New Unreal Engine Features
We received a press release from Epic Games announcing their plans for this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (March 9-11). The company is headlining three speaker sessions, and will also show some new Unreal Engine 3 technology features which sound pretty nice
Seamless World Support allows the creation of virtually unending environments through background management of game levels and assets. Even titles not requiring open world support will benefit from these memory management techniques on next-generation console platforms. Second, the new UnrealKismet visual scripting system empowers designers to build and iterate detailed game scenarios and AI behaviors with limited, or even zero, programmer involvement -- thus providing a massive productivity gain over previous generations. Epic will also demonstrate significant improvements in physics, terrain editing, lighting, material editing, animation, cinematic creation and particles.
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Lethal01
replyThe end of "Loading..", or random tunnels or tight corridors to do your level switching? I'm all for it!
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*drool*
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I've been annoyed about the loads in FPS games for awhile now. Ever since I saw GTA and MMO games I asked why FPS games couldn't do the same. I have confidence that once FPS games use seamless worlds we won't be able to tolerate another loading screen again. I remember when Unreal 1 and HL 1 came out, people loved staying in the game while the next level loaded as opposed to a separate load screen.
Thumbs up to Epic for taking the initiative to do this.
-Reid-
Um... by comparison to your average FPS, GTA has very simple geometry and textures. There's always a tradeoff (at least with hardware for the foreseeable future). If you choose to have dynamically-loading scenery, then you're going to be operating at a suboptimal level of detail, or you're going to have weird artifacts (in both rendering and collision detection) where you've moved through the world faster than the loading system can keep up.
This only applies to worlds that are truly seamless, though. If you're only concerned about being able to stay in one level while another loads, then that's not very hard (although it might still cause suboptimal performance during the interim).
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I hope it's as smooth as Dungeon Siege. The seamless loading in DS was near perfection. TES III: Morrowind almost had it, but there were still minor loading bars in a few spots. With a fast PC it wasn't that big of a deal though due to the speed. I can't wait to see how well this upcoming Unreal Engine handles it.
