective.
I work with offline renderers (Redshift and Arnold mostly).......I have no idea what you are talking about.
Are you talking about the Fresnel Effect?.
 
Blatantly untrue
Yeah, because it doesn't align with your narccisist fanboyism views my friend.

Guerilla Games have always been good at visuals and that's it. The only decent Killzone game was Killzone 2. The only good thing that came out of them during ps4 era was just the Decima engine that Death Stranding ended up using (fantastic game) and thats it.

Honestly, I am not sure how they managed to survive for however long they did. Every other IP by other Sony studios absolutely blows Guerilla Games out of the water when it comes to gameplay.
 
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Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Here the shader calculations for the paint. In unreals presentation @ 2:43 I guess.

I dont think you fully understand what they are demonstrating to you.
The Substrate material framework is Unreal engine basically catching up to other material systems.......they finally have what other systems would call a 'Layered Material" and its actually relatively easy to make(in the old system layered materials were a bitch).......if you look at the Substrate node itself it actually looks more like what you would find in any modern DCC, they are finally actually using IOR values........as I mentioned before Unreals material system was one of its biggest weaknesses, right now Substrate looks to be something that people coming from other material systems would find easier to grasp. (Which I find really annoying cuz I spent so much time learning the old (shitty) system, when they could have launched with this system and I would have landed running cuz its what frikken normal people do)

Which is why I find your use of the term "Shader Calculations" so confusing, what calculations?
 
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Pedro Motta

Member
They should focus more on actually making good gameplay rather than worrying about their techy visuals.

Their titles always had lackluster gameplay.
Tom Delonge Wtf GIF




The internet is an amazing place.
 

Aaron Olive

Member
I dont think you fully understand what they are demonstrating to you.
The Substrate material framework is Unreal engine basically catching up to other material systems.......they finally have what other systems would call a 'Layered Material" and its actually relatively easy to make(in the old system layered materials were a bitch).......if you look at the Substrate node itself it actually looks more like what you would find in any modern DCC, they are finally actually using IOR values........as I mentioned before Unreals material system was one of its biggest weaknesses, right now Substrate looks to be something that people coming from other material systems would find easier to grasp. (Which I find really annoying cuz I spent so much time learning the old (shitty) system, when they could have launched with this system and I would have landed running cuz its what frikken normal people do)

Which is why I find your use of the term "Shader Calculations" so confusing, what calculations?
The math behind the tools the 1’s and 0’s

But if I’m wrong then I’m wrong.
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
The math behind the tools the 1’s and 0’s

But if I’m wrong then I’m wrong.
I dont know what model Decima uses, but the new substrate system in Unreal Engine 5.2 uses BSDF you can read up on it here:

Note: That Substrate is still super experimental in UE 5.2p maybe when 5.2 comes out it will be production ready.

Also: As an aside, how fast did the reverse trike in Death Stranding travel?
Their World Streaming is fine, and def rivals if not bests Unreal Engines World Partition.
 
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Yoboman

Member
Yeah, because it doesn't align with your narccisist fanboyism views my friend.

Guerilla Games have always been good at visuals and that's it. The only decent Killzone game was Killzone 2. The only good thing that came out of them during ps4 era was just the Decima engine that Death Stranding ended up using (fantastic game) and thats it.

Honestly, I am not sure how they managed to survive for however long they did. Every other IP by other Sony studios absolutely blows Guerilla Games out of the water when it comes to gameplay.
Constantly stating it's bad without any rationalisation makes for a poor argument

"Yeah, because it doesn't align with your narccisist fanboyism views my friend."

Sweet irony
 
Constantly stating it's bad without any rationalisation makes for a poor argument

"Yeah, because it doesn't align with your narccisist fanboyism views my friend."

Sweet irony
You really can't read can you? I also DID explain in greater detail why the gameplay is not that good if you actually bothered to scroll up and read my other replies.

Every other IP by other Sony studios absolutely blows Guerilla Games out of the water when it comes to gameplay.

I can forgive the first game since it was the very first entry in a new IP. But I cannot forgive the 2nd game.

The game is Open world with a main questline and a bunch of random NPCs for sidequests.

Gathering mats for supplies, killing random things, finding towers (tall necks) killing animals for meat and so on.

Combat is not very good. You constantly have to go into the weapon wheel to re-craft arrows. You can never really go into a battle in any of the Horizon games and have a super smooth engagement without any menu interrupts or weird slow downs for crafting mid battle.

Melee combat feels very clunky as well. The only cool thing about the combat is how Aloy can pop off certain parts of the robots to cause extra damage or take away their fighting capabilities.

This is coming from someone who has 100% of trophies in Zero Dawn including DLC where you had to beat the game and dlc on hardest difficulty on new game+ or something like that.

The hardest difficulty wasn't really hard, it was just a bunch of jacked up numbers for the damage the machines dealt to you. If anything it was extremely infuriating and annoying and only reason I did is cause I wanted the 100%. That's not how you do good difficulty.

https://psnprofiles.com/trophies/5879-horizon-zero-dawn/Gyrathus

Learn to read posts.

Nowhere did I say I do not like Sony titles. TLOU 2, GoW R, Returnal and Bloodborne are some of my favorite games. Just because I don't think Horizon has amazing gameplay doesn't make anyone a fanboy you goofball. It's a decent franchise, not amazing and that's it.

Go back to Icon-Era bud Bryank75, Swift_Star and arfvb need your support. Otherwise, they are nobody without you. For those who do not know all of those people were banned of Gaf for reasons you can already probably guess.
 
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Aaron Olive

Member
I dont know what model Decima uses, but the new substrate system in Unreal Engine 5.2 uses BSDF you can read up on it here:

Note: That Substrate is still super experimental in UE 5.2p maybe when 5.2 comes out it will be production ready.

Also: As an aside, how fast did the reverse trike in Death Stranding travel?
Their World Streaming is fine, and def rivals if not bests Unreal Engines World Partition.
Thanks for the info will read as I love educating myself on new tech, need to download the PS5 directors cut since I have it bought and do some test, but when I played on PS4 the vehicular traversal was quite slow and load times were quite long.
 
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Belthazar

Member
They should focus more on actually making good gameplay rather than worrying about their techy visuals.

Their titles always had lackluster gameplay.

Horizon has some of the most engaging combat mechanics on any modern AAA, what are you even talking about? It has many problems, but gameplay definitely isn't one of them.
 
Horizon has some of the most engaging combat mechanics on any modern AAA, what are you even talking about? It has many problems, but gameplay definitely isn't one of them.
I'd have to respectfully disagree. Please explain to me how hiding in a bush, aiming with your bow and shooting a robot/enemy is an engaging way to start combat? Sure, you crawl up as well and do a critical melee hit instead. Or lay a bunch of traps and lure them in with rocks/noises. But this is nothing new, other games have done stuff like this in the past.

Shooting of specific parts and being able to use their weapons against them is cool, I'll give you that. But I don't find it engaging running around a robot in circles and trying to craft arrows every time I am out of them. It breaks the pacing. I feel like something is off, it just feels tedious.
 
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CamHostage

Member
Please explain to me how hiding in a bush, aiming with your bow and shooting a robot/enemy is an engaging way to start combat?

Belthezar, please explain to this guy in a different thread which isn't about the Decima Engine and totally unrelated to the gameplay qualities...

Or don't. But if be nice if Elder could find some other of the many Horizon threads to jump in with this opinion if he really wants to talk about how Guerrilla games play.

The guys optimizing the engine are sometimes different people than the guys directing the gameplay design.

Barely even "sometimes", especially at this level. Engine developers coordinate with designers to solve problems or offer new tech opportunities, but if there's enough people on a professional job that everybody has a role, there'd be not much reason why the guy figuring out the streaming and procedural generation systems would be also crafting a boss encounter.

Plus, as the article says, this guy is being promoted from individual Guerrilla projects to a larger Decima support/expansion role.
 
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Yoboman

Member
I'd have to respectfully disagree. Please explain to me how hiding in a bush, aiming with your bow and shooting a robot/enemy is an engaging way to start combat? Sure, you crawl up as well and do a critical melee hit instead. Or lay a bunch of traps and lure them in with rocks/noises. But this is nothing new, other games have done stuff like this in the past.

Shooting of specific parts and being able to use their weapons against them is cool, I'll give you that. But I don't find it engaging running around a robot in circles and trying to craft arrows every time I am out of them. It breaks the pacing. I feel like something is off, it just feels tedious.
Sounds like a skill issue to me
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Decima engine is working pretty well for them though, so I think it makes sense for GG to push it further. Also, EA is a bad comparison lol.
Frostbite was not the only example, they did the same thing with Renderware.

Still, the point is not how much we like EA or not, forcing engines on studios tends to hurt both studios’ output unless it fits very well in their existing workflows else it is higher support costs (devs do not really like to do support work, documentation, and the more changes you do to be more flexible the harder it is to maintain the codebase and make it best in class and efficient at anything) and teams feel restricted / pain points they do not feel empowered to fix. An engine is much more than the renderer’s features, it is a manifestation of a team’s ways of working and processes.

It can help some teams, especially new teams or teams with internal tech that just does not work for them (they built something without the experience required) or where their concepts and flows match what the engine provided requires, but if Sony really were to force Decima on all studios it would end in tears / doing more harm then good (not supporting a studio with their internal tech stack is a soft way to force it too).
 
Frostbite was not the only example, they did the same thing with Renderware.

Still, the point is not how much we like EA or not, forcing engines on studios tends to hurt both studios’ output unless it fits very well in their existing workflows else it is higher support costs (devs do not really like to do support work, documentation, and the more changes you do to be more flexible the harder it is to maintain the codebase and make it best in class and efficient at anything) and teams feel restricted / pain points they do not feel empowered to fix. An engine is much more than the renderer’s features, it is a manifestation of a team’s ways of working and processes.

It can help some teams, especially new teams or teams with internal tech that just does not work for them (they built something without the experience required) or where their concepts and flows match what the engine provided requires, but if Sony really were to force Decima on all studios it would end in tears / doing more harm then good (not supporting a studio with their internal tech stack is a soft way to force it too).
I hear ya. I don't think Decima will be forced on all studios, that would be actually dumb.

Some engines are better than others for certain type of games or the studious themselves. I highly doubt Naughty Dog efforts would go to waste engine wise after TLOU 2 and the Remake. I am pretty confident Naughty Dog is gonna continue using their own thing.

Death Stranding 2 obviously will continue to use Decima cause it got the job done and the game looks fantastic. Horizon 3 will most likely be the next big Decima showcase for Sony though.

Idk what Insomniac uses, is it their own? EDIT - Insomniac's proprietary engine. No clue what the name of it though is.
 
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Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
I hear ya. I don't think Decima will be forced on all studios, that would be actually dumb.

Some engines are better than others for certain type of games or the studious themselves. I highly doubt Naughty Dog efforts would go to waste engine wise after TLOU 2 and the Remake. I am pretty confident Naughty Dog is gonna continue using their own thing.

Death Stranding 2 obviously will continue to use Decima cause it got the job done and the game looks fantastic. Horizon 3 will most likely be the next big Decima showcase for Sony though.

Idk what Insomniac uses, is it their own?
I think Insomniac uses their own, but then again I bet there are lots of small portable libraries and techniques the SIE WWS share with each other (easier to get clearance to share any investigation, spike, algorithm, idea) in the internal 1st and 2nd party studios network (KojiPro has source access to Decima, had GG employees working on their games too, and contributes engine updates to it too).
 

midnightAI

Member
The engine can't do VR so should license to Xbox to reboot halo lol.


Jokes aside, it's a beautiful engine, may as well make some coin.
I know it's a joke, but if course it can do VR (Until Dawn: Rush of Blood and Rigs Mechanised Combat to name a couple)

I don't think they are talking about licensing the game engine out (although I'm sure any Sony first party can use it if they choose to, even select third parties). I think they are talking about continuing to update the engine so that it is more future facing adding features such as ray tracing and (hopefully) using PS5 as the base spec.
 

CGNoire

Member
Yup was going to say the same….

Proper HDR support
World partition
Ray-traced rendering
NVME support for kraken compression for faster load times.
Better physics capabilities
Animation rigging improvements
Better PBR
Shader calculations
Collisions/clipping = Aloy’s hair!
Those are a good 1st step but.....Way more important would be nanite and lumen equivalents.
 
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kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
The upgrade system was extremely shitty. To upgrade the good weapons you need several random drops from tough enemies so you have to put in considerable time traveling to a site, killing one, traveling to another site, killing another.... repeat 10 times until you get the drop. If they need the Apex version, you need to keep notes of which sites on the map actually spawn those. It is obnoxious, grindy, bullshit, and fucking terrible. I absolutely hate it. I have no issue with needing to cleave parts off of things though. I actually enjoy that. It's the random drops and the fact that you need so many of them to upgrade weapons. Who the fuck thinks that this shit is fun? It is the worst kind of grindy bloat. Also why the fuck would you need an Apex ____ heart to upgrade a fucking bow? It's stupid as shit on top of being unfun.

HFW had far, far too much grind compared to its predecessor. I was able to get all my weapons upgraded to max in HZD without too much trouble. In HFW it takes at least ten times as much time to do the same. I turned the difficulty to story mode whenever I needed to upgrade my weapons and kill loads of robot beasts for random loot and even then it took a ridiculous amount of time. No fun at all.

aint nobody got time for that GIF
 
They might want to make Decima the 'house engine' of Sony?
Unreal Engine is making big steps and almost forces a lot of studio's to use it because of its advanced features. Maybe they start to invest more resources in making Decima something similar, creating their own Nanite and Lumen solutions. Because they probably don't want to give Epic a bunch of their income from using UE.

Right now, Decima is a great engine for open world games, but I feel like they need to make it much more versatile (same thing EA did with Frostbite at some point). It was telling that Call of the Mountain was not made in Decima, but in UE, probably due to Decima not being ready to make VR content..
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Those are a good 1st step but.....Way more important would be nanite and lumen equalvalents.
These are I think the biggest steps other engines need to make.
Other engines are already "better" than Unreal at pretty much everything else:

World Partition - Even Crystal Dynamics engine already had better world streaming, which is why some engineers were sad to leave the engine behind.

Physics - Weve seen that Havok/PhysX is pretty damn powerful....I have yet to see just how good Chaos Physics actually are in practice.

Procedural Placement/Generation - Decima showed off their procedural system with Horizon Zero Dawn what 5 years ago?......Unreal was showing off their equivalent at State of Unreal this year.

Materials - Sweet Jesus....if theres one thing Unreal Engine has been backwards on for years and years.....its their Material system...they are supposedly gonna fix this in UE 5.2 which is a good thing.


But right now, Nanite is a true game changer because Virtual Geometry makes life so much easier for pretty much everything.....the fact UE has pretty much solved the need for full on geometry completely now that foliage and dynamic meshes that can also be Nanite-ized man, im sure artists a chomping at the bit waiting for their engines to have an equivalent.

Lumen is also a great addition, I dont think its as much of a game changer, because RT systems have been developed by other engineers in other engines already, and we saw Insominacs solution is actually super performant on PS5, im sure other Sony engines have found ways to really push the visuals without overly stressing the system

Virtual Shadow Maps is another thing that hopefully other engines are really thinking about.
 

Pedro Motta

Member
Lol. The only delusional thing here is your reply. Combat itself is far from top notch and as a matter of fact Horizon as a franchise is basically Sony's 3rd person version of the Far Cry formula. Under all those great visuals is a very shoddy experience.

I can forgive the first game since it was the very first entry in a new IP. But I cannot forgive in the 2nd.

The game is Open world with a main questline and a bunch of random NPCs for sidequests.

Gathering mats for supplies, killing random things, finding towers (tall necks) killing animals for meat and so on.

Combat is not very good. You constantly have to go into the weapon wheel to re-craft arrows. You can never really go into a battle in any of the Horizon games and have a super smooth engagement without any menu interrupts or weird slow downs for crafting mid battle.

Melee combat feels very clunky as well. The only cool thing about the combat is how Aloy can pop off certain parts of the robots to cause extra damage or take away their fighting capabilities.

This is coming from someone who has 100% of trophies in Zero Dawn including DLC where you had to beat the game and dlc on hardest difficulty on new game+ or something like that.

The hardest difficulty wasn't really hard, it was just a bunch of jacked up numbers for the damage the machines dealt to you. If anything it was extremely infuriating and annoying and only reason I did is cause I wanted the 100%. That's now how you do good difficulty.

https://psnprofiles.com/trophies/5879-horizon-zero-dawn/Gyrathus

The only thing Horizon really has going for it are the visuals and that's about it. Writing is awful, Aloy isn't really that interesting. There are far better written female characters in other titles like Freya from GoW or Ellie from TLOU and even Chloe from Uncharted.

Horizon is not that good of a franchise as you think it is. It could have been way more interesting if they've had a more interesting protagonist, better writing and most importantly much more fluid combat and good game design that meshes well together. Returnal and GoW Ragnarok are good examples of well designed core mechanics that work well of each other. Horizon sometimes doesn't know what it wants to be
Git gud.
 

Aaron Olive

Member
Game dev times are taking longer and longer. If every studio is wasting years on getting their engine upgraded for next gen, they are wasting time that would otherwise be spent on development.

With UE5 offering so many incredible new features that every single of those devs would have to create from scratch, its best to choose one internal engine so that they dont ahve to share 12% of their revenue with Epic for every game.

In the Sony first party thread, we were talking about how Insmoniac and ND needed to work on transitionary games like Miles and TLOU Part 1 because their pre-production team was not ready to immediately begin development on a next gen title. Well, if the engine was ready, if the tech was there, they would have begun right away.

Epic's lumens tech uses AMD's rt cores, their nanite tech uses primitive shaders in AMD shader cores, their megascan library is massive, their physics system is leagues ahead of anything else out there, their upscaling solution is way better than FSR and checkerboarding, their facial animation/mocap tech is unrivaled. Sony studios simply cannot match that feature set without spending half a decade developing it. If GG is the one studio that sets aside a big team simply incharge of incorporating these features into their engine, that frees up other studios to simply rely upon GG's engine and actually work on making games instead of engines.
This is a bad take, a Projects development never ceases to move forward when the engineers have to upgrade the game engines. Project work is started in the stable builds of the engine and test builds while the engineers test the stability of the environments and additions going forward. Once engineers have mostly completed advancements and additions to the game engine everything moves over to the final engine builds as assets get made to be finalized during what we know as the crunch period.
 

CGNoire

Member
These are I think the biggest steps other engines need to make.
Other engines are already "better" than Unreal at pretty much everything else:

World Partition - Even Crystal Dynamics engine already had better world streaming, which is why some engineers were sad to leave the engine behind.

Physics - Weve seen that Havok/PhysX is pretty damn powerful....I have yet to see just how good Chaos Physics actually are in practice.

Procedural Placement/Generation - Decima showed off their procedural system with Horizon Zero Dawn what 5 years ago?......Unreal was showing off their equivalent at State of Unreal this year.

Materials - Sweet Jesus....if theres one thing Unreal Engine has been backwards on for years and years.....its their Material system...they are supposedly gonna fix this in UE 5.2 which is a good thing.


But right now, Nanite is a true game changer because Virtual Geometry makes life so much easier for pretty much everything.....the fact UE has pretty much solved the need for full on geometry completely now that foliage and dynamic meshes that can also be Nanite-ized man, im sure artists a chomping at the bit waiting for their engines to have an equivalent.

Lumen is also a great addition, I dont think its as much of a game changer, because RT systems have been developed by other engineers in other engines already, and we saw Insominacs solution is actually super performant on PS5, im sure other Sony engines have found ways to really push the visuals without overly stressing the system

Virtual Shadow Maps is another thing that hopefully other engines are really thinking about.

I mostly agree.

World Partition - Unreals been shit at streaming for so long for sure.

Chaos - is far far more advanced than havok or physx. Check out there release video they did for that vr robot game where they break down its features.

Procedual Gen- this is where I disagree. Oblivion had procedual content algos used for forest generation and Bluprints are so customizable that a feature atleast "at that level" could have been implemented pretty quickly if needed.

Materials- could you please elaborate. I have always felt there materials look damm good and often can produce very realistic results. Though I will say some artists exspecially Youtube armchair devs with there shitty UE clickbait vertical slices suck at authoring them.

Lumen - yes this is definitly the thing Im worried the least about since everyone and there mom is developing a realtime GI soultion. I do however wonder how they will be able to intergrate it with a massive polycount of whatever virtualized geometry solution there creating? Same concern with VSM as well.
 
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Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
Chaos - is far far more advanced than havok or physx. Check out there release video they did for that vr robot game where they break down its features.
Yeah.
Ive been following Unreal Engine 5 because my workplace is planning on using it as a "cheap" fast renderer for projects that dont require absolute accuracy and being the gaming guy at the office, they said "you are gonna present why we should adopt Unreal Engine 5".....note i never voted for it to be implemented in the first place.
Ive seen Chaos but I havent seen it do anything that Havok and PhysX couldnt.....im pretty sure the main reason Epic chose to abandon PhysX is because they want everything to be handled in house, they dont want to pay anyone for licensing.
If they cant make it, they buy the company that can.

Materials- could you please elaborate. I have always felt there materials look damm good and often can produce very realistic results. Though I will say some artists exspecially Youtube armchair devs with there shitty UE clickbait vertical slices suck at authoring them.
How they look isnt the issue, with enough time and effort youll get to the finish line eventually...........how you make them is the issue.
You can imagine a material in your head, then sit in the material editor and the logical steps to make said material dont work in Unreal.
Pretty much every other Material system is for lack of a better world straight forward and logical.....Unreals system is overly complicated with weird workarounds for straight forward things.......so much so, that I actively avoid it.
Its easier for me to make a material in Max then use Datasmith to convert that material into an Unreal material.....and never edit it in Unreal.
Ill just go back to Max if I need to make changes.

Their new Substrate system is closer to what every other modern material system does....you can see their presentation on Substrate here:


^You can imagine, if this is a revolution.....what the fuck were they doing before?
 

mhirano

Member
It's going to become the Sony engine.
This is actually a terrible idea.
Would it be good Naughty Dog and Insomniac dropping their amazing engines for Decima?
This would be Frostbite (EA engine) fiasco all over again.
 
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Shubh_C63

Member
I am not the engine guy but Decima and ResidentEvil-Engine are some amazing stuff.
RE engine works even on toasters.
 

CGNoire

Member
Yeah.
Ive been following Unreal Engine 5 because my workplace is planning on using it as a "cheap" fast renderer for projects that dont require absolute accuracy and being the gaming guy at the office, they said "you are gonna present why we should adopt Unreal Engine 5".....note i never voted for it to be implemented in the first place.
Ive seen Chaos but I havent seen it do anything that Havok and PhysX couldnt.....im pretty sure the main reason Epic chose to abandon PhysX is because they want everything to be handled in house, they dont want to pay anyone for licensing.
If they cant make it, they buy the company that can.


How they look isnt the issue, with enough time and effort youll get to the finish line eventually...........how you make them is the issue.
You can imagine a material in your head, then sit in the material editor and the logical steps to make said material dont work in Unreal.
Pretty much every other Material system is for lack of a better world straight forward and logical.....Unreals system is overly complicated with weird workarounds for straight forward things.......so much so, that I actively avoid it.
Its easier for me to make a material in Max then use Datasmith to convert that material into an Unreal material.....and never edit it in Unreal.
Ill just go back to Max if I need to make changes.

Their new Substrate system is closer to what every other modern material system does....you can see their presentation on Substrate here:


^You can imagine, if this is a revolution.....what the fuck were they doing before?


I see what your saying now. My main experience with material authoring outside of UE and UDk was Max back when it was all Blinn,Phong,Oren Nayer or whatever that soft shader was called. Before PBR framework became standard shit was obviously a nightmare just to get realistic results. I felt so much more at home using a PBR approach for replicating real world surface responses that I must admit it all seems amazing to me. So I have been mostly blind to its inefficiencies. Do you feel like substrate is still far behind? What do you see is still missing? Is it still better to just work with Substance designer?
 

Black_Stride

do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
I see what your saying now. My main experience with material authoring outside of UE and UDk was Max back when it was all Blinn,Phong,Oren Nayer or whatever that soft shader was called. Before PBR framework became standard shit was obviously a nightmare just to get realistic results. I felt so much more at home using a PBR approach for replicating real world surface responses that I must admit it all seems amazing to me. So I have been mostly blind to its inefficiencies. Do you feel like substrate is still far behind? What do you see is still missing? Is it still better to just work with Substance designer?
Substrate is closer to what everyone now calls the 'Standard Shader/Surface/Material", there are some things missing, but I dont want to judge Substrate until its out of the experimental phase....im pretty sure Epic is aiming to make Substrate as close to Standard as possible so people coming from any other material system can feel right at home quickly.

You can and should still use Substance Designer/Painter there will just be some maps that you will never need to author now because Standard Shaders just use straight math to calculate those.(saving memory)
e.g Metalness.......there is no reason to tell a material it is metal if its IOR is that of a metal, itll just look like metal.
(anecdotally the Metalness map can be used as a blend map in standard shaders to achieve similar effects)

Whats probably gonna become much more important for people coming from the old system, is they will need to learn how to make blend maps so they can layer all the "substrates" over each other correctly in editor.
Substance Painter is still excellent for that cuz youve been doing that all along in Painter, now you just need to export those masks.

P.S
The old material system isnt going away (yet). Substrate is still experimental, but I do see it taking over as the defacto Unreal Engine Shader sooner rather than later.
Standard is just so efficient and easy to understand i wouldnt be shocked if by UE5.6 the old system becomes legacy and you have to unlock it in editor to actually use it.
 

CGNoire

Member
Substrate is closer to what everyone now calls the 'Standard Shader/Surface/Material", there are some things missing, but I dont want to judge Substrate until its out of the experimental phase....im pretty sure Epic is aiming to make Substrate as close to Standard as possible so people coming from any other material system can feel right at home quickly.

You can and should still use Substance Designer/Painter there will just be some maps that you will never need to author now because Standard Shaders just use straight math to calculate those.(saving memory)
e.g Metalness.......there is no reason to tell a material it is metal if its IOR is that of a metal, itll just look like metal.
(anecdotally the Metalness map can be used as a blend map in standard shaders to achieve similar effects)

Whats probably gonna become much more important for people coming from the old system, is they will need to learn how to make blend maps so they can layer all the "substrates" over each other correctly in editor.
Substance Painter is still excellent for that cuz youve been doing that all along in Painter, now you just need to export those masks.

P.S
The old material system isnt going away (yet). Substrate is still experimental, but I do see it taking over as the defacto Unreal Engine Shader sooner rather than later.
Standard is just so efficient and easy to understand i wouldnt be shocked if by UE5.6 the old system becomes legacy and you have to unlock it in editor to actually use it.
Im enjoying all these workflow upgrades and we clearly need them but constantly relearning new wotkflows can leave aging artists like myself in a consant state of Future Shock. It is for the best though. Super Exciting times.
 
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