Source vs UE3

T

The_Don

Guest
I've been reading about the new UnrealEngine3 and, although it sounds pretty damn impressive, what has it got the Source hasn't? I'm just wondering because UE3 is still a year or two away, yet from what I've been able to find it doesn't appear to be a great advance over Source. Does anyone know more about it? Are there any other next-gen engines in late development?



BTW, if this has been discussed before, a link would be great. Cheers!
 
actually the UE3 is probably more like 2 or 3 years away, so really, there's no point in arguing this.
 
pong 2.0 owns UE3 any day... did you guys see those ball physics?
 
There is absolutely no comparision. UE3 is a next generation engine. The Source engine will be improved and upgraded constantly and they'll use it to power Half-Life 3. When that happens you'll be able to compare them.
 
I wouldn't count on them using Source for HL3. Probably a lot of the experience gained from writing Source would be carried over, but if you compare the stuff that the unreal 3 engine is getting put into it -right now- in preparation for the future, there's no real way valve can catch up, I don't think, unless they spend a couple of years working soley on upgrading the engine - but in software engineering, you can only upgrade something so many times before it becomes cumbersome and needs to be chucked out and started-over from scratch (the current Unreal engine, for example).
 
Lanthanide said:
I wouldn't count on them using Source for HL3. Probably a lot of the experience gained from writing Source would be carried over, but if you compare the stuff that the unreal 3 engine is getting put into it -right now- in preparation for the future, there's no real way valve can catch up, I don't think, unless they spend a couple of years working soley on upgrading the engine - but in software engineering, you can only upgrade something so many times before it becomes cumbersome and needs to be chucked out and started-over from scratch (the current Unreal engine, for example).
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They're definitely using Source for Half-Life 3.
 
Sparta said:
actually the UE3 is probably more like 2 or 3 years away, so really, there's no point in arguing this.
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I'm not arguing anything. I'm just trying to find out what's going to be better about it. I mean, what new technologies or visual aspects are going to be added? The point is, specs I've seen so far don't appear to show a great advance.


Horray for pong! :afro:
 
Have you seen the pics? The pics alone shows the progress and advance of the engine.
 
Lanthanide said:
I wouldn't count on them using Source for HL3. Probably a lot of the experience gained from writing Source would be carried over, but if you compare the stuff that the unreal 3 engine is getting put into it -right now- in preparation for the future, there's no real way valve can catch up, I don't think, unless they spend a couple of years working soley on upgrading the engine - but in software engineering, you can only upgrade something so many times before it becomes cumbersome and needs to be chucked out and started-over from scratch (the current Unreal engine, for example).
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At no point did Epic scrap the Unreal engine and start again. What you've seen in the UE3 demo is a direct evolution from the first Unreal engine.
 
p_bezerker.jpg


That right there = Awesomenessticity.
 
The UE3 engine is going to almost mirror what happened with the very first Unreal game turned up.

It'll blow people away
It'll have limited enemies on screen at once
Only a few will be able to run it beyond the basics to begin with
It'll win a few awards
The engine will be really cool, but not THAT impressive really, when you come down to the nuts and bolts of it (it doesn't actually DO anything Source can't do right now, it just uses a couple of thousand more polygons, allows for much larger textures, uses offset mapping (which Valve claim Source can do anyway, and even if it can't, its just a basic shader) and does't have limitating brush based maps.. A change to a couple of lines of code would fix Source for the whole poly and image limits)

Point is UE3 isn't all that impressive, it probably does less than Source really, it just hasn't got the same current limits in poly counts and texture resolutions Source has.. But thats cause UE3 is running with machines from 3 years from now in mind, not current machines. Nobody would be able to run UE3 properly atall right now, unless you dropped down certain aspects, and then you'll find its no different really from Source.


I remember when the first Unreal was coming out, for years showing just teaser images of it looking light years ahead of the competition at the time, just like UE3 is now. Yet when it came out, it wasn't much more technically advanced as the others, not REALLY anyway. Just looked good.
 
The_Don said:
I've been reading about the new UnrealEngine3 and, although it sounds pretty damn impressive, what has it got the Source hasn't? I'm just wondering because UE3 is still a year or two away, yet from what I've been able to find it doesn't appear to be a great advance over Source. Does anyone know more about it? Are there any other next-gen engines in late development?



BTW, if this has been discussed before, a link would be great. Cheers!
Click to expand...

bullsh.. thread Unreal3 comes in 3 years
 
cenmocay said:
bullsh.. thread Unreal3 comes in 3 years
Click to expand...


FFS mate I KNOW. You've completely missed the point. Fenric fortunately hasn't (thanks for the insight btw :cheers: )
 
The_Don said:
FFS mate I KNOW. You've completely missed the point. Fenric fortunately hasn't (thanks for the insight btw :cheers: )
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Wow, you mean you could understand my ramblings?

/me is impressed
/me is having trouble reading /me's previous post :D
/me is shocked at how many grammatical errors it has even for /me ;)
 
I agree with Fen: it's gloriously shiny, but not all that much when it comes down to what matters.

Consolers will lap it up. :p
 
I agree with Fenric, it looks great, but it's an evolutionary step, they invented nothing new, they're just using the stuff that has been around for ages but the computers were (and still are) too slow for.

What are its main features? Parallax bumpmapping (aka virtual displacement mapping) can probably be done by Source, HDR can be done by Source (it's in it, even if it's possibly not available with HL2), and an expansion in the lighting techniques of Doom 3 (instead of a hardedged shadow it blends between a very soft one and a harder one).

This doesn't mean it doesn't look great, it just means it's not that spectacular, it's just using the power of pc's over the next 3 years. There will be plenty of engines of at least the same quality, Carmack will have an answer to this, and so will Valve.

That monster posted earlier is nothing Source couldn't do, it would just perform awfully. It's just a 10.000 triangle monster with HUGE colour and normalmaps and a bloom effect made possible by HDR. There's no reason why you couldn't smack on three 2048x2048 textures on a HL2 character.
 
Yeah. But lets be fair. What the Unreal engine is showing us is a glimps of the future. The Unreal engine has never been a sloppy peice of work, and for me has always had a visual edge over the Quake engines.

Unreal 3 as a technology is simply awsome. The running visual performance does kick Half-life 2's visuals in the nads. True it needs a monster to run it but its showing us whats going to be.

I'm kinda surprised that people are hacking apart the engine. After all for the last few years, to me the Unreal engine has been one of the best engines around with many great games running it.
 
Raxxman said:
Yeah. But lets be fair. What the Unreal engine is showing us is a glimps of the future. The Unreal engine has never been a sloppy peice of work, and for me has always had a visual edge over the Quake engines.

Unreal 3 as a technology is simply awsome. The running visual performance does kick Half-life 2's visuals in the nads. True it needs a monster to run it but its showing us whats going to be.

I'm kinda surprised that people are hacking apart the engine. After all for the last few years, to me the Unreal engine has been one of the best engines around with many great games running it.
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Who's hacking it, i was explaining the facts and the similarities of the first Unreal engine's appearance years back.
 
Let's face it, Source is the representation of engine capabilities we can see and use now. Unreal Engine 3 is what we'll be seeing in about 3 years' time. Now, push forward Source another 3 years and I'm sure it'll be on par with UE3's capabilities and quality, if not better.
 
It`s a shame that Epic will never have the amazing art direction of Valve and other competing studios. You can have all the pixel shaders in the world, but if you don`t have cool source-material, it`ll be worth nothing. Tech isnt everything.
 
how much money do you think epic could make by selling the engine to various companies?
 
I believe the UE goes for around $300 000. That includes all future updates and assets.
 
Cerpin said:
It`s a shame that Epic will never have the amazing art direction of Valve and other competing studios. You can have all the pixel shaders in the world, but if you don`t have cool source-material, it`ll be worth nothing. Tech isnt everything.
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To be honest, in my opinion, the art is the biggest plus in the UE3 demonstration. All that pixelshader technology isn't that hard to program and I believe Source (and even Far Cry) can use the same pixelshaders. What really makes the UE3 demonstration shine is brilliantly modelled characters and environments. I think the artists at Epic really did a great job there.

But if you could convert all those polygons and shader files to the Source engine, I'm sure it will look just as good. :cool:
 
jameth said:
alot. i heard the royalties were 750 grand? (probably mis-informed here)


http://unrealtechnology.com/html/licensing/terms.shtml
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That's for buying the engine without having to pay royalties to Epic. So you pay the 750k, then make a fantastic game, millions buy it, but you don't have to pay anything extra to Epic because you bought the licence that denies them royalties.
 
Cerpin said:
I believe the UE goes for around $300 000. That includes all future updates and assets.
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well, my theory was that they may not have to make any new games, (which is just a bad idea all together), but they could just sell their engines and gain a profit from that, which just doesn't sound likely if 300,000 is what you get for it.

EDIT: 750 grand kind of changes the story, if they get five buyers then they may be able to just sell their engines. and since it is just bought directly from them they'd get most if not all the profit.
 
Cerpin said:
It`s a shame that Epic will never have the amazing art direction of Valve and other competing studios. You can have all the pixel shaders in the world, but if you don`t have cool source-material, it`ll be worth nothing. Tech isnt everything.
Click to expand...

Very true. But more than I'd say GSC gameworld doesn't have great art direction, for their monster x-ray engine. I mean that thing literally has all the new tech but unfortunately the characters, graphics (to an extend) and overall gameplay for their game stalker looks bland.

The outdoor scenes in stalker look horrible, yet indoors the game is comparable to doom 3.
 
Arno said:
To be honest, in my opinion, the art is the biggest plus in the UE3 demonstration. All that pixelshader technology isn't that hard to program and I believe Source (and even Far Cry) can use the same pixelshaders. What really makes the UE3 demonstration shine is brilliantly modelled characters and environments. I think the artists at Epic really did a great job there.

But if you could convert all those polygons and shader files to the Source engine, I'm sure it will look just as good. :cool:
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I get your point. Maybe I was a little vague. What I meant was that the universes/characters/etc that Epic creates lack.. personality. I find them to be well modelled, but rather boring and generic. Sure they look good, but they arent interessting. They are impressive, but from an artistic and creative standpoint, it just doesnt compare to the cool stuff that Half-Life 2 has.
 
i believe that epic should stop playing safe bets and start expanding beyond unreal, it's true that many different types of game developers already use it for different types of games outside fps's, which means that it's obviously meant for more than first person shooting. well, then again the most drastic move i can possibly see epic doing is making an online fps for consoles that doesn't have the unreal logo slapped on it.
 
Sai said:
i believe that epic should stop playing safe bets and start expanding beyond unreal, it's true that many different types of game developers already use it for different types of games outside fps's, which means that it's obviously meant for more than first person shooting. well, then again the most drastic move i can possibly see epic doing is making an online fps for consoles that doesn't have the unreal logo slapped on it.
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Yeah, they should make some new IP (intellectual property) as some say. In other words, a new brand of game. Not unreal - because this time the unreal tech actually looks real.
 
lans said:
Yeah, they should make some new IP (intellectual property) as some say. In other words, a new brand of game. Not unreal - because this time the unreal tech actually looks real.
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hahaha

and may be outside of actually making the generic console fps that i was talking about they should publish and head another project, like lucus arts did with bioware in kotor, epic might supervize another project when another company making a different fps or something

i'm just hopeing for some unpredictability from them at least some time
 
lans said:
Yeah, they should make some new IP (intellectual property) as some say. In other words, a new brand of game. Not unreal - because this time the unreal tech actually looks real.
Click to expand...
They probably wont do that because the brand name, Unreal. Is worth a hell of a lot in itself. Thats likely the only real reason all those games share the same name, there's little else these games have in common with each other. So I reckon they'll stick with the name until its been milked dry.
 
I wonder if there are any plans for an engine (by any company) that takes advantage of the new 3D displays soon to be released. Software can be adapted to be displayed in 3D but I'm sure an engine designed for it would have far more impressive results.
But imagine that. At the moment we're getting excited over graphics on 2D displays, just think what it's going to be like on the 3D displays :bounce:
 
Cerpin said:
I get your point. Maybe I was a little vague. What I meant was that the universes/characters/etc that Epic creates lack.. personality. I find them to be well modelled, but rather boring and generic. Sure they look good, but they arent interessting. They are impressive, but from an artistic and creative standpoint, it just doesnt compare to the cool stuff that Half-Life 2 has.
Click to expand...
Ah, thanks for explaining, now I see your point too. :cheers:
I was impressed with the amount of work that went into creating the art, but the design itself is indeed pretty unimaginative.
 
Crusader said:
What are these 3d displays like?
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Stunning. The sort of thing most of us were expecting maybe in a decade or two but then the Japs (godda love em) went and built them. By the time they were appearing in the New Scientist publication in the US/UK, 2 million cell-phones with 3D screens had been sold in Japan.
Examples: (there's loads of info on the net, Google it)

http://www2.toshiba.co.jp/kakan/en/02visual/newtech101.html
http://www.stereo3d.com/displays.htm

I'm talking full 3D view with no crappy glasses and a good viewing angle. First models of monitors and TVs may be released in the UK as early as 4th quarter of 2004. I'm surprised you haven't heard of them.
A seperate layer of technology will allow current games to be displayed in 3D.
 
I'd guess they're like the 3d glasses you can get now (not the colour filter ones!), they are part of the graphics card and have 2 screens, one for each eye.

They display the same scene from slightly different positions to give you the impression that you are seeing something in 3D.
 
Unreal 3 does everything source does man....including a realtime lighting engion that blows doom3 out of the water, and MUCH better creatures/enviroments.

BUT, it IS a few years away, sooo, it SHOULD blow source out of the water. Source can be upgraded to meet Unreal3 standards fairly simply I'd imagion. Greateruse of real lime lighting, and more power for higher poly limits. Greater use of normal maps..and well...then it would match up fairly well I think. Point is, source = scalability...Unreal almost ALWAYS = near top of the line at time of release.
 
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