During this year’s GDC, Epic Games demonstrated an amazing open world environment that can be created in Unreal Engine 4. This open world environment – which is 100 square miles – was used in its latest Kite Tech Demo, therefore you’ve already got a glimpse of it. However in Epic’s “The State of Unreal” talk, Epic’s Francois Antoine showcased various weather types in that map, as well as day/night cycle and how that affects lighting and shadows, AI animals that react to the players, and more. The real-time video starts at the 46:00 mark. Enjoy and kudos to our reader ‘Olek S.’ for spotting it!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Wow.That was nice.
Where’s the video? I see a white space underneath the article. IPad Safari
It’s Flash. Jobs is shaking his head and pursing his lips at you in his grave.
It’s 2015 and people are still using flash? That’s pathetic.
It will be downloadable soon as was said in the presentation.
That’s awesome news! Can’t wait to test this on my new rig ^_^
In the meantime download Unreal Engine 4 and try out all the existing demos, the Elemental Demo is included there as well, you can go freecam mode in all of them and mess around with the assets.
The demos are located in the “Learn” tab in the Epic Game Launcher which is also used to download and launch the engine.
Thanks a lot brother 🙂 …downloading now ^__^
Devs said during the conference that it’s completely possible to run this map in multiplayer on a server with good amounts of memory.
Some random dude modded the Elemental tech demo and made it into a Unreal Tournament map.
I hope some modders will do the same with this once it’s released.
Can you imagine a game like DayZ running on this?
Mind=blown.
I’ve already played around with many, example of an interior: imgur.com/a/8QMb9
Did you make that?
Imagine skyrim like this… too bad the video quality is terrible.
Skyrim couldn’t do this (as you may know) because of hardware limitations of the PS3 and XBox 360; they designed Skyrim in 32-bit. Skyrim will need 64-bit floating-point precision to have such large maps 🙂
Let’s hope the next Bethesda RPG is actually using up-to-date technology!
Yeah it simply can’t but if…. Hopefully elder scrolls 6 will look something like this.
Not trying to detract from how utterly beautiful it looks, but I did have a bit of a giggle when I looked at it and thought to myself ‘yeah, this is definitely in real-time, I can see the detail-fades and everything!’
Amazing demo though. So pretty.
Is it reported anywhere how many person-hours were required to create the 100-square-mile environment? It seems to me that the amount of work required to create a demo tends to be downplayed, and therefore audiences and often left with the impression a piece of software makes the task easier rather than merely making the task possible.
A few dozen people over the course of 3 months.
No exact figures given.
And i think this really goes beyond what we call a tech demo.
It’s almost like a partially done game.
Actually they said it in the conference, they said that the team was at 13 towards the end, meaning that a good portion of the work was done by 10 or under.
Span over 3 months.
The procedural simulation algorithms for all the vegetation removed a ton of the work from their hands. In another stream they mentioned that they also came up with an algorithm to quickly create rivers running down from mountains.
Thank you! Clearly, I was way too lazy to actually watch the whole conference. 😉
Some really neat tech they’ve incorporated into this demo. I’m surprised they opted to make such a dynamic world with AI and simulation, rather than pre-rendered animals or landscapes that are simply fine-tuned to the camera angle.
If you watched the recording of the stream you’d understand that they did not set out to make this cinematic, they built the world first and thought that a cinematic would be a nice way to showcase it.
Technology aside, when I watched the demo all I could think was just let the kite go, kid; buy a new one. It’s not worth running miles into the countryside to retrieve. It wasn’t even a particularly nice kite, either.
They should have made him lose his dog – that would be worth the risk to life and limb!
over hyping is really bad
F**k the kid and the kite!…this is LOTR epic battle material all the way…or some sort of new AAA fantasy action RPG………….Game Of Thrones *__* *__* *__*
My gad that was really pretty
With the power of Dx12 and cloud, the xbox one will become 100x more powerful than the PC and the pathetic indie station 4 and reach these levels of graphics.
Are you high, or just incredibly stupid ?
Frostbite looks like Mario compared to this. Wish DICE would throw away that garbage engine and use this instead. Looks fantastic!
Everything we have seen of Frostbite was last-gen based. UE4 doesn’t have those shackles. Once Frostbite ditches its 360/PS3 legacy code it should be able to compete. It’s the same thing every console gen. Whoever makes an engine specifically for the new systems gets all the WOW effect. But look at what happens over time. At the beginning of last-gen we had UE2.5 (bloom and blur), COD2 (depth of field blur) and Far Cry Instincts (bloom and 3D water). Everyone thought these were amazing at the time but they pale in comparisons to later engines. COD4 and Assassin’s Creed established real-time shadows as the new standard and the various bloom and blur effects became mandatory for all games. In the third wave games like Crysis 2 brought deferred lighting and even more post processing effects.
My point is UE4 and Guerrilla’s engine are two of the few that actually focus on current-gen. UE4 is also very solid on PC. As time goes on Frostbite, CryEngine etc. are going to ditch last-gen and rival or trump UE (again).