My personal highlight reel of the wired article
"UE4 represents nothing less than the foundation for the next decade of gaming. It may make Microsoft and Sony rethink how much horsepower they’ll need for their new hardware. It will streamline game development, allowing studios to do in 12 months what can take two years or more today. And most important, it will make the videogames that have defined the past decade look like puppet shows."
"In a scant three months of production, a team of 14 engineers has fashioned a video demo to show off the new engine, and it acts essentially as a full-featured, if small, top-of-the-line game—the first title of the next generation. “I had sleepless nights over this damn thing in the beginning, but I think we got the disasters out of the way,” says art director Chris Perna, the man responsible for the look and feel of the demo. Lead artist Wyeth Johnson adds, “In the time I have been here, we have never not pulled it off.” Johnson, a six-year veteran of Epic, is referring not only to the company’s ability to deliver on tight deadlines but also its track record of wowing the skeptics.
Like so many games, the demo begins with what’s known as a cinematic, a noninteractive scene meant to wow players with all the punch of a blockbuster movie trailer. In this case, it’s as if H. R. Giger and George R. R. Martin took peyote together. And had a baby. And that baby had a fever dream. But it’s not just empty spectacle—it’s a crystal ball. Every pixel is spent on visual effects that are impossible in today’s games because of hardware limitations. But those limitations could be overcome: In an impressive departure from the usual practice of such demos, this one is running on a single consumer-level graphics card—Nvidia’s new Kepler GTX 680."
"In previous engines, one floating ember was enough to slow performance considerably; a shower of them was impossible. With Unreal Engine 4, there can bemillions of such particles, as long as the hardware is potent enough to sustain them. Game developers overuse features of every new engine, because they are suddenly so easy to implement. In the original Unreal Engine, for example, the ability to render colored lighting led to a rash of games that employed the effect. The same may prove true for UE4′s particle effects, for better or worse. (“Mark my words,” Bleszinski says, “those particles are going to be whored by developers.”)"
Yay particles!
"In one 153-second clip, the Epic team has packed all the show-off effects that have flummoxed developers for years: lens flare, bokeh distortion, lava flow, environmental destruction, fire, and detail in landscapes many miles away. Plus, it’s breathtakingly photo-realistic—or would be if demon knights were, you know, a real thing.
But that’s just the opening scene. After the cinematic, Epic’s senior technical artist, Alan Willard, starts playing the demo. At this point the view switches to that disembodied first-person perspective made so ubiquitous by shooting games like the Call of Duty franchise and Epic’s own influential Unreal titles. Willard maneuvers his avatar into a dimly lit room where a flashlight turns on, revealing eddies of dust—thousands of floating particles that were invisible until exposed. In another room, globes of various sizes float in the air. Willard rolls a light-emanating orb along the floor (think of a spherical flashlight that rolls like a bowling ball) and beams of light wobble and change direction, illuminating parts of the room and revealing the clusters of floating spheres with a kind of strobe effect. At first it all seems perfectly familiar: “Well, yeah,” you think, “that’s how they’d act in the real world. What’s the big deal?” But it is a big deal: This is stuff that videogames have never been able to simulate—the effects simply aren’t possible on today’s consoles."
"designers programmed the light to look realistic in any of that scene’s possible situations—one situation at a time. “You would have to manually sculpt the lighting in every section of every level,” Bleszinski says. “The number of man-years that required was astounding.” UE4 introduces dynamic lighting, which behaves in response to its own inherent properties rather than a set of preprogrammed effects. In other words, no more faking it. Every light in a scene bounces off every surface, creating accurate reflections. Colors mix, translucent materials glow, and objects viewed through water refract. And it’s all being handled on the fly, as it happens. That’s not realistic—that’s real."
"Making a splashy videogame used to be something that a small group could accomplish. Now it takes a small army. “Call of Duty was a game that a team of a few dozen could develop on PlayStation 2,” Sweeney says. “Now Activision has hundreds of people working on Call of Duty for the current-gen consoles. What’s supposed to happen in the next generation? Are they going to have 4,000 people?” To combat the bloat, Sweeney has stuffed UE4 with tools that promise shortened production pipelines and lower production costs (and all the profit that such efficiency represents)."
"When Alan Willard walks the audience through the demo—complete with armored demon, dancing sparks, and rolling balls of light—the room falls still. Then the twist: Willard reveals that both the cinematic scene and the following tech demo haven’t been running off a game file but in real time from within UE4′s game editor. It’s like finding out that the actors on TV are actually tiny people living inside your set. It also helps him show that changes can be made to the game’s design and code, recompiled and executed nearly instantly—a technical feat that has been simply unheard-of in game development. And just like that, the silence in the room becomes reverent. The videogame industry has changed."
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