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Unity3D vs Fostbite3

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by yuriythebest, Jul 29, 2013.

  1. yuriythebest

    yuriythebest

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    to those yet unacquainted:

    :


    While of course Unity it "the peoples engine" - aimed at a wide array of uses, simplicity and low cost, vs Frostbite - the "big industry / large team, proprietary engine"

    THE QUESTION:
    using unity, realistically, if you had a large team, would you be able to do the cool stuff shown in the above video (not just as tech demos of individual things, but of it all working together)
     
  2. KheltonHeadley

    KheltonHeadley

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    Never heard of Fostbite. ;)

    No point in comparing.
     
  3. Acumen

    Acumen

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  4. Dan Fury

    Dan Fury

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    Frostbite isn't the "big industry / large team, proprietary engine" , it's the "EA exclusive engine"...
     
  5. JamesLeeNZ

    JamesLeeNZ

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    no. unity got nothing on frostbite
     
  6. imaginaryhuman

    imaginaryhuman

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    Apart from the physics of things breaking apart into little pieces and flying all over etc, most of the rest of it could be done with the right shaders it seems? Maybe I am being naive.

    But when will Unity get GPU-driven physics?
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2013
  7. JamesLeeNZ

    JamesLeeNZ

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    There's a truckload more than just graphics going on in frostbite. I would imagine its more of a tailored to FPS engine though.
     
  8. Ben-Massey

    Ben-Massey

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    If you had the team, definitely.
    Unity is the tool to allow anyone and everyone to make just about anything, it depends on the artists. Obviously features aren't going to be specialized as they're in other engines, you're not going to get the same performance, easy functionality, and possibly left to create a lot of tools and plugins yourself to pull off anything similar.

    It's like for our own project, we'd like to think our water is up their with the big titles. Unity never had this technology for us, but we created it ourselves.

    Short answer, yes, long answer no, but that's just my opinion.
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2013
  9. JamesLeeNZ

    JamesLeeNZ

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    Unity is too far behind in physics to compete, no matter the team size. I would say Unity is also a behind in DX11 features, but I cant really be sure if that statements correct.

    Multiplayer... well... yeah...

    GUI... what's this GUI you speak of...

    Visuals... hard to say. I imagine Unity would get bogged down if you managed to push it to the visual level of FB2

    BUT...

    Unity is easy to use for us mere mortals.
     
    MO_UNITY and shkar-noori like this.
  10. dxcam1

    dxcam1

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    You can do this in unity but you might as well make your own engine or apply for a job at unity if you're gonna go through the trouble of rewriting their entire engine.
     
  11. JamesLeeNZ

    JamesLeeNZ

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    lol cam.

    Dont get me wrong, unity is great for what it is, but it cant even be put into the same category as frostbite2
     
  12. chrisall76

    chrisall76

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    you could do this with Unity, but you would have to edit the engine.
    Could also be that the frostbite engine is developed by the same team that creates Battlefield so
    of course they know how to use the engine to the fullest.
     
  13. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Not possible without a source license and a lot of work for the following reasons:

    1. completely replace unity's lighting pipeline and shadow system with geometrics enlighten
    2. completely renovate how meshes, textures and so forth are given to the engine - heavy streaming
    3. completely change how umbra works with unity to accept streaming data

    The rest is doable within reason, but you aren't going to get close to what frostbite can do without a source license and a year's work, minimum. I'm a unity fanboy but I know it's limits.


    COMPLETELY naive, yeah. Unity can compete if you're doing a room or an enclosed area, but there's no way it can handle the data loads frostbite can nor can it match the lighting on anything except DX11, and even then it will struggle to keep up framerate wise. It's just not built for streaming.

    Unity will also fail hard at trying to to GTA 5 even on a system 5 times stronger than a PS3. It'd have to load the entire world in and have a computer with around 8gb of ram plus the latest gpu/cpu. All because again, there's no streaming or management of data on demand. And you can't do that without a source license and heavy changes.

    I would expect Unity 5 to address this (not being sarcastic).


    Meanwhile Unity excels in level based games, it would probably do Halo 4 really, really well for instance, of course assuming same developer. Halo's areas are nicely divided up and carefully managed.
     
    Last edited: Jul 29, 2013
  14. mokko6

    mokko6

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    Very interesting responses so far.

    One of the few times somebody isn't chewed out, talked down to, told to read the top sticky, or condescendingly dismissed for even suggesting that Unity can't do (right off the shelf) what another engine can do.


    :)
     
  15. jmatthews

    jmatthews

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    One of the main engine coders of frostbite is this wicked PhD that has several innovations to his name, mostly regarding streaming data, and the parallel processing of multiple streams of divergent data. I'm talking "whitepaper, yawn if you're still awake, drill down to the RISC level machine code." type optimizations that make what they're doing possible. Genuine bleeding edge stuff. Unity's innovations are in interface, cohesion, ease of use, toolchain, and content development. Two different arenas and I'd argue that each of these represent the state of the art in their respective fields.
     
  16. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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    Not really much of a comparison here... the two engines have totally different target markets.
    Unity is built to be the all-in-one general purpose engine to run games on all platforms, and this is their focus.

    FrostBite is a Windows specific engine that is dedicated to making the games look, feel and sound as good as possible, making use of all the latest PC/console hardware at its disposal.

    Two very different directions if you ask me.. not even sure why these two engines are even being compared..
     
  17. JamesLeeNZ

    JamesLeeNZ

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    so, I hadnt actually watched the video at the top...

    just did. pooped a little.

    Definitely upgrading gfx card on release. Will give the wife my 6970. lol.
     
  18. dogzerx2

    dogzerx2

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    Isn't an engine like that a bit useless without a big experienced team? And of course money to hire this team! Otherwise how can you bring out all that engine potential?
    For small devs it's a lot more useful to use unity, easy quick development and still great results!
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2013
  19. chrisall76

    chrisall76

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    It's built by the same developer that uses it, and a few of the EA team's are using it (like Bioware for ME4). So yea, a pretty experienced team
    is needed.
     
  20. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Very misguided there old chap. Streaming technology makes being indie far easier, not harder. Streaming would allow a wasteful hobbyist much more potential than otherwise. Yes its a waste of power in the hands of an indie or hobbyist, and a true demonstration of power in teams. But you do not need more than one person to use this power.

    It's got nothing to do with art materials in this case and everything to do with shunting boatloads of data.

    But streaming is for really large worlds and MMOS!

    ...or it's for the last of us, where you can pack every single room full of detailed textures and interesting objects. Slenderman clones would be full of objects which would be scattered by the physics engine and saved.


    In a hypothetical situation if I was going to integrate streaming into unity I'd do two things:

    1. I'd have hints. Each area can hint what media and textures it might need. Could leverage umbra data to predict.

    2. I'd have object impostors. In the editor, you specify what object the impostor is sourced from and treat the impostor much like a normal mesh: rotate it, scale it, etc. Then at runtime, this is all replaced with placeholder gameobjects and streaming brings the meshes in / textures in and out on demand. Relies on a decent hinting system.

    In any case its doable in unity with a source license and a decent team to bring some streaming to it. It's a lot of work for unity.
     
    Last edited: Jul 30, 2013
  21. I am da bawss

    I am da bawss

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    Actually, if I recall correctly, those "physics" destruction were actually all pre-baked - meaning they used tools such as 3DS MAX (MassFX) and break those models apart and then importing those meshes into the engine and basically set the hitboxes and breaking condition and let the physics engine handle the debris falling animation. But the actual breaking apart part is not done in-engine.
     
  22. dogzerx2

    dogzerx2

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    I reckon this streaming tech is super awesome, and hopefully indies get their hands on it widely in mid-term. But it's like cryengine, their demos look fantastic, probably more than you could possibly do in unity... but at what cost? A complex user unfriendly workflow a simple mortal would never understand? Just give me unity.. I don't mind I can't scatter 100s of objects yet, I wouldn't even have time or money to model so much content anyway! Of course when unity has the chance to bring new tech like streaming while staying user friendly, we will all have a reason to par-tay woohoo!!
     
  23. gallenwolf

    gallenwolf

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    If that's so, then the Houdini Engine plugin will be rocking inside Unity! Can't wait.
     
  24. yuriythebest

    yuriythebest

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    Gratitude. I indeed composed this post knowing the very likely-hood of such responses, and wrote a several sentences "diffusing" it before it even occurred, demonstrating that I had a grasp of the subject matter and not just someone saying "Well frostbyte has feature X so Unity Sux!".

    So it seems that, the main thing missing is the ability to smoothly stream assets (something the company I work for has indeed noticed when it came to iOS) - also frostbyte seems to have a general cohesion to the dynamic environment (trees shaking because of wind, boats affected by waves, etc and it all working together)- then again how much of that is the engine and how much of that is people using the engine well is another matter- there is probably a very good amount of both to see such stunning results.
     
  25. lmbarns

    lmbarns

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    You've seen this unity ocean right? https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/4481

    Just because it's not common doesn't mean it's impossible.