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[Neilg]

On the vertex colour issue. I could understand Nintendo being tight with textures to still be relying on cheaper coloured polys they don't fully-multitexture, but it came across as though the Coalition's entire technical blueprint for making games was a little stuck in the past - Xbox 360 gen - which seemed really odd for very talented people. I can only assume there is a very good reason for using vertex colours - maybe the cost of per vertex colour is there in directx rendering whether you want it or not, so maybe not using it, is a waste of performance.

UE5 is in beta - they will be adding something like this back, it's just too early.
We use vertex painting in offline rendering, its a very basic and useful feature - I've got scenes that max out 128gb and take 4 hours to render a single frame using it.

it's fast to work with and at the end of the day, all these tools are in service of the artists producing the work. the best results in the world don't mean shit if it adds too much time to development to justify the cost.

 

[PaintTinJr]

Well yes, it is very easy to imagine that, as Unreal 3 was not optimised for the PS3 properly without significant investment from both Sony and Epic. Game engine optimisation generally relies on the vendor of said engine to optimize. With UE5 being over a year from full release, it does not appear strange to me at all that Microsoft are still working closely with Epic to optimize the engine as much as possible for the Series consoles. I imagine Sony is doing the same.



But Xbox does have the same low-level access that Playstation and Nintendo does. DX12 was literally built for that exact purpose and competes well with Vulkan, another low-level programming API in the PC space. DX12 on the Xbox goes even further, as described in the article I linked. It is not a HAL solution, and works with the GPU directly. Playstation had the advantage going into the PS4 generation with Gnm, which Xbox really didn't have an answer to, hence the entire creation of DX12 in the first place.

DX12 Ultimate is a more broad focused API, meant to work with PCs, but it is still a low-level programming API and the further customised solution on the Series consoles is basically as close to the metal as you can get.

AFAIK it isn't the same access, as the Xbox GPU API never exposes the GPU assembly to the game developers - although Epic probably have lower access going by the comments in the video - so the DirectX solution at best would have an equivalence to a high level shader compiler producing GPU assembly, which will be great, but still inferior to hand-rolled GPU assembly, and no where near the efficiencies of some of the stuff described in interviews DF have done in the PS3 era, where optimisations spanned GPU, SPU and PPUs.

As I understand it, Microsoft analyse the bottleneck problems in the GPU, after the fact, then investigate optimisations and then - keeping with the analogy - update the compiler specifically for the X and S to improve performance in those bottlenecks with specific code generation.

Many of the optimisation technologies developed by PlayStation in the PS2 and Ps3 generations that are proving hard to emulate on PC efficiently are because of these superior optimisations.

 

[gamer82]

Gotcha so another few years before Xbox series x

so glad , just means cheaper console and games win win but we’re shall see what the still have to announce

 

[mckmas8808]

the tech talk is right here

This was GREAT to watch and listen to. Makes you realize we are only 5% of the way into these next-gen consoles.

 

[Insane Metal]

I don't understand how people are not impressed by this, I understand that the demo is very boring, but the technology behind it is really damn good. The character detail and material, especially the leather looks pretty nuts. The other video with the environment also looks really good and comparable to the rocky areas in the UE5 demo on PS5 (but in closed environments, simply because that's the kind of place they are showing).

 

[jose4gg]

I don't understand how people are not impressed by this, I understand that the demo is very boring, but the technology behind it is really damn good. The character detail and material, especially the leather looks pretty nuts. The other video with the environment also looks really good and comparable to the rocky areas in the UE5 demo on PS5 (but in closed environments, simply because that's the kind of place they are showing).

My problem and I imagine a lot of people's comments was "expectations", I thought we were going to see something like the UE5 reveal, and it looks kinda similar, that's why is really disappointing... because its the exact same thing again, and again... We already saw this, we saw it in the reveal, we saw it in the Beta release. In fact, I've seen better videos on youtube from small creators... maybe not running in a console at 1440@46, BUT looking really good and with different environments... This felt like an over-hyped showing... there were news saying "the coalition going to show their muscles with UE5" and at the end, it was just a regular showing on UE5...

 

[CamHostage]

My problem and I imagine a lot of people's comments was "expectations", I thought we were going to see something like the UE5 reveal, and it looks kinda similar, that's why is really disappointing... In fact, I've seen better videos on youtube from small creators... maybe not running in a console at 1440@46, BUT looking really good and with different environments...

The timeline of it all just is really messing with people's heads!

It's hard to understand why "reality" is miles away from "expectations" right now, especially for people who (like me and you) are savvy about gaming history and have seen some UE5 experiments but (...like me, at least?) are not smart enough still to really understand the process of game development and the difference between an early access demo versus a production-ready engine/devtool. (And my personal expectations were not huge, but I really didn't expect The Coalition to be proudly debuting "a bunch of rocks".)

There's reasons, but I hope real devs can be understanding or with people's frustration over where things are with UE5. This engine progress timeline (and the timeframe of everything next-gen, basically) has really messed with people's understanding of what's going on with their games.

Because this is what the UE4 timeline looked like:

• February 27, 2012: Epic Games shows the first demo of Unreal Engine 4 behind closed doors. They run the demo "Elemental" on a PC, and tell developers about the next-generation features that UE4 will bring to game development.
• June 6, 2012: Unreal Engine 4 is shown to the public, with a video release of Elemental and detailed showcases of its amazing material and particle advancements.
• March 29, 2013: At the next GDC, Epic shows what UE4 can do on a console, using the same impressive demo (with differences) as last year's Elemental demo. They also announce the new low-cost licensing approach, among many other things.
• Also March 29, 2013: Uh oh, SVOGI is out, but here's for public showing is the Infiltrator demo, and it impresses without using SVOGI. (Infiltrator is later released for game developers in Sept 2015.)
• November 2013: Xbox One and PS4 launch. No titles using UE4 come out to support the launch, but a number of game have been announced that are using it.
• April 29, 2014: Unreal Engine 4 brings home its first game with Daylight by Zombie Studios coming out on PC and PS4. (This game BTW had been announced in Dec 2012 as using UE4, and was first shown in February 2013, with a playable demo at PAX East in March 2013.)
• July 13, 2014: A surprising and unusual announcement at EVO reveals that Tekken 7 was being made on UE4. (The game would go out on playtests in Japanese arcades in October of that year; the home version didn't happen until 2016.) This marks a significant milestone where a major franchise is now trusting Unreal Engine over its own internal technology systems for the first time. It will not be the only big-name game to embrace UE4...

So, just over 2 years and UE4 goes from first-reveal to being in a shipped game, and a major game the year later. The new consoles had UE4 games within 5 months of launch. Sure, there were fits and starts in between (including the unexpectedly long development time of Epic's own Fortnite... try explaining to your kids that there was a time when Fortnite was considered a laughing stock, BTW,) and UE4 really didn't hit its stride until 2016 when it was ubiquitous. But it moved along, and it made some sense what to expect & when to expect it.

Now, compare that to the Unreal Engine 5 timeline...

• June 15, 2020: Epic Games reveals Unreal Engine 5 to the public. On a console. In a playable state of a full "game" level, not just a cinematic or engine demo. And it blows minds, showcasing the new Nanite and Lumen next-generation technologies that UE5 will bring to game development.
• May 26, 2021: One year later, Epic Games again shows UE5... oh shit, not just shows it, it's OUT! Early Access is released to the public, and everybody can test their own UE5 projects or convert their UE4 projects and see what this mindblowing technology will do right on their own home computers.
• July 26, 2021: The Coalition, one of the leading game developers using Unreal Engine and a partner inside Microsoft Game Studios in experimenting with and optimizing next-generation technology, is invited by Epic Games to GDC to show what a team of dozens has been working on since November with Unreal Engine 5 technology. And they show... 30 seconds of some rocks in the sun, and a face. Not even both at the same time. It's new rocks and a new face, not just UE Market assets plugged in, but it's not so monumentally-awesome rocks or face that it shows the amateurs what it's like when the pros get to work.

So, UE5 is revealed, it's playable, it's already on a console, it's practically backwards-compatible with UE4 (unlike UE3,) it'll be out in a public preview in eleven months, it looks beyond anything imaginable... yet, a year later, the first professional UE5 demo not by Epic comes out and apparently pro developers are barely getting started with it. That's a weird flipflop on the timeline. (Meanwhile, the Early Access is out there showing how "easy" it is for tinkerers to make amazing things with UE5 themselves right now in their bedrooms, and that confounds the timeline too because open early access has never been so open and so early before.)

Is UE5 awesome and ready to jam? Or is UE5 barely done and nowhere near ready to be used seriously? Or is it a little of Column A & B?

The point of Alpha Point, and the real status of game development and console performance with UE5, that all gets covered in detail in the full video. (In fact, Colin Penty shined a little light and had a little dig at those being wowed by UE5 Marketplace kitbashers with a bit towards the end about what it really takes to make assets of this quality and tech modifications from scratch.) So, it's technical, but that can help realign expectations.

But I get you. It's been weird figuring out what's the status of UE5 (and again, next-gen in general), and it's tough to get a feel of the roadmap for what to expect in the future too. I didn't expect this to be awesome because it is just a GDC demo ultimately, but I I am genuinely shocked at kind of the rudimentary state of it, how similar it was to general UE5 demonstrations, how long it was in development (they had "early-Early Access" a couple months before the public preview build, and they started in November prototyping inside UE4 before that,) how many people it took to make it (albeit that's credits, not necessarily all those people all that time working on it,) and just generally how far this team (and really every MS team and probably every professional team outside Epic on any platform, since Coalition is on prototype vanguard for XBsX/S) is from making a UE5 game right now. Awesome demo or not, I did have in my head to expect them to be further along.