JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post anything about MX Simulator here. Please. I'm begging you.
jlv
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by jlv »

The 16k texture might have been the total size of the texture atlas. It'd be ridiculous to use that for a single texture as it'd be mapped to something like 1000 DPI assuming the gun has around a square foot of surface area.

I think you'll find it's even more critical to have efficient models and textures when the engine is doing all sorts of fancy multi-pass effects. Do something like dynamic cube environment maps and suddenly you're redrawing the scene 6 times for each shiny object. That makes it critical to keep the geometry under control. The models in the demo obviously have multiple LODs as you can see the LOD popping as the camera moves around. I'm sure the textures are also all very carefully mapped to get the most out of every byte of texture memory.

I don't really want to bother with the pretty/slow stuff since it's hard to do and MXS is more of an esports type of game anyway. The engine changes I'd like to make are all things that would either break even or improve the frame rate.

- Lighting entirely with HDR environment maps. Should be as fast as the current fragment shader.
- Make the terrain tessellator work on larger areas instead of tessellating down to 3x3 triangle fans. It'd make more triangles overall but require much less data to be sent to the GPU. This is one of the biggest performance problems in the current engine.
- Atlas the billboards and render them all in one draw call. This would be much faster but at the cost of perfect sorting for translucent billboards.
- Require large texture support. The current terrain engine goes through awful contortions to stay under 1024x1024 textures. Probably been over 10 years since a card had that limit.
- I'd kind of like to have displacement textures even though that would hurt the FPS.

Is anyone still using anything less than OpenGL 2.0? I should do a poll on that.
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RobertPink
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by RobertPink »

If I'm not mistaken isn't JLV currently using the source engine with is out of date, to a certain degree. I am no genius and I personally think Unreal Engine 4 would make the game look like incredible, however in a game like sim do we REALLY need our stuff to look like something we'd see if we walked downstairs? No. IMO Sim is a great point right now, could use some optimization for erode which JLV is trying to fix, but this game is by far the best motocross game I have ever came across.
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by Jeremy150 »

[quote="jlv"][/quote]
Really excited to see where we can go with HDR lighting. So where do you stand on implementing PBR materials? Also, if I'm not wrong, I'm pretty sure everyone with a GTX 700 series and higher are on OpenGL 4.5.
Image
Cody Dawe
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by Cody Dawe »

RobertPink wrote:If I'm not mistaken isn't JLV currently using the source engine with is out of date, to a certain degree. I am no genius and I personally think Unreal Engine 4 would make the game look like incredible, however in a game like sim do we REALLY need our stuff to look like something we'd see if we walked downstairs? No. IMO Sim is a great point right now, could use some optimization for erode which JLV is trying to fix, but this game is by far the best motocross game I have ever came across.
its more than just visuals, performance is being limited by the current limitations of the engine. just look at your system utilization when playing.
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by MxWayGamer »

yzmxer608 wrote:
MxWayGamer wrote:For example, if we would like to play with lot of skins, we have to buy a NASA computer...
*With unreasonably sized skins and shader maps.
The most of big team use unreasonably sized skins.. 800mb the team pack...
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jlv
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by jlv »

RobertPink wrote:If I'm not mistaken isn't JLV currently using the source engine with is out of date, to a certain degree. I am no genius and I personally think Unreal Engine 4 would make the game look like incredible, however in a game like sim do we REALLY need our stuff to look like something we'd see if we walked downstairs? No. IMO Sim is a great point right now, could use some optimization for erode which JLV is trying to fix, but this game is by far the best motocross game I have ever came across.
It doesn't use source engine. It uses the custom made "No Frills" engine.
Jeremy150 wrote:
jlv wrote:
Really excited to see where we can go with HDR lighting. So where do you stand on implementing PBR materials? Also, if I'm not wrong, I'm pretty sure everyone with a GTX 700 series and higher are on OpenGL 4.5.
That just means the materials conserve energy right? It would but that's not a big deal.

A better question would be "will you allow more than one roughness setting to be blended together?", and the answer would be only if it's absolutely necessary. Just playing around in Blender it doesn't seem like it's *that* important. The plastic looks a little metallic with only one layer since it doesn't have a duller sub-reflection to go with the top gloss but it's not that noticeable.

For the OpenGL compatibility stuff, the Nvidia cards aren't the problem. It's the Intel hardware that's ubiquitous and really bad.
MxWayGamer wrote:
yzmxer608 wrote:
MxWayGamer wrote:For example, if we would like to play with lot of skins, we have to buy a NASA computer...
*With unreasonably sized skins and shader maps.
The most of big team use unreasonably sized skins.. 800mb the team pack...
The size of the PNG file is not what the GPU sees since the PNG is LZ77 compressed. As an example, when you make a 4k*4k translucent white spec map the PNG file will only be a couple of K. When it's uncompressed to texture memory it's 64 megs.
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Bradclay306
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by Bradclay306 »

im sure that 95% of the people who bought this game would re-buy it almost instantly, if it was to be optimized better and had better visuals.
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by yzmxer608 »

jlv wrote:it uses the custom made "No Frills" engine.
How's the team doing?
TeamHavocRacing wrote:If I had a nickel for every time someone asked for this, I would have a whole shitload of nickels.
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by Jeremy150 »

jlv wrote:That just means the materials conserve energy right? It would but that's not a big deal.

A better question would be "will you allow more than one roughness setting to be blended together?", and the answer would be only if it's absolutely necessary. Just playing around in Blender it doesn't seem like it's *that* important. The plastic looks a little metallic with only one layer since it doesn't have a duller sub-reflection to go with the top gloss but it's not that noticeable.
Sort of, PBR materials use real world values to better represent materials more accurately. I'm sure you are aware that most games are going that direction, and I think it would improve the visuals of this game a lot, without much effort from the artists. With some programs like Substance Painter, and Substance Designer, you can simply assign a material like titanium, for example, to a mesh and it will reflect that material accurately.

Blender has just started to implement PBR into the newest version 2.79. Although, it is all done through node setups. Would you be able to allow us to export models with materials made with nodes instead of what we have now? I don't really know how much would go into it, but if you could make that happen, then I think that would be the easiest way to get us into a complete PBR and HDR environment setup.

I do know that if we go to PBR, then we will need to have HDR environment maps, so the PBR materials will work correctly.

Image
Image
YaBoiMxx
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by YaBoiMxx »

I agree with this topic. The current software used for Mx Simulator is far outdated. Moving over would require allot of work but overall would make the game look better and possibly run better with the tools of the Unreal Engine 4. I hope this game gets a huge update in graphics,model materials because currently the shaders are outdated and its just really behind in the visual department. Lets hope something changes in the near future.
#Whipitwednesday
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by swoodmx »

jlv wrote:The 16k texture might have been the total size of the texture atlas. It'd be ridiculous to use that for a single texture as it'd be mapped to something like 1000 DPI assuming the gun has around a square foot of surface area.

I think you'll find it's even more critical to have efficient models and textures when the engine is doing all sorts of fancy multi-pass effects. Do something like dynamic cube environment maps and suddenly you're redrawing the scene 6 times for each shiny object. That makes it critical to keep the geometry under control. The models in the demo obviously have multiple LODs as you can see the LOD popping as the camera moves around. I'm sure the textures are also all very carefully mapped to get the most out of every byte of texture memory.

I don't really want to bother with the pretty/slow stuff since it's hard to do and MXS is more of an esports type of game anyway. The engine changes I'd like to make are all things that would either break even or improve the frame rate.

- Lighting entirely with HDR environment maps. Should be as fast as the current fragment shader.
- Make the terrain tessellator work on larger areas instead of tessellating down to 3x3 triangle fans. It'd make more triangles overall but require much less data to be sent to the GPU. This is one of the biggest performance problems in the current engine.
- Atlas the billboards and render them all in one draw call. This would be much faster but at the cost of perfect sorting for translucent billboards.
- Require large texture support. The current terrain engine goes through awful contortions to stay under 1024x1024 textures. Probably been over 10 years since a card had that limit.
- I'd kind of like to have displacement textures even though that would hurt the FPS.

Is anyone still using anything less than OpenGL 2.0? I should do a poll on that.


JLV nobody wants more FPS I have two fucking Titan XP GPUs in SLI BABY! WE NEED MORE FIDELITY AND UNREAL ENGINE IS THE SHIT with crazy good FPS on medium grade hardware! its time to bring MX SIMULATOR into the game with some good graphics from 2018 not 1995 graphics!
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by ColtonD719 »

The biggest benefit to using an established engine like Unreal: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/
jlv
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by jlv »

yzmxer608 wrote:
jlv wrote:it uses the custom made "No Frills" engine.
How's the team doing?
It's been pretty bad since Phat retired!
Jeremy150 wrote:Sort of, PBR materials use real world values to better represent materials more accurately. I'm sure you are aware that most games are going that direction, and I think it would improve the visuals of this game a lot, without much effort from the artists. With some programs like Substance Painter, and Substance Designer, you can simply assign a material like titanium, for example, to a mesh and it will reflect that material accurately.

Blender has just started to implement PBR into the newest version 2.79. Although, it is all done through node setups. Would you be able to allow us to export models with materials made with nodes instead of what we have now? I don't really know how much would go into it, but if you could make that happen, then I think that would be the easiest way to get us into a complete PBR and HDR environment setup.

I do know that if we go to PBR, then we will need to have HDR environment maps, so the PBR materials will work correctly.

Image
Looks like the left one has no environment map but the right one does, so if PBR means "has an environment map" it'll do that! Seriously though, I tried to look up what the term means and it's apparent that it's just a buzzword with no concrete meaning. I can add support for specific things, but for something that's "more of a concept than a strict set of rules" I can't honestly claim to do it since it's meaningless.
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by Jeremy150 »

jlv wrote:
Okay, so what about letting us export models with materials made with nodes instead of just the default materials in the blender render engine? PBR Materials do things so much more accurately. For one, it automatically calculates the Fresnel of a material just based on its real world values. With what blender has setup with there new Principled Shader, we can adjust more values like the metalness and roughness of an object while having accurate fresnel. The biggest improvements I've seen with PBR is with metal objects. It just has such a more accurate representation of what the actual object is. Also those both are using HDR lighting. It does look like they tried a little bit to hard to show the difference of PBR materials by not giving the scope a good reflection on the left. But look at the difference between the metal on the gun.

Again, I don't know what you would have to go through to allow us to use custom materials made with nodes to export our models. If having too many different material outputs would cause an issue with your game, what about limiting it to materials made with the Principled shader?
Image
jlv
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Re: JLV should use Unreal Engine 4!

Post by jlv »

I could support some node setups. If your nodes are basically mix(diffuse, gloss) it'll definitely do it. Maybe mix(diffuse, mix(gloss(roughness1), gloss(roughness2))) as well but just from experimenting in Blender I've found the effect of more complicated node setups is pretty subtle. I could see anisotropic specular being noticeable for machining marked or brushed metal but most of the other stuff you have to look carefully to even notice the difference.

Basically, when I do renders in Blender the environment map makes a huge difference compared to a simple lighting setup. The other stuff you can kind of notice but you have to look really carefully. Here's an example:

Image

"Sharp" is just mix(diffuse, gloss). Is it really that much worse than the more complex "combined" node? It's very little difference. But if you take away the environment map lighting it'll look like crap.
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