Unigine Engine Does Real-Time Global Illumination

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Unigine Engine Does Real-Time Global Illumination

The Unigine Engine has been revised with a number of new features and impressive capabilities. One of several new features is "real-time global illumination with spherical harmonics", which may be a mouthful but is for delivering even more beautiful graphics...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIxMDQ

[Vadi]

Speaking of Unigine, I took up OilRush again and it runs at a solid 60fps on a 560gtx with graphics on ultra and textures on highest. The game looks wonderful and the strategy it brings it pretty fun.

[Xilanaz]

For those still wondering about when Unigine is going to release Unigine Valley, the latest I heard out of the company several weeks ago is that Valley is basically done and released to their customers, but nothing that's publicly available yet. This is rather upsetting and really sad to see, but hopefully it will get a public unveiling soon.

I don't care about a new demo, its more sad they seem to be missing the boat with developers, I see unity on so many kickstarters but don't see unigine there at all (could be me not looking in the right places).....

[Vadi]

Hm, agreed. Isn't Unigine more expensive though? I think it's more geared towards heavy-duty games, not mostly indie stuff as Kickstarter is.

[devius]

How can it be pre-computed and interactive at the same time? Unless I misunderstood this only calculates GI from static light sources, but is able to iluminate moving objects. Real real-time GI is probably still a few years away.

[elanthis]

Hm, agreed. Isn't Unigine more expensive though? I think it's more geared towards heavy-duty games, not mostly indie stuff as Kickstarter is.

Nobody's using it for that, either. Phoronix readers might not get this, but Unigine is practically unheard of in the wider games industry. Whoever's in charge of their product marketing, evangelism, and sales over at Unigine is completely and utterly dropping the ball.

There's still the problem that I can't even easily evaluate what features Unigine has. Pretty graphics, sure, but 90% of that is still based on the art put in, and frankly most games these days are going away from the super photo-realism (it costs a fucking ridiculous amount of money to produce that quality of graphics, even with a pre-made engine, and the recession is finally eating into the gaming market in a big big way).

What increasingly matters today is how quickly a small, agile, high-skill team can put together a small but fun game for under $10million. That means that the engine needs to be all about tools, content integration, and iteration speeds. Nobody knows how good Unigine is at that because Unigine doesn't even so much as describe their tools on their website last I looked, and they make you jump through too many hoops just to get an eval copy of their tech.

[smitty3268]

Nobody's using it for that, either. Phoronix readers might not get this, but Unigine is practically unheard of in the wider games industry. Whoever's in charge of their product marketing, evangelism, and sales over at Unigine is completely and utterly dropping the ball.

There's still the problem that I can't even easily evaluate what features Unigine has. Pretty graphics, sure, but 90% of that is still based on the art put in, and frankly most games these days are going away from the super photo-realism (it costs a fucking ridiculous amount of money to produce that quality of graphics, even with a pre-made engine, and the recession is finally eating into the gaming market in a big big way).

What increasingly matters today is how quickly a small, agile, high-skill team can put together a small but fun game for under $10million. That means that the engine needs to be all about tools, content integration, and iteration speeds. Nobody knows how good Unigine is at that because Unigine doesn't even so much as describe their tools on their website last I looked, and they make you jump through too many hoops just to get an eval copy of their tech.

I think the AAA games that care about those photo-realistic graphics are very risk-averse when it comes to switching to a new graphics engine. They're sinking so much money into the project, they want to go with a known commodity, such as the Unreal Engine, or something that they are familiar with. It's the smaller indie games like you are talking about that is a market they might be able to break into easier, and they don't seem to really be targeting that market they way Unity or others are.