Rail Sim - South Australian Outback

[Guest shane.ploenges]

]This is a shot from one of our nearly completed simulators, it comprises over 200km of CGI of the South Australian outback.

 

The scene consists of 48x terrain tiles at 8193 x 8193  Step 1 each with LODs of 45 and flatness 0 (To avoid seams at tile edges)

 

 

 

 

 

 

[manguste]

Wow, a huge terrain indeed.

 

BTW, I'm sure it was mentioned before, still, you can bake flatness into the terrain via TerrainRelax. If baked, it should not cause any problems. And such flat relief (well, judging by a screenshot) could definitely gain some performance boost from that.

[nat.harrold]

Excellent work Sydac team. It is a big one.

 

Now all we need is a mad max mod.. ;)

[manguste]

ahaha, true :D

[Guest shane.ploenges]

This is a true testament to Unigines power being able to create a seamless world of this size - This would be impossible with Unity, Cryengine, UDK or any other comparable game engines without a huge amount of work and trickery such as moving the world around the camera to maintain precision.

 

We did need to develop a lot of our own tools for terrain modification to make this possible, and we still are trying to iron out performance stuttering and framerate drop issues that are hard to pin down, however just being able to achieve this sized world is amazing.

 

I would be happy to share any experiences and information on what types of tools and soulutions we developed to make this possible, or answer any questions anyone may have.

 

Thanks

[werner.poetzelberger]

Dear shane, 

 

I am curious to know more about your experiences, creating such a project.

We are atm, evaluating unigine and checking the possibilities against our requirements.

 

Our upcoming project will be an outdoor scene, placed in a strange corner of the world.

It will have an area of around 3 square kilometers, which needs to be passable in very high detail, seen from first person camera at walking speed.

As well we will have more cameras displaying the same scene onto different outputs, all synced.

The whole visuals must be beyond any gaming standard and aim for very high realism and athmosphere.

It will be a simulated world, so 24/7/365 is a basic need.

There will be a more then one animated characters in the scene, actually there will be a lot.

 

What I see so far from the engine (and as far as I can evaluate), unigine does most of the things we need very right.

As I know, the 'devil is in the detail' so I think, there will be some issues.

 

I would be happy if you would share some of critical issues you came along, and would be thankful for any thought to consider from the beginning of the project.

 

Cheers.

Werner

[ulf.schroeter]

New UNIGINE valley demo should give you a very good impression of current capabilities. See video below for multi-screen valley panorama

 

 

UNIGINE double precision support and multi-screen/wall rendering support are unmatched when compared to other engines. Streaming of endless worlds is on the roadmap and hopefully will be available soon. With this feature UNIGINE will be one of the best available engine for really huge world.

 

Beside large-world-support UNIGINE strength is the large set of pre-defined materials and objects, very powerful scripting language (though weak debugging features) and very stable and clean engine implementations.

 

Due to its early design focus on providing primarily high-level game engine functionallity based on scripting only low-level engine customization (shader programming, C++ engine customization) is not that easy as in other game engines (though possible if you invest quite some time on code analysis).

 

Engine source code is perfect with respect to code simplicity and elegance, source code documentation is nevertheless minimal and could/should be more verbose (especially when it comes to descriptions of implemented algorithmes/concepts).

 

The only real documentation "night-mare": all shaders are nearly undocumented (sure, frustum has no problems in this area, but for customers this is a real pain in the ...) At least UNIGINE provided some extensions in the last year to better support customer low-level GPU-based compute shader operations, dynamic texture rendering, post-processing (though documentation of these new features is minimal....go for it, manguste)

 

Of course just my personal feelings :-)

[manguste]

Ooook, will mind that for my to-do list :)

[werner.poetzelberger]

 large set of pre-defined materials and objects

 

Hello.

 

As I mentioned, I am evaluating the eval. Kit.

Where do I find that large number of materials and pre-defined objects.

In the editor, there is a fair amount of materials within the libraries.

 

Will there be more, when we aquire the engine/sdk ?

 

Cheers.

Werner

[Guest shane.ploenges]

Hopefully soon an editable version of the Valley demo should be available for customers to examine the internal workings.  I do not know that this will be made available to evaluators though.

[nat.harrold]

I thought we already could get into valley. I have been in there a few times to look at how things have been done. Can't recall If i have been in the latest one, but not heaps has changed in the workflow or techniques from other valley demos. Lot of technical tweaks deeper down, but the art workflow theory is the same and the rest is on this forum.

 

And werner, there are a lot of useful assets for northern hemisphere users. Particularly the high quality and very optimized vegetation and clutter and weather system. Oil rush has fantastic particle art. Heaven demo has.. um... A really good dragon? And provides example of various materials and how to use.

 

City demo originally had some good lightmapping examples and glass materials to deconstruct. All the demos contain working examples of materials and the material inheritance system and a range of assets to peek at. The new waterfall in city looks good so far. It doesn't take long to get going when you have access.

[werner.poetzelberger]

And werner, there are a lot of useful assets for northern hemisphere users. Particularly the high quality and very optimized vegetation and clutter and weather system

 

Hello nat, 

is this meant to be for evaluation users, or only to customers? (sorry for that stupid asking).

 

cheers

werner

[nat.harrold]

Werner, basically any object, material, effect, you see in any of Unigine's demos scenes are available with the editor for customers to pick apart. If you are a source code customer you get deep systems and if you are binary customer you get less. All customers get good starting point with assets to disect.

[werner.poetzelberger]

Thanks Nat.

 

Good to hear that.

 

Cheers.

werner

[Guest shane.ploenges]

The latest Valley demo adds billboarding of trees , so this is what has changed from a content generation point of view - this is not available as an editable version to deconstruct yet.

[manguste]

Yep, still, binary and source SDK users can unpack Valley resources (it's a simple UNG archive as far as I remember correctly).