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Unrecord - Official Early Gameplay Trailer (Unreal Engine 5-powered body-cam FPS)

Macattk15

Member
Looks cool. Keep in mind that this is an on rails FMV like experience, probably with "free" aiming in particular situations. They are using photo scanned assets and the animations are motion captured sequences. Still, this is very impressive for a small team.
Oh that makes it far less impressive.
 

nemiroff

Gold Member
Oh that makes it far less impressive.

Well, for one it's false information (it's not "on rails").. And it's also weird how completely common and legit development processes are suddenly wrapped into an absurd negative narrative. It boggles the mind why people choose to do this shit, it comes out of the blue and makes absolutely no sense.
 
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mdkirby

Member
Idk about that, the UE5 matrix demo had consoles stuttering way beneath 30fps and even that didn't look as photorealistic as this. Maybe you're right about "precomputed lighting" though, idk.
The matrix demo was pretty early implementations of ue5 tech, devs always find weird hacks to get more from stuff over time. Hell people were making almost photorealistic stuff in dreams. More importantly tho, the matrix demo was open world, full of characters, cars, buildings etc. small contained environments will always be able to jam way more in and look much better.
 

hyperbertha

Member
The bolded is what I'm talking about. These are his critiques, which I believe are small critiques. I don't care what y'all call them, but to me these are critiques.

The other part is his opinion on it's eventual release. That, of which, I do not agree with.

There is nothing here that I am lying about and is just a matter of opinion. I have stated that I agree to disagree, so please drop it.
But the criticism was complete bullshit. It looked raytraced, and if it wasn't, it approximates it better than any game so far, probably lumen. I noticed plenty of ao as well. This is literally the best looking game out there. There nothing to criticize unless you're nitpicking.
 

CamHostage

Member
So, very cool, looks great and fluid, I'm not sure how the aiming system works but it's fast and tense. I've been waiting a while for one of these body cam games to release and love how much shakeycam adds to the impression of realism.

However, for those saying this puts other pro developers to shame or sets a new next-gen graphical bar or that there's no reason to criticize because it's the best-looking game ever seen, try to calm down. This isn't a revolutionary work that will upset graphical standards forevermore. I'm not a developer, but with a little tech insight, you can see what the game is working with if you know about what it's doing and what's been done with similar techniques. Most of it doesn't even come down to bleeding-edge UE5 features or "next-gen power", it's more the nice quality of the photogrammetry snaps and well-mixed Quixel assets plus a good mix of first-person effects and nicely detailed animation with sweet IK blending. Reactions from pros, for example, is a lot of, "Oh, nice work, that looks a lot like... huh, I guess nothing comes to mind that's shipped with this stuff, but I've seen this here and there over the years." (Makes you wonder why game developers haven't jumped on the body cam bandwagon if it makes such an impression, right? Condemned 3, where are you!) Whether or not the assets or effects are at/beyond what you've seen before, the overall impression of it in motion is a top-flight experience. People like Cherno here can run through what's special and what's normal about this project so far, and help put it in perspective.



Photogrammetry has been increasingly used in games, going back into the PS4/X1 generation with Star Wars Battlefront, Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and Death Stranding. (I believe P.T. also used photogrammetry, and if we're talking photo-realism combined with body cam motion effects, P.T. is one of those so-real-it's-unreal game projects which gamers still talk about as the best of its gen even though all the individual pieces are outdated or simple if you had to stop and look.)

First thing which came to mind for me when I saw this was Farm 51's work in photogrammetry over the last decade. They never did a body cam viewpoint ultimately and they had to push across a full game into a level of scale that lost the intimate detail (they also didn't get a framerate nearly where Unrecord is demoing at,) but if you're interested in photogrammetry use in games, you may want to check out the two games Farm 51 has shipped, Get Even and Chernobylite. Farm51 also did a great breakdown of photogrammetry usage in game design, with lots of plus/minuses and tips, in the Farm 51 Photogrammetry Content in Modular Level Design talk at Unreal Fest Europe 2018.

Again, none of this takes away from the achievement or excitement for the Unrecord demo, but do try to keep things in perspective when you're making judgments about what this is and what it says about other games.
 
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mckmas8808

Banned
Well, for one it's false information (it's not "on rails").. And it's also weird how completely common and legit development processes are suddenly wrapped into an absurd negative narrative. It boggles the mind why people choose to do this shit, it comes out of the blue and makes absolutely no sense.

Because some gamers can't seem to understand what truly new hardware can do for a developer. This has happened every time games are being made with the new hardware in mind.
 
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