Can The Unigine Engine Get Any Better? Yes, And It Has.

[birdie]

Qaridarium,

Arma2 screenshots are indeed spectacular. Don't listen to them.

People just don't want to accept the fact that there are no decent 3D engines for OpenGL. Even Unigine Haven demo looks terrible IMO - everything is bumpy, there is little to be seen in small details.

[b15hop]

Plus ARMA 1 / 2 suck as far as gameplay is concerned. Crysis at least has good gameplay. I wouldn't use them as a comparative engine either as in game, the graphics are terrible. Feels blocky and horrible. Unigine is coming a long way, and I also agree that v3.0 is really starting to shine.

I must mention that one of the reasons I loved the half life (heavily modified quake) engine was simply because of it's level editing tools. Worldcraft 3D was awesome, period. UnrealED was a pile of crap. I get the feeling that Unreal would have been a better game if the editor had been improved to match the game engines abilities. It's a real shame too because back in the day, half life engine was technically an old engine compared to unreal but yet look at who come out the victor. I'm so glad that valve went on to make the source engine for that reason, because I don't think portal and hl2 would have been the same with any other game engine.

[Svartalf]

in my point of view arma2 beat unigine ...

In your OPINION. The pics you linked aren't as great as you think of them. I'm certainly unimpressed with what you're using as "proof" here- it's nothing that compares to some of the more advanced game engine graphics- not to mention that ARMA II doesn't do it natively to begin with.

[V!NCENT]

@Qyaridarium; graphics are not nice looking forests, because that is atwork, but things like global illumination and other rendering techniques. Nice looking explosions is not equal to graphics tech

[kayosiii]

It's pretty much impossible to judge the quality of a game engine by looking at screenshots. What most people see is down to the skill of the artists using the engine to create something of course the engine has to enable the artist.

As it stands Unigine is a very capable engine but it takes a quite a bit of work to figure out how to get the most of (as it happens we have also trailed arma2 and I didn't think much of it).

The latest update is pretty sweet though (running it through it's paces at the moment)

I have to echo the currently the main weakness is in Unigine is the relative immaturity of the artists tools.

[lem79]

Score -1 Troll, Quaridarium. That Arma II screenshot looks nowhere near as nice as the Unigine shots. No shadows, poor lighting effects, low mesh detail (look at the stone formation in the foreground).. there's no contest between them.

[MaestroMaus]

Seriously clueless are shining bright today...

[Djhg2000]

To some extent I agree with the ground looking a bit simple, in the first screenshot I was very aware of it being a rendered image, but it really improved in the other screens so maybe it was just a fluke... honestly use a dirt-like texture next time.

On the other hand at greater distances it looks amazing!

[jasa68]

The screenshots look almost as good as Crysis from ... the beginning of 2007.

However grass and ground still look awful.

From my views they look like they are supposed, eventually i would doubt many persons would concentrate on details like that in "faster" action games of.

A partly figuring of ways like that of Elder Scrolls would been at some point of, the potentiality of engine still is that of same as any other that was released previously with same type of "technology demos" of, for example that of pictures they show.

Those are always in that of same either attempts of providing an nice looking environment without much of an effects other than dynamic shadows and life like attempts.

As for general usages it falls on that some companies could make an adventure games from those of engine parts released, others would make an Diablo clones with equipment modifiers and folks running after those of slight adjustments towards stats and going on around either "grinding" or "leveling".

I would like to see that on action of some different way of things, instead of shadows or anything into something completely else in terms of shadowing images, they could try to duplicate that of engine limits an thing like Bejeweled.

[deeceefar2]

Yeah, graphics are great, but they aren't really what makes an engine great. A decent graphics coder can make any half-decent engine shine.

The core engine architecture is infinitely more important than its graphical capabilities, as that's what determines how easy it is to make a new game on that engine. Unreal in that sense sucks, severely -- the first thing just about every team does when they license Unreal is rewrite large portions of its game object system, so I'm told.

The editor and tools are also where its at. Unity has one of the best setups in this regard. What makes or breaks an engine in actual production use is how easy the workflow is for the content creators (level designers, artists, etc.) to make a game.

I'd like to see more information on both of those things in the Unigine engine. I didn't see any documentation links on the Unigine site, albeit I Only looked for a few seconds.

The engine code is awesome. I've had some experience with it. The engine is generally well documented. The scripting language itself is basically c++. It is actually close enough that with some minor changes you could actually compile it if you wanted.

The beginnings of unigine were open source back in the day. So if you do some digging you can find the original source code, and frustrum, their lead developer's, blog about making the engine and the scripting language. So you can see first hand the quality of the code.

The editor and tools are fairly well documented though sometimes counter intuitive. Though I suspect this is an issue of most complex 3d software. More time is spent on adding features and exposing them; then is spent on making sure the interface is simple, and the work flow intuitive.