Unreal3 Engine being ported to Mac!
http://insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=9909
"Obviously, there's a lot to be done at this point, but best to start now so I'm not scrambling to port a whole engine when UE3 games get closer to shipping."
This is great! We have both Doom3 AND Unreal3 coming to Mac! This is going to open up the door to many more next-gen Mac games.
Screenshots showcasing the engine.
Who cares about HL2 anymore?
"Obviously, there's a lot to be done at this point, but best to start now so I'm not scrambling to port a whole engine when UE3 games get closer to shipping."
This is great! We have both Doom3 AND Unreal3 coming to Mac! This is going to open up the door to many more next-gen Mac games.
Screenshots showcasing the engine.
Who cares about HL2 anymore?
Comments
Originally posted by Placebo
http://insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ArticleID=9909
"Obviously, there's a lot to be done at this point, but best to start now so I'm not scrambling to port a whole engine when UE3 games get closer to shipping."
This is great! We have both Doom3 AND Unreal3 coming to Mac! This is going to open up the door to many more next-gen Mac games.
Screenshots showcasing the engine.
Who cares about HL2 anymore?
It's great that Ryan Gordon is such a Mac and Linux fan. He's done an excellent job on many ports. I'm so happy with what he's done so far that I can forgive the delays on the Duke Nukem 3D and Unreal Tournament ports he's been working on this past year and a half.
I just hope Apple doesn't goof everything up by shipping iMacs that won't be able to play Doom 3 very well. I think a big selling factor for the next iMacs would be that it's able to play Doom 3 and future Doom 3-engine games as well as UnrealEngine3 games fairly well. That would sell some iMacs I would think.
Valve is probably not going to license the HL2 engine. I find it way more beneficial that the Doom3 and UnrealEngine3 are being ported. It effectively makes ports of Quake 4, Return to Castle Wolfenstein 2(?), and Unreal 3 (and future Unreal Tournaments) much more possible.
Unreal 3 is phenom. Valve and Gabe can dry up and blow away AFAIC.
Originally posted by Aurora
Thanks Placebo for the link, very nice screenshots. looks like unreal3 engine will no longer be cartoon but almost photorealistic. Cool in fact very cool.
What is photorealism? Everytime some new engine or some new graphics pardigm shows up, I always think "wow, that's photorealistic". Heck, when PC switched from EGA to VGA, I was like "holy crap, those are nice photorealistic graphics." Ok, I'm exaggerating a bit but:
- in a few years when graphics are even better, we'll think that Doom 3 and Unreal 3 looked cartoony
- the screenshots only show detailed landscapes or detailed characters...but never both together. I'd imagine both could exist simultaneously but the graphics card of today and even the upcoming ones wouldn't be able to keep up with the engine. Either the 3D models will not be as detailed as on those screenshots or the game will run really slow
It'll be awhile before we see an actual game with fluid detailed graphics/3D-models.
Doom 3 is visually stunning. But the hardware hasn't caught up yet to make these games a pleasant experience.
I'd imagine in a year or 2, Doom 3 will run quite well, though.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, the Doom 3 and Unreal Engine 3 engines are going to be around for awhile because hardware hasn't caught up yet...but that we're still far from photorealism.
There will have to be a shift in graphics methods before we even begin to see photorealism. The polygon models are fine now but there will probably be some kind of shift to atomic models...object composed of densely packed spheres instead of a thin skin of textured polygons. The hardware is not even near from being there yet but it'll happen I'm sure. Then we'll have the beginning of photorealism and better physics since these spheres would behave more like real life atoms and organic shapes will look, well, organic at any screen resolution.
Polygons-models could get close but they'll never be the end-all solution and are becoming more and more complex to create.
Originally posted by kim kap sol
Doom 3 is visually stunning. But the hardware hasn't caught up yet to make these games a pleasant experience.
It's true that at it's highest (called 'Ultra' in the game) graphics setting, Doom 3 will only crawl on todays consumer or prosumer machines.
However, id have done an amazing job of creating scalable technology and Doom 3 will look great, and remain extremely playable on systems raging from brand new, top-spec machines, to mid-range machines like mine (Athlon Barton 3000, 1gb Ram, 128mb 9800 Pro), to low range machines. That's one of the greatest things about the engine.
An excellent article about this can be read Here.
id have capped the Doom 3 frame rate at 60fps, which should get rid of annoying benchmarks and hotrodders trying to get stupidly huge frame rates just for the same of it.
Simply put though, Doom 3 is playable now. As for the Unreal 3 Engine, that's not going to be ready until 200/2006. By then, personal computer technology will be a lot better, and the engine will be playable. They wouldn't release an engine that wasn't playable.
Working in one of the top CS depts for graphics in the world, I've seen stuff that would blow your mind. True photorealistic rendering of complex imagery (a locomotive in a live setting with wind in the leaves of the trees, the grass rippling in its wake, steam jetting out the top, then the brakes, hot sparks from the wheels) in real-time. It just required a highly custom system.
Point is: current top of the line games are great... but they'll just keep getting better, and we'll look back on today's state of the art like it was PacMan.