Exquisite is basically equal to the player’s wallet will be deflated, but it does not necessarily mean fun.

Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “PingWest Pinwan” (ID: wepingwest), author Xing Yifan.

The night before yesterday, U.S. game developer Epic Games announced Unreal Engine Updated to the fifth generation (Unreal Engine 5), and released a real machine demo video on PlayStation5.
  

As a game engine specially designed and developed by Epic Games for the first-person shooter game, the Unreal Engine has a good reputation, “Rainbow Six”, “War Machine”, “Jedi survival “,” Fortress Night “and other heavyweight shooting games have chosen it. Eight years have passed since the debut of Unreal Engine 4, and Epic Games has finally made it.

The visual impact has made many foreign media give high evaluations such as “unprecedented” and “true next generation”. However, what technology has Unreal Engine 5 made breakthroughs for players and the game industry? What does it mean, can not be summed up in a sentence “the next generation has arrived”.

New technology for liberating artists

According to Epic developers, Unreal Engine 5 can achieve “real-time rendering details comparable to movie CG and real world”, mainly using two core technologies, Lumen and Nanite.

The first pillar of Unreal Engine 5 is the so-called Lumen system. It is a full dynamic global illumination solution that can do scene and lighting changesReal-time response.

In the demo video, when changing the direction of the light source, the light in the cave immediately began to change, and it was constantly reflected between the stones and the cliffs. Even the places that were not directly found by the light had a sense of light, even if ray tracing was not used. It can also produce the same lighting effects as the real world.

Epic says that this dynamic lighting system will make lightmaps history. As small as turning on a flashlight or opening a hole in the ceiling, to sunrise and sunset and sky changes, artists only need to place a light source on the engine to see the lighting effect immediately, without having to move every time during the development process. The light source has to wait for the texture to be baked.

In fact, similar ray tracing effects are not new. The real-time ray tracing algorithm RTX released by Nvidia in 2018 has been used in Minecraft.

This is the first time real-time ray tracing has been implemented on the host, not to mention” indirect specular reflection in a large and fine scene, and diffuse reflection that can rebound indefinitely “” In the picture below, even in a dark place without direct light, players can see a reflective metal shield. The light is continuously diffused on the surface of the object like in reality. Each frame in the game is close to the quality of the movie CG.
 

Epic mentioned, dynamic global illumination In addition to more realistic effects and faster rendering, it may also change the gameplay. The beetles photographed in the demo video fled around and interacted with the light source.

There are many possibilities for the interaction between the elements in the game and the dynamic light source, such as the puzzle level of the game, the instructions of the maze, or the horror game with limited vision.

The second largest technology of Unreal Engine 5 is Nanite, a micro-polygon geometry rendering technology. Ninante allows artists to display ultra-high-precision models directly in the game without being limited by the number of texture faces.

In the existing development engine, the artist is pinched by the model surface, and spends a lot of time on the conversion between high and low modes. For example, in “The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild”, the Link model has 12,000 texture faces, which is twice the number of Link faces in “Sword of the Sky”, and the entire series has been created. New record.

In contrast, however, there is no limit to the number of polygons in the game screen using Nanite, which can be as many as tens of billions. The pitted surface in the picture below is not noise, but countless polygons, each polygon is a side of the model, with different color performance.
 

With the support of Nanite, artists do n’t need to manually export normal maps at the expense of HD materials, and then paste them on low molds with a small number of faces It is a waste of time, but can directly import film-level high-definition material into the engine. Whether it is a model scanned by Zbrush or CAD scan data, it can be imported in Unreal Engine 5, and there will be no loss in picture quality.

Polygons are so worthless that a single fish in the demo video can have 33 million polygons.

How far is it from the actual application?

I am certainly excited about this high-level picture effect, and of course I want to buy PS5 as soon as possible. However, this demo video alone is still not too early.

First of all, if there is no accident, the preview version of Unreal Engine 5 will be released at the beginning of 2021, and the full version will be released at the end of 2021. In the actual development process, can it be realized that “light source changes are immediately visible” and “one-click import” “High-precision model” and other functions will not be known until next year.

For players, the actual waiting time for Unreal Engine 5 may be longer.

In the past few years, the cost of game development has been rising, and the development cycle of 3A masterpieces has also been getting longer. Four years after the release of Unreal Engine 4, the first batch of games developed with it appeared, and even today, there are not too many games with real-machine effects reaching the Unreal Engine 4 demo screen. Therefore, it is conservatively estimated that players want to play the high-quality games in the Epic demo video, it will take five years.

For game developers, another sound is “more willing to watch To a lower cost, more efficient pipeline “instead of more realistic lighting and a larger number of polygons. And accompanied by higher quality pictures, it is higher investment and greater risk. For developers, this may not be a good thing. Instead, it may seek stability and lose the opportunity to explore new gameplay. . After all, the engine is only a development tool, and the core competitiveness of the game is whether the game is good or not.
  

The most powerful proof may be that Epic, Microsoft, and NVIDIA are all struggling for more realistic light and more refined models. Nintendo said that he does not care at all, Turned the game characters into origami.