new game engine for uru?

[kaelisebonrai]

wait a couple months and SensEngine might be ready enough for a simple Uru fanage to be ported...

SensEngine? That makes a lot of SENSE. >.>

[andylegate]

Definitely different. Definitely outstanding! The textures are coming alive in the Unreal SDK's Material Editor, especially using the normal maps an different shaders. Having used the old Unreal Editor 1.0 way back when, this feels like home. Had a slight issue getting the scene meshes to go where they are suppose to, since you can not import a whole scene directly into the 3D window (you have to set up a pipeline and package), but I found a neat little trick that takes care of that.

TONS of tutorials, both written and video, from everyday people, and by some of the Unreal Dev's themselves.

Supports SpeedTree too! (all though I don't know anyone with that expensive license, heheheheh).

Since this is the SDK, you can make any kind of UI or HUD you want of course. But what made me stand up and take notice was the license: No purchase required, (IE EULA is good enough) as long as the content you build is:

Personal Use
Educational Use
and the kicker.....

Is Freely Distributed

Of course some of our resident lawyers will understand Unreal's license requirements better than me.

But I do hope to have this ready soon to test out:



In the mean time, I having a blast doing this while jamming to some Nine Inch Nails, Motley Crue and some Metallica.........

[Aloys]

what made me stand up and take notice was the license: No purchase required, (IE EULA is good enough) as long as the content you build is:

Personal Use
Educational Use
and the kicker.....

Is Freely Distributed

Of course some of our resident lawyers will understand Unreal's license requirements better than me.

You are correct; as long as this not a commercial application, the Unreal SDK is 100% free. Which means you can litterally make a game with it legally as long as you don't plan to make any money from it.
And the same goes for the CryEngine. (Except that this one hasn't been released yet; but they announced it for this month, so it should only be a matter of a week or two)

[andylegate]

Ooops! Just hit my first big snag!

Was starting to put in the lighting this evening, when I noticed that the light actor icon filled the screen. I was like, "Whaaaa?"

Then I remembered that in the Unreal Editor I used to use, and GTK Raidiant, the brush sits at 256 x 256 x 256 units. 16 units = 1 foot...........

exporting the Nexus into UDK, I made a slight error in scale, heheheheheheheh. I have built the worlds smallest Nexus at just under 1.5 feet wide!

Going to be kinda hard to squeeze in there! And I thought Sharper's Spy Room was small! Ha!

Okay, so I just need to scale everything up and proceed from there, remembering that when I export from Max in the future, I need to scale all the meshes up by that factor.

[andylegate]

Okay, here we go, a video of the Nexus in the Unreal game engine. This was a quick build, I didn't bother to animate the rings, or put in the lens flare of the light. I did mess around with the materials some (Normal and offset bump mapping). I love the motion blur you get when you move around.
The lights in UDK use Lightmass, so when you put in your light source, it automatically calculates scatter and bounce and provides a Lighting Environment. So no more having to put in a bunch of lights to get your scatter and bounce (of course if you WANT to do that, you can turn off the Environmental Lighting and do it that way):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62ya0zvqmx0

I also just used the games normal UI or HUD for now, just to get in and move around.

There is one problem however: Collision. Right now, it wants closed meshes for collision (IE Planes don't work, so I kept falling through the floor, heh). I ended up putting a very flat cylinder under the actual Nexus floor for now. This is problematic for terrain, but then I have not finished watching the video tutorials (which are many and numerous. The best are from 3DBuzz and you can download them to watch later).

I'll do something bigger that is outside next. I'm itching to try out the Distortion Material: Picture this......The sunny cleft....as you look toward the horizon, not only do you see what we normally see, far off desert, mountains washed by a blue haze and brilliant sky......how about that shimmering you see when you look out across very hot terrain? heheheheh. Just itching to do that!

I also need to learn more about Kismet, which is the visual scripting. So wiring and Age in UDK is .....uhm....the closest I description I can think of is a Flow Chart. PyPRP 1.6.0 we scripting everything in with text. Cyan's plugin was all point and click buttons. Kismet is like a bunch of visual nodes that you literally "wire" together and in the end it looks like a flow chart.

Lots of fun so far, and not all that hard to learn, especially with the massive amounts of tutorials out there. The kicker too is that if you rather still model in either Max or Blender (or Maya for that mater) you still can and just export it to the UDK....as long as you remember to scale everything up by a factor of 16. 16 Unreal Units = 1 Foot, so like in Blender, you need scale up to match that. In Max I used the percentage and scaled up from 100 percent to 1600 percent. Worked pretty good.

Anyways, off to explore this some more.

Oh yah, talked to Mark about this, his answer was that Cyan would have to buy the license if it where to replace MOUL:a's game engine, but that if a bunch of fans could get together and port it all over and make a shard using Unreal then license is met as long as the content was distributed freely (IE no cost for a license).

[Floydman]

I also need to learn more about Kismet, which is the visual scripting. So wiring and Age in UDK is .....uhm....the closest I description I can think of is a Flow Chart. PyPRP 1.6.0 we scripting everything in with text. Cyan's plugin was all point and click buttons. Kismet is like a bunch of visual nodes that you literally "wire" together and in the end it looks like a flow chart.

Like in the BGE?

[andylegate]

So after about 4 days worth of work, here is the Ahnonay Linking Room in the Unreal game engine. I've got the lights a bit too bright, but the shadow mapping worked great. I have not put in the lens flares on the lights, nor used Kismet on the doors (but left the collision off so I could walk through them). I messed around with the textures on the stain glass windows lining the hall way, using some bump map offset on them to try and bring out the bindings. Again, just the normal HUD in the game.

So interesting, not too hard to learn, and an outstanding use of materials and lightmass (I just love the swarm for making builds, heheh):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mDmoFvvKoM

[Chacal]

Amazing.
You even got it to play the music and sounds!

[andylegate]

But of course!

The whole reason wasn't just to see if I could get meshes into Unreal, it is also to see how good / bad it would look and sound.

Overall I'm very pleased with how things have been turning out, and I really do believe that the Unreal game engine would work quite well for Uru.

However, porting it all over would be a very large undertaking, and would definatly need to be done by several people. Even then it would take months to get everything working and looking / sounding correctly.

And that doesn't even cover the fact that we would need people willing to modify the UI or HUD.

Will people do it? That's up to the people of course. I know I would certainly be interested in it and helping.

Should Uru be ported over to it then? Ah, that's a matter of opinion. You'll have plenty of people that would be very resistive to the idea, simply because they have spent many years working with Plasma. For some of them, it would feel like a lost investment, and I can certainly understand that.

What would be nice is if we could have a Plasma 3.0 that utilizes modern shading techniques and all the advantages of a game engine like Unreal. I would certainly use the heck out of it!

Unfortunately, I don't see that happening, and have a better chance of getting a pony..... (oh wait.....that's Zardoz line, heh). I think it's just too big of a change to the original Plasma game engine.

In anycase, what I've found is that basically the answer is "Yes." that Uru could be ported over to the Unreal game engine, and not only perform well, but look even better than the original. Don't expect Cyan to do it, but if a group of fans wanted to, they could create a shard based on it.

Heck, they could even skin the AI's as Bahro's and go around fragging them if they wanted to! (The "Alternate" GT MOUL ending! Death To The Attacking Bahro!).

Anyways, I wrote a short blog about how I did what I've done so far, and will most likely add to it their (so I don't clutter up this forum, since it's basically dedicated to Plasma and not Unreal, hehehe). Here is the link for any that would like to follow:

Taking Uru To Unreal

[Aloys]

Really cool, nice work there Andy.
The process you described is interesting: it's not too complicated; could be a bit speedier but that seems decent for the most part. Just a lot of boring manual work..
With a bit of tweaking on the lighting, shaders, and normal maps it could look really nice. Just seing the new lighting style is fun.
Do you actually plan on doing a larger area?
As I suggested earlier that would really emphasize the differences between the engines.. Things like water could look so much better. And even lighting will 'shine' much more on an outdoor area; Lightmass is a great lighting engine.