CD Projekt CEO reveals why the company decided to use Unreal Engine for The Witcher 4
TechSpot
CD Projekt CEO reveals why the company decided to use Unreal Engine for The Witcher 4
The next chapter in The Witcher's fantasy saga won't run on CD Projekt's proprietary graphics engine. According to the company's co-CEO, that decision was actually made years...
Disappointing.
For everyone not in the know, the Unreal Engine Lighting model is about 260 years out of date. No, that’s not a joke. The lighting model is based on Lambert’s paper from 1760. That’s the reason why literally every surface looks like plastic.
But plastic didn’t exist in 1760!
It doesn’t matter if plastic existed back then. The consequence of the Lambertian lighting model is that every surface, because of the flawed reflectance physics, now looks like plastic. Alternatively, you could say it looks like clay. It doesn’t matter what analogy you use, the surfaces should not look this way.
Lambert, Lambert, what a prick.
This is so funny (and wrong). Just code your shaders yourself to use the model you want.
Explain why it is wrong you doofus.
Don’t just drive by saying ‘This is so funny…’. :/
Engines dont force a lighting model (since like y 2000 or very simple ones) because you make your own with the pixel shaders, and with the setup you want (deferred lighting is more complicated for example, toon shading not so much, phong is super simple, flat is simpler and so on. All available with the UE). So the whole “lighting model from 200 years ago” is just a joke, it’s like “they force you to use mommy brown, a color not made any more!” It doesn’t make sense, or if it do so, please do enlighten me 😌
Generally the onus is on the one making the claim to prove it is correct.
They did that?
Which is why the “nuh uh wrong” is now a new statement that needs to have some foundation to be worth anything. Cmon this ain’t rocket science
Where exactly in this comment did they prove their claim?
“For everyone not in the know, the Unreal Engine Lighting model is about 260 years out of date. No, that’s not a joke. The lighting model is based on Lambert’s paper from 1760. That’s the reason why literally every surface looks like plastic.”
Also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens's_razor
They put the name there so you can easily Google it. If you had any intention you could find Lambert shading on Wikipedia real quick, that’s usually enough for a conversation between people that’s not a scientific paper.
I have no scientific footnotes for these statements I just made, don’t even ask.
You’re insufferable, however a quick search brings up threads such as this one: forums.unrealengine.com/t/…/2669505
Where the user is specifically asking to get Lambert shading, which to me, indicates that is in fact not the default.
But go off
Edit: JK you right did more research, obviously using an older diffusion model based on an old paper isn’t great, but it’s not like that’s literally all the engine does/can do.
It’s just a hyperbolic claim while partially correct.
Why? Then it’s just going to look like every other game that came out in the past few years ffs!
And the physics would be boring.
If it gives them more room to focus on story and other decisive qualities, why not.
The Witcher 3 was able to do all those things, why make ourselves dependent on an American game engine?
Let’s keep using the Polish one instead for Ciri’s story.
From what I heard it’s because they reached the maximum of the Red Engine with Cyberpunk.
You can upgrade game engines…
There are limits to what can be easily done, at some point it makes more sense to start over. Given the choice of build a new game engine or use an existing one, I would choose to use an existing one.
If you’re thinking small and don’t care about innovation sure.
I’m still pissed about how Halo Infinite’s game engine was sabotaged because Microsoft cared more about avoiding employee benefits so they hired 18 month contractors who kept getting fired right when they mastered the new engine.
You need massive budget to r&d game engine and come up with something truly innovative. That’s not something game studio of this size can do when they have to keep things going to retain players and investors. You also need use-case for what you innovated, otherwise you just wasted time and money.
Most games aren’t that innovative. But you are correct for projects like Kitten Space Agency a custom engine makes sense. However building from scratch takes longer and added to development cost.
Witcher developers aren’t starting from scratch though, they can optimise the engine and add better physics.
That optimisation may come at a greater cost than using an existing engine. You also have to consider, with an industry standard engine it is easier to hire and train new devs.
Every system has architecture which is good for something and bad for else. That’s basic software development. You cannot optimize endlessly. At some point you have to choose that A is more important than B and to achieve better A you need significant change in architecture designed for B. This cost time and money. Not a little, because rewriting game engine stops game development and requires specialized game engine developers, NOT game developers (users of engine). Maybe it will be news for you but C-suite do not care about game engine development, it’s not the product they sell, they sell finished game. Epic’s Unreal is product, it’s getting good budget in the company which is 4 times bigger in head count and 20 times higher in revenue.
If you still going to reply with another “but just”, then I’m giving up on trying to reason with you. I recommend Newstainleo do same as I see they are trying to get this point across to you too.
But why do they not simply build an engine with all the good stuff, and don’t do any of the bad stuff? Checkmate atheists
Daaamn, is that the innovation other lemming was talking about? Genius!
Xbox360 graphics was good enough.
The Witcher 4 isn’t going to look and feel like a “generic” UE5 game, Nowakowski suggests.
is this an ai article?
I just hope they can create a playable experience for hanhelds. It’s not like the ram shortage is going to stop anytime soon. EDIT to add: it would be ideal if they switched to a different engine for their next installment, but doing that mid game would just cause a repeat of cyberpunk 2077.