Anyone else check out Unreal Engine 5’s demo on the PS5? It’s incredible!
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This also seems pretty big to me (not because I’ll ever get anywhere close to it mattering, just in that it’s a huge jump from the previous terms):
“Unreal Engine royalties waived on first $1 million in game revenue. The new Unreal Engine license terms, which are retroactive to January 1, 2020, give game developers an unprecedented advantage over other engine license models.”
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Automatic LOD, and z-brush → Game engine with no baking? Fully Dynamic GI? That sounds neat.
It is awesome, but Unity does not necessarily need to have something better. It would be nice to have those features though. Unity has never really competed in the AAA realm, just look at the Steam top 100 for the past 5 years. They dominate in Mobile, VR, Indie, and have a lot of headway in other non-game related spaces.
Edit: The bounce on the lighting seems to have a delay, is this more or less similar to other dynamic gi solutions?
Also, I noticed the Fluid simulation seems pretty weak. Low poly, and possibly some TXAA artifacts on it?
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I remember reading somewhere that Unity is working on a realtime GI system, but the unlimited detail is incredible. Not having the reduce high poly meshes and bake normals is an incredible time-saver.
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I think Unity chasing Unreal for the last few years is the Achilles heel of the engine. Unity had usability and broad reach. It may not look like unreal but it doesn’t have to: Unity can make beautiful looking games in its own way. A return to an un fractured unity that focuses in its own strengths instead of spreading itself too thin ina race to be something else is the way to support developers and asset store creators. We’ve created great things in Unity and want to keep doing so.
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The 500 statues thing was cheesy, and not really needed. Why did they not just have a room full of 500 statues, and light it up with the cool dynamic GI? It was super dark, and you could only see a handful at a time.
@protopop Like I said above, Unity is dabbling in some AAA territory, that’s true, but that’s not its main business. It has domination in a lot of other areas, including the non-games space.
I think Unity will do just fine, and in fact, I think it’s never been in a better place. Unreal gives the Unity Technologies team some strong competition in high end visuals and fidelity, and that’s a good thing. I hope they learn off each other, and get closer to parity in the next few years.
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To be honest, I’m a bit sceptical about their new showcase. I mean, somehow almost nobody can reproduce what game engine developers show in such demos. And I am talking not only about Unreal now. The same goes for the “Book of the Dead” which looks the way it does because of the occlusion probes and some other custom stuff designed exclusively for that project. It has never appeared in the engine after that and no one was able to come up with something similar, as far as I know. As for Unreal, they had a showcase for UE4 a few years ago where they talked about millions of particles in a single frame for VFX, but I doubt there’s even one single game made with UE4 which does that kind of stuff.
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This is important feature. I wish Unity SRP could also do this.
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@valarus If I’m not mistaken, there is a fancy new conversion wizard for HDRP and URP, no? Have you seen the latest SRP?
Still don’t really want to have to go back to C++. And really don’t want to use Blueprints…
Unity’s killer feature is its C# support. (It used to also be the ease-of-use/learning, but it’s rapidly getting rather more complex these days)
But there’s also huge numbers of Unity devs focused on mobile (or indie stuff with less graphical requirements), for whom the shiny new top-end graphics features are irrelevant.
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Impressive demo. But if I was Unity I would be more worried about this: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/epic-online-services-featuring-epic-account-and-game-services
Unity is crying out for these features and now they seem to be targeting Unity devs.
@Shizola That’s tied to the Epic Games Store right? How popular is that? Its main pull is still the Fortnite community, right?
I don’t think it’s that attractive, unless you’re doing a game like a high end FPS maybe
They had an entire part near the end where the room ended up getting illuminated.
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No, I haven’t. I’m on 19.3 HDRP 7.31. It would be nice to upgrade to 20.2 HDRP 9 without having troubles.
@Murgilod Absolutely, that scene looks awesome. Still, saying there are 500 statues, and making a room dark where you can see a handful of statues, is not really impressive.
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Ehh, let me know when we can actually play any games that look like that.
I’m a total skeptic. Like they’ve just silently solved all of the issues plaguing game development? No aliasing, no temporal artifacts, no artifacts of any kind except for some slight lag in the GI? And how big is the tech demo? A terabyte? 8k textures, raw data models… Who can work with that? Or even download it to their consoles? 3ds Max or Blender basically crash when you try working with models straight out of ZBrush. And how are they texturing the models? Are they unwrapping 30 million triangle models? And for any skinned characters you’d still need to retopologize them to be able to animate them I imagine. Otherwise how would you maintain proper deformations? And what about platform support? Most developers, AAA included, are going to want to target as many platforms as possible and this seems like something that, if it’s not complete bullshit, would be reserved for the highest end devices and all other devices would still require traditional workflows so are you going to have to support both the old workflows and this new workflow to make a game supporting this? There are so many questions I’ll reserve my judgement until I see it with my own eyes, I guess. 
And as an indie game developer, or for most game developer I imagine, ease of use is the most important feature as I’ll never have access to the manpower needed to work with assets and projects of that scale, nor am I even interested in that as I will always lag behind the AAA developers who have hundreds of people staying on top of what’s bleeding edge while I would continuously be chasing after them.
The GI system sounds like a winner though if it works like they claim. Completely dynamic lighting benefits everyone. Not having to bake stuff, place light probes etc. etc. just frees up so much time.
What’s bigger news in my opinion is that Unreal Engine is removing the royalties for your first $1 million dollars of revenue, essentially making the engine completely free for most people.
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amazing! this is how you get triple AAA to use your engine
hope unity will also deliver with their ECS they took years to make,
sure gonna be game changer having 10,000 cubes instead of 1000 
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Well Unreal is surely dominant in the consoles market but unless they make their engine not to lag on mobile platforms, the future of Unity is secured.
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They show the statues thirty seconds later in a scene with dynamic lighting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC5KtatMcUw
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