Tech Demos Discussion Thread

Desmond

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This thread is dedicated to sharing and discussing tech demos for various gaming engines.

Some are listed below:

Cryengine 4:





Unread Engine 4







Share more as you come by them.
 

anaklusmos

Youngling
[YOUTUBE]/watch?v=rf045VYP3z4[/YOUTUBE]
Scarily photorealistic

PS: Wow, just look at that apartment, would love to live in one like that :D
 

Anorion

Sith Lord
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Can do this in Unity as well. It just won't be optimized. It will do fine for an escape room title, or a point and click adventure, but not for an fps or a game with really large areas, such as an MMO.

[YOUTUBE]kLVa0NOFdwM[/YOUTUBE]
 

SaiyanGoku

kamehameha!!
Cryengine has been one of the best out there. I remember playing Crysis 2 and oh man, the visuals were way more stunning than anything I had ever seen in a game.
 
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Desmond

Desmond

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Crysis 1 and Warhead were better than C2. :|

Gameplaywise, but Graphicswise Crysis 2 was better. I wish it was in an open jungle like environment though.

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UE looks really impressive. I just want it very optimized. :p

We can only know that once some games are released for it.

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Can do this in Unity as well. It just won't be optimized. It will do fine for an escape room title, or a point and click adventure, but not for an fps or a game with really large areas, such as an MMO.

[YOUTUBE]kLVa0NOFdwM[/YOUTUBE]

This demo won't really be optimized for mainstream hardware either.
 

Nerevarine

Incarnate
[YOUTUBE]watch?v=IA0Im3j-wf4[/YOUTUBE]

Unity 5.0 - voted most user friendly engine according to developers and #5 best tech invention (2014)

 
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Desmond

Desmond

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That would explain why suddenly there are so many 3D mobile games.

Seeing all these Tech Demos I feel like all game engines have reached stagnancy. All of them look good but there is little that really separates one from the other in terms of graphics. Also all of them are pretty much at the peak of optimization in order to render all such scenes.

I think the real next step would be to create a truly voxel based engine or a fully raytracing engine.

Here is an example of a Voxel based engine:



And here is an example of a Raytracing engine:



Both of these are still experimental since there is no optimized way to render graphics using voxels or by raytracing in real time.

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In case you are wondering what a Voxel is, a voxel is a volumentric pixel. Therefore, its a pixel in a truly three dimensional space unlike current graphics where the scenes are rendered two dimensionally using techniques such as z-buffering which gives an illusion of depth. The limitations of using voxels is that the number of voxels required to render complex scenes can become extremely huge and rendering such a scene would require tremendous amounts of memory.

Raytracing is a technique of tracing the path of a light ray in reverse (i.e. from the eye to the object we are looking at), simulating its effects such as reflection and refraction with objects and rendering the scene using that data. Therefore it has the potential to render extremely photorealistic scenes.
 

Anorion

Sith Lord
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Yup voxels based engines are really making their presence known. Till now, people thought that voxel means blocky, which is no longer the case.
[YOUTUBE]BxcaRhmHm18[/YOUTUBE]

And Nvidia's gameworks tech tends to be used in multiple engines
so these are already being used, from Cryengine to Evolution

[YOUTUBE]kLzE-xsr-vw[/YOUTUBE]

But realism alone does not make a good game, we could do with good AI or great gameplay
 
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Desmond

Desmond

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I don't think there will be a fully voxel based engine anytime soon, at least not for another 5-6 years. They are simply not optimized enough to run on mainstream hardware.

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I am really more interested in Raytracing engines but those are even more nascent than voxel engines.

In case you are wondering, here is what Raytracing can do:

*hof.povray.org/images/bigthumb/glasses.jpg

More examples: POV-Ray Hall of Fame

Those are still images however, and creating animated scenes is still far off.

However, someone did create Raytraced Quake 3 sometime back. Let me see if I can find the video for that.

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Got it:

 

Anorion

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procedural generation is another option, it only means longer load times, but the memory footprint is very low
like 200-300 MB can be converted to a 96KB game if it is procedurally generated
.kkrieger is a demo of this, if you don't want to download you can just look at it here, but the gfx scales according to the machine

[YOUTUBE]RfqaSP8rtq0[/YOUTUBE]
 
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Desmond

Desmond

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Yeah, I played .Kkrieger. Back in the day it had pretty high system requirements considering its small sub-100KB or so filesize.

However, they haven't released the next episodes after this one.
 

warfreak

Talk to the hand!!!
"A bad workman blames his tools"

A good workman, however, creates masterpieces with what he's got.

Game engines are just middleware. How good a game looks actually depends more on the level design and art development than the game engine.

Engines only provide a set of tools. They may help in ease of implementing those tools but in the end it depends on developers on how well they utilize them. I feel that with the current generation, most of the top engines are more or less in the same page in terms of technical capabilities.

A classic example is how the last generation of games were created. We can all agree that Cryengine or Frostbyte or idTech5 may have had more "better looking" visuals than Unreal Engine but look at the number of games other than the flagship titles that implemented them.

UE on the other hand spawned not only games but entire franchises with varying levels of graphical fidelity and gameplay. I'm talking about Bioshock, Mass Effect, Borderlands and many more. These games used "a heavily modified" unreal engine and not just plain vanilla unreal engine. Which brings me to my "good workman" argument.

tl;dr :- no engine is better than the other in terms of graphics, it all depends on game developers
 

Anorion

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^wanted to post something similar. The pre-release game-play videos always look great, but the finished project is never up to the expectations the devs themselves have set.
Realism could have actually killed good design.

Digital Extreme went on to use Evolution instead of Unreal in their latest project, and it came out well
 
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Desmond

Desmond

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"A bad workman blames his tools"

A good workman, however, creates masterpieces with what he's got.

Game engines are just middleware. How good a game looks actually depends more on the level design and art development than the game engine.

Engines only provide a set of tools. They may help in ease of implementing those tools but in the end it depends on developers on how well they utilize them. I feel that with the current generation, most of the top engines are more or less in the same page in terms of technical capabilities.

A classic example is how the last generation of games were created. We can all agree that Cryengine or Frostbyte or idTech5 may have had more "better looking" visuals than Unreal Engine but look at the number of games other than the flagship titles that implemented them.

UE on the other hand spawned not only games but entire franchises with varying levels of graphical fidelity and gameplay. I'm talking about Bioshock, Mass Effect, Borderlands and many more. These games used "a heavily modified" unreal engine and not just plain vanilla unreal engine. Which brings me to my "good workman" argument.

tl;dr :- no engine is better than the other in terms of graphics, it all depends on game developers

Makes sense.

However, the purpose of Tech Demos is to demonstrate cutting edge technologies. Whether developers use those tools or not is another matter.
 
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Desmond

Desmond

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An early Vulkan API tech demo running on Android



For those of you who don't know, Vulkan is a new graphics API that is a successor to OpenGL and a competitor to Direct3D 12. Unlike Direct3D 12 however, Vulkan can run on all mobile devices, PC, Mac, Linux, Windows and even older windows versions such as XP and 7. It is essentially Mantle 2.0.
 
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