Unigine Engine Looks To Wasteland 2

[kayosiii]

Unigine should definitely profile the engine with ati cards much more, if they only use nvidia for development they do something wrong.

Unigine does test there engine with ATI/Linux in fact ATI/OpenGL was the first combination they had tesselation working on.

[yogi_berra]

Yeah, I'm still playing in Fallout 1, 2 and Jagged Alliance 2. The only game I can imagine that's close to their level is Fallout: New Vegas. Fallout 3 is a broken mess. I don't care how Wasteland 2 will look like. I liked Van Buren (true Fallout 3) look.

New Vegas was definitely better than F3.

From the latest update:

Access to a collection of exclusive Ranger portraits that will double the pool of character portraits you have to choose from at the start of the game when you are rolling up your Rangers. This unique image collection will not only give you more Ranger portraits, but more Ranger icons used to display your party location on the world map.

That sounds like a 2D game to me. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...2/posts/208363

[yogi_berra]

Eye candy was important in Fallout 2. Does that mean that it was made to sell to idiotic kids?

Sure it was. That is why they used the same engine as Fallout, with the same assets just with a few tweaks for better inventory management. I give you props for the attempted troll, though.

[Kano]

First of all your gfx card does not even support tesselation. Thats the point: the heaven demo heavyly uses it and the performance is therefore pretty slow. Also the 3rd person view seems to improve the speed as the models could be rendered in lower quality with increasing distance. You should better directly compare heaven to oilrush (but you need to get a better gfx card with opengl 4 support first), then you see what they have done to give increase speed a bit. Basically they dont use any fancy effects and only far distance viewpoint. I am also still waiting for a demo with benchmarking support. But coming back to the statement that the engine is slow with opengl: if you ONLY test with Linux then you totally missed the fact that it is faster with dx11 on win. Especially with ati cards the speed difference is extreme - even more when you add 2 of em. I certainly know that you can only test cf with ati cards - 2 nvidia cards would not help at all because for opengl 4 support you need fermi+. There is no sli support for opengl 4 cards on Linux. But as cf is more or less pointless on Linux i would suggest to replace the card by a faster one instead of adding a second, that only helps for win. I am pretty sure if you create a 1st person shooter with that level of detail heaven used it will run very slow. nvidia might be a tiny bit faster, usually the difference was not that big from win to linux with nvidia cards, less than 10% diff, but ati is much more. Unigine should definitely profile the engine with ati cards much more, if they only use nvidia for development they do something wrong.

[Bestia]

I don't know why you are considering Unigine as a slow engine. I have Oil Rush and it runs great on my machine:

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+
nVidia 9600 GT NVIDIA Driver Version: 295.20
GeIL 2 GB RAM DDR 2 800

I'm playing it with Graphics set to Ultra and Textures to High on 1920x1080 fullscreen without Anti-Aliasing. I get more than 30 fps with drops to 20 (when looking in the smoke) and that's on Unity Ubuntu 11.10 32bit (using Daniel van Vugt PPA's for Compiz and Unity). If I run it in E17 or Razor-qt then it's even faster. I get there about 50 to 40 fps and it even goes as high as 60 fps when looking at some areas of the map (for example glaciers).

Tesselation is a very taxing graphicall effect. Crysis 2 without it runned very good even on old configurations, but when it was added the performance got a huge hit.

The new Valley tech demo looks very impressive on screenshots in the devlog and judging by what binstream says it will look even better when finished.

[kayosiii]

Valley is in "preview" state until the next Unigine SDK update - we are adding stars system (actually, implemented yesterday) for the night sky and new improved clouds. So the sky will look way much better in the next build.

I would love to see some Screenshots -either here or in the unigine forums.

[kayosiii]

@kayosiii

Most ppl would expect that a game using unigine engine would provide extra gfx effects compared to other common engines as they have used that in heaven already. If you dont use em at all whats the reason to use it?

That's a good question - we use just about every other feature in Unigine, we just don't happen to currently have a need for the tesselation. This has as much to do with how many man hours it would take to make the assets as much as anything else. Other Key factors in choosing a game engine are how easy it is to extend, How easy the company/project is to deal with business wise, how much it costs for licensing, what the terms of the licensing are and what the particular skillset of people in your team are.

Also if you really want to sell a Linux game you HAVE TO test on ati as well. I would even try it on latest Intel onboard, but that could be a bit tricky. Somebody should profile the opengl variant to find out what is so much slower compared to dx11. It is really unlogical when the visuals are identical that opengl is slower. There should be opengl profiles added for cf as well, only dx11 is boring...

I was talking more in terms of being an Artist/Developer. I personally wouldn't use anything other than nVidia/Linux or Windows in a production environment obviously I would want a testing box if I was releasing a product for that combination. IIRC Unigine supports one Intel Chipset so far. One of the good things about buying middleware is that somebody else deals with the hardware compatibilty (This is something that Unigine seems to do a really good job at from our perspective).

[kayosiii]

At the very least, Unity3D games can run on Linux in Chrome thanks to NativeClient.
What language is this? Home grown? What IDE does it have? Static typing? Code completion? Debugger? JIT/assembler output? What kind of debugging features, and how are they integrated with the editor? These are all incredibly important questions which Unigine makes impossible for anyone to find out the answer to on their own.

It's home grown but close enough to C++ that you can use a C++ IDE to develop it in. I use KDevelop for my development in Unigine, With that I get syntax highlighting, code completion, grammer checking (for all but the few constructs that Uniginescript has that C++ doesn't). It's statically typed. It has builtin types for all the data structures you would expect in a high performance game engine. Debugging could be better than it is but the logging when the engine is running in debug mode is usually verbose and useful enough to nail the problem.

It's worth noting here that in Unigine Linux is a first class citizen not just a redheaded stepchild. Everything runs on Linux, the Game, the editor tools, everything; 99.9% of the code you write for it will run on any of the platforms without thinking about it.

Why does the asset files being in XML matter? Are users expected to write their own tools or modify the files directly? Or were just commenting on them being nice files even though that point isn't important?

It's important if you want to build custom tools or customise the existing tools to maximise the efficiency of your workflow (in my studio we have needed to do this for every game engine we have used, artist hours are expensive) - I guess the main point here is that the majority of the asset files are not binary files, but XML is important because there are a lot of great software libraries and tools for dealing with the format (which cuts down on developer hours which are also expensive).

This is damning. There shouldn't need to be a wait for better FBX support. It had damn well better be amazing from day one. With all features. Many freaking student game engines do that.

Yes FBX/Collada support should be better (not that I give a flying f**k about FBX - talk to the blender devs if you want to know why). But if you are using 3DStudio Max, Maya or SoftImage this isn't a problem since Everything is covered by the plugins provided by the SDK. I can't comment on the specifics of these plugins except for the Max one since that is the only one that gets used at my work. This approach seems to be more reliable than Collada/FBX but if you are using Blender, Cinema4D or say Houdini there will be difficulties.

This is one of the places that will sink or swim a game company, especially a small one. If the content authors have to take weeks doing things that should ideally take days, that's a ton of time and money that the company loses.

Yes It can. Unigine gives you a lot of rope which you can hang yourself with. We are a small team (one non artist), We have done over 60 projects in Unigine. I wouldn't take Unigine on without a pipeline guy, but then I wouldn't reccomend doing any game production in any engine without a pipeline guy.

[UrpbBojoing]

Say what?

Indeed, it is one of the weak points of Unigine. A couple of years ago I tried to get th eevaluation kit, but no, it is just studios. Had access to the SDK as part of the Dilogus project, but inmediatly when the fate of the project became unclear they cut my forum access. I tried to google for tutorials and videos: nothing available. But a week ago a friend of mine downloaded Unity3d and he is already doing a lot of things. Even CryEngine has a community forum.

Hi. I had to register just to respond to this post. A bit off-topic, but... As someone who has followed Dilogus for over a year (and subsequently given up on it), I'm intriqued by that remark. Fate became unclear? When did that happen? Were you booted out? What about the rest of the team? Do you think the project is being mismanaged? Extracting info from Norbert is as hard as pulling teeth, so I'm not even trying anymore. Their forum is pretty dead too.

[curaga]

At the very least, Unity3D games can run on Linux in Chrome thanks to NativeClient.

Yes, and a significant portion of users will never install that piece of malware. Hardly a solution.