So Square Enix released a few screens and a lofi video of their new engine and the internet goes wild.

My problem with it is that I don't see anything exciting and especially nothing new. We had graphics like this years ago (Crysis and Alan Wake come to mind).

Yet there are responses along the lines of "I can't believe this isn't reality!".

Either I'm not seeing something everyone else does, or people just believe whatever they're told ("this is uber next next gen!").

Somehow I'm waiting for a press statement from Square-Enix like "Haha! This is actually from our shelved PS2 game! So graphics aren't important after all!! Point proven!".

Can someone shed some light on what the hype is all about and why Square Enix chose to present their new engine this way?

So on one hand, I don't see anything novel about the engine. In fact, it looks more or less just like lightmapping; it the lighting could be updated in real time, but since the lights aren't moving, I see no reason to believe that this is the case.

On the other hand, I do think it looks very realistic. It's well-done lightmapping, and the camera shake looks very organic (not that that's new, either, and it would probably get unpleasant in a real game), and the art seems to be based on something that really exists. Overall, except for what appears to be bad aliasing, I wouldn't necessarily know it was fake.

I can't help but think that they are, as you suggest, choosing to present it this way to prove a point, but I think the point is more that "realistic" artistic decisions go a lot farther to make something look real than adding a ton of "next-gen" features.

So, let's see...
1) They haven't shown anything but boring static indoor geometry. Hmm. OK.
2) They haven't shown anything that couldn't be done with already available technology.
3) They show a fifteen second extremely compressed video of a camera walking down a ramp with no lights moving or anything otherwise noteworthy happening. Impressive huh?

I see no reason to be excited at this point in time. Want to see something impressive in real-time? Checkout CryEngine 3. Or Samaritan (<-- though that one was being played on a ridiculous beast of a computer!)
Yes, they announced that they're using DX11 (surprise surprise!) and that they are, basically, "doing awesome stuff". That video and the accompanying screenshots aren't much to be wowed over -- not until they throw together something at least resembling interactivity! If they wanted to play up this announcement they really should have waited until they had something to show; for what they have shown is "meh".

If you're going to get worked up every time someone online gets excited about something that doesn't seem that neat, you're going to give yourself an ulcer pretty quickly.

This looks like unbiased rendering. So far, no engine has used it, either precomputed or real-time (so far not possible).

Main issue with this type of rendering is that it works ok for static camera. But AFAIK, there is real option for arbitrarily moving camera. If they somehow managed to do that, it would accomplish two things:
- next step in graphics quality
- uncanny valley will go to new depths

Latter point is relevant due to computational complexity. Static geometry will look nice, but everything else will look out of place. Shadows and other interactions, as well as subtle interactions will break the quality.

We had graphics like this years ago[/quote]
Nope. FryRender is capable of this type of quality, but at vast expense of storage and only for fixed number of viewpoints. Mostly it's used for static images or precomputed animations.

Want to see something impressive in real-time? Checkout CryEngine 3[/quote]
Nice, but artificial.


That said, low resolution video hides some details, seeing demo in 1080p would really reveal some details. Then again, VGA is the sweet spot that can be realistically achieved with today's memory sizes. For anything more, texture sizes become a problem.

This looks like unbiased rendering. So far, no engine has used it, either precomputed or real-time (so far not possible).

Main issue with this type of rendering is that it works ok for static camera. But AFAIK, there is real option for arbitrarily moving camera. If they somehow managed to do that, it would accomplish two things:
- next step in graphics quality
- uncanny valley will go to new depths

Latter point is relevant due to computational complexity. Static geometry will look nice, but everything else will look out of place. Shadows and other interactions, as well as subtle interactions will break the quality.

[--snip--]

Yes, all true -- not that it matters.

My point was that they haven't done/shown that yet. So, regarding as to what they've shown, it's pretty, sure, but not really "revolutionary" -- not yet. When they've shown anything interactive, complete with a free flowing camera, then I'll reconsider how impressive this new tech of theirs is. By the look of things, it'll be another year or so before they do a proper showcase...

I'll hang back and see what they come up with whenever they come around to showing it off. For now I retain my position that this isn't news worthy and doesn't exactly scream impressive all over -- and the fact that they decided not to release a high-res video seems telling that they probably couldn't. Otherwise, it'd've been an obvious idiot move to not show things of in HD - after all, aren't they the ones touting how next-gen, HD-enabled, awesomesauce it is?

unbiased rendering (...) no engine (...) precomputed (...) not possible

?

Unless you're working under a different definition of "unbiased" or "precomputed" than I am (or "engine"?), I don't understand.

From what I can see in the video, they've got a nice GI solution (baked or dynamic), and a physically accurate BRDF for their materials. I'd guess the most impressive feature here is that they've matched the real-world physical data very closely for their scene, such as index-of-refraction (~= 'specular mask'), reflection coefficients (albedo), etc.


Getting materials to match photo-reference like that isn't simple, especially with most engine's addiction to lambert/blinn/phong BRDFs...

[quote name='Antheus' timestamp='1318611225' post='4872579']
unbiased rendering (...) no engine (...) precomputed (...) not possible

Unless you're working under a different definition of "unbiased" or "precomputed" than I am (or "engine"?), I don't understand.
[/quote]
There aren't that many unbiased renderers in existence and to my knowledge no game engine uses it o.O

What is your definition of the terms?

That said, I was more interested in their press release when they said that the engine was easily scalable to large and small projects. I'm interested to see more of what they mean by that. It seems like it's largest piece of interest could be in cutting costs with high performance rather than it having the highest performance of any engine.

If you're going to get worked up every time someone online gets excited about something that doesn't seem that neat, you're going to give yourself an ulcer pretty quickly.

I get worked up over a lot of internet-BS. I need to stop reading it

This looks almost realistic to me at a first glance:




The Square-Enix screens do look almost identical to the photos, but to me the reference photos they used look rather surreal in the first place.