Unreal tech demo is available on the app store.
I’m really hoping these features will come to unity for iOS at some point.
There’s already a long discussion about it here: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=63314
And frankly, I don’t see why it could not be created with Unity, especially with 3.0. The demo is mostly about really well made artwork lots of “cutting corners” in lighting/specular (hint: almost everything is baked).
I agree that we should do a demo of similar quality; just right now our demo team is very small focused on making Unity 3.0 launch demos/etc.
Um, their licensing requirements are ridiculous. Unity stay like you are! I don’t see them as competition!
I bet a demo of such quality would give you a positive net revenue return. Even if they are cutting corners, it looks darn impressive. 
I’d be more impressed if they had characters walking about. I agree in that I don’t see much in there Unity couldn’t do (if anything.)
The art is amazing, but really all I’m seeing in that app is 2 or 3 huge textures that are very intelligently used, plus a heap of light mapping…
There are noticeable delays when walking in/out of the citadel walls, which makes me think they’re swapping out textures etc. There is some LOD going on but it appears quite minimal.
Should unity have a similiar tech demo? I don’t think the benefit would be as big as you might think. Anyone who genuinely understands what Unreal is doing there wouldn’t be all that impressed on a technical level, and those are the only ones who are likely to make a kickass title anyway.
But, there’s no reason why Unity couldn’t throw it out as a competition… Winner gets a Pro license, or something. There are companies with programmer bottlenecks (like ourselves)… One artist can keep five scripters very busy
Honestly? I’d rather Unity spent their time doing their thing. Leave pretty pictures to the people who make the best art - those with nothing better to do
EDIT - I was a bit vague there. Unity should hold a competition for someone to make an iDevice showpiece - rather than wasting their own time on it.
How did they get the cloth flowing in the wind? As I’m pretty sure cloth physics don’t work on mobile builds… do they use animated meshes or something?
Yeah, it’s not dynamic
I like that idea, winner gets a copy of Unity 3 Pro, they get something to show Unity off with, everyone is happy.
As for Epic’s tech demo, looks awesome like everything they do, and full to the brim with tricks to make that possible, like everything they do (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s the end result that’s important).
There’s a lot of difference between “Can Do” and “Has Done”.
There demo team has awesome videos of Unity 3 features, and I beleive that iPhone is a pretty big market for Unity. I think a demo of this quality would be beneficial… awesome to see too.
The problem is you’d probably already need a seat of Pro to do anything wild Perhaps a license to publish on one of their other platforms?
Hmm, that’s true. Though isn’t doing anything on the iphone incredibly limiting? The indie version would be perfect! 
Or maybe they could give a free copy of Unity 3 to everyone who wants to enter… what do you mean they won’t fall for that? Damn, and I woulda got away with it too! 
I bet it’s just a skinned animated mesh.
There are some things in the Unreal demo which I couldn’t really see how to do in Unity. Displacement mapping, for example…
It’s not displacement mapping, just parallax mapping. Turns out Unity has parallax bump mapped shaders since about 2005 (that said, for iPhone you should not use them, but roll your own that wouldn’t have to compute lighting at all - which is probably what Epic did as well since all lighting is baked there)
I frequent a game art forum (~50%+ of them professionals working in the industry), and he’s what one of the mods had to say about the game.
They are not impressed by the technical stuff (spec, light maps, baked everything), they are impressed because they’ve never seen anything this well done for the iphone, and how much they could get away with.
Their main concerns are how its going to work with the unreal engine only running on windows. And if they need a mac to publish the games.
Notice how sparingly it was used…
I’m working on a scene that has some of the same elements, maybe more using Unity 3. Last night I backed my scene and ran it on my 3Gs, and it ran very smooth (smoother than Unreal 3). Here is what is into so far.
Huge city (going to build both day and night scenes):
44K Tris (no Occlusion Culling, doing that now)
Lightmaps
Reflections (lake in the city)
Flairs (sun, street lights)
These pics were taken as screenshots on my 3Gs.
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I still have a bunch of work to do (wind to make the trees sway, lightmapping, ect…).
I did not add a transition scene, this city is scene 0. I can’t believe it runs with no OC at 30 FPS with 44K Tris!!!
What I have not figured out yet, is how to turn on antialiasing with the iPhone 3Gs with OpenGL ES.2.0.
Can anyone help?
Thanks,
I think it may be physics baked into vertex animations with some form of compression to keep the animation and computations efficient.
Perhaps very optimised realtime cloth.
Do you know a way to bake cloth simulations into a skinned mesh bones?
That would be interesting to know
I know borderlands (unreal engine) supports baked cloth animations, you can loop bone cloth animations pretty easily.
Just a guess, but couldn’t you also fake simple cloth effects using bones and ragdoll like setup? Not much use for things like flags which could be done easier using other methods. But stuff like capes, drapes etc. might be workable that way?