A Boy and His Kite - Jun 11 & Jun 12

Just a quick question. Will the kite demo run on my system(not the .exe , from the editor) without lagging ? or do I need to upgrade my RAM ?

Configuration -
i7 3770
8 gb DDR3 1600MHz RAM
nvidea gtx 980

Mind sharing where?

You definitely need to add another 8GB to the RAM. Still can’t say it would make it lag free since it was running on GTX Titans… I’m curious to see how much resources it takes to have a 20km^2 landscape in engine.

As always, I am a bit skeptical. I mean the demo is nice and everything, but unless they have techniques in the engine the make it running on 8GB without nvidia titans, there is nothing to be excited about. Any engine can create sth. like this if you feed it with endless Ram and the latest and greatest gpu(s). This demo makes really only sense if it can run on hardware that is not overpowered. See open world games…they are running in normal powered hardware (8 GB is what most people have, imo) because they have good techniques in the engine, see the latest witcher title.
To just dish out a open world demo and say ‘yes, but you need min. 16GB ram and a titan, or better two of each’…well, reply would be ‘thanks, keep it’

It’s cruel to compare Kite Demo level which is a tech demo (where it’s all about showcasing the technical advancements with maximum quality possible) to open world games on the market where it’s all about maximum optimization, maintaining good quality AND performance to make it possible to play on mid range PCs and above so they can have more sales.

Kite Demo level is a different category than games category. No game has photoscanned rocks with 8096x8096 texture resolution etc. :slight_smile:

Oh, looks like I either didn’t read the release notes carefully enough (once again…) or you snuck in those updates ninja style. Either way, I’m very happy to hear it’s still being updated at all!
I just tried to get some spotlight GI going, but it doesn’t appear to be working out of the box. Are there any additional steps required to set it up other than what I would do for directional lights?
And do you have information about when we might see that sweet emissive lighting feature by any ? :slight_smile:

You’ll certainly need more RAM for the whole scene in editor.

Hi ,

Hope you well dude. Need some help mate, Ive made a little command line app (thats threaded) to convert Tangent space normal maps into Tangent space Bent normal maps by inputting the original normal map with a height map to generate the new bent normal map. It also generates AO for it as well. It uses basic ray tracing to achieve this.

I need a solution for self shadowing normal maps in UE4, Also i think it would be far more efficient to do parallax with pixel offset node with Bent normals. The parallax ways at the moment are very costly, especially at grazing angles. Also by using bent normal maps AO directionality and possibly GI would also be able to take advantage.

The code is VS 2013 and tiny, Can i send it to you to take a look. In the long run ill add a nice GUI for it. But i need you to take a look to see how you could support the bent normal format with UE4 and your shader pipe with PBR. Also you can end up with Aliasing on the self shadows from the bent normal maps at the moment, if you know how that could be solved would also be .

Cheers Brother,

PS the tool will be made available for free to the community to use in projects :slight_smile:

But then what is the point of showcasing it as representative material for the engine if it can not run on normal computers. It is misleading. People try it and are exited only to realize that you need overpowered demo hardware to run it. All the other indie engines could just show the same and more. I could code my own basic raytracer and built the kite demo and then have it run on a 64core machine with 128GB Ram and 5 Titans. :slight_smile:
This is really just bending the truth a bit. Unity and the others do not show over powered things like that because they know 99% of their users will not be able to run it. And because they know that there is no novelty in it in terms of engines. They only novelty here is that for the first time a studio used such an over powered machine, it could run the throw-it-all-in Kite Demo… -1 Guys, -1…

Hmmm going back to the point I made in previous post, the reason for the Kite Demo was to showcase the features. And every single feature does work on all the mid range hardware too. Are you not able to use the new grass tool, procedural foliage too, DFAO, DOF etc. with a mid range PC ? :slight_smile:
The reason Kite Demo needs such high end hardware is mostly because of the aggressive use of high poly meshes and really large textures. If you down res them all I’m pretty sure you don’t even need a high end GTX to run it.
Their simple grass mesh is just +700 Tris where if it was a game and optimization mattered it was probably less than 200 Tris. And things like that. :slight_smile:

I feel like you’re stretching things a bit PolyPlant, wasn’t it running on a single Titan X?

If it’s running on a single card that people can go out and buy, I personally wouldn’t call it ‘overpowered demo hardware’.
Something more like ‘enthusiast level PC’ seems more appropriate to me.

We also don’t know what fps it was running at, but to use the assets from the demo you really don’t need a Titan/980 ti.

Ok, these are all valid points!

Bit could they please also publish a 2K or 4K version of the demo. I do not need 8K textures and high poly meshes. Optional yes, but not as the only thing available!

I am looking forward to it, because I like to landscape. But if they only publish the highres stuff, they can keep it.

I want to walk through that landscape. My machine runs AC Unity without a hick-up. If this thing does not run on it because they give ‘over powered/ enthusiast’ user rig stuff as the only option, then keep it.

I do not need 8K! I need to have it running!

^^ I’ll 100% be re sizing a bunch of the assets as I don’t need 8K either, I just appreciate having access to the highest quality stuff so that I can decide what quality I want to use them at =]

With just a little effort you can resize all the textures yourself. Just load an empty level, export a texture to desktop, resize it and import back. :slight_smile:

You do realize that people who only own ‘normal’ machines are not exactly the audience who go through this workflow. New people to UE4 will not at all.
I would not! I mean, Epic, just publish a lighter version of the thing as well.
You can not be serious…8K.
No game in the world uses this. No-one will notice any difference to what they have seen so far in any of their games.
Really, if they decide to only publish the 8k version and only a handful people will be able to open the thing after hours of loading time, then they can just keep it.

that’s because its not game it’s a cinematic and they use that level of detail on a regular basis:).

I want to move/walk through that stuff. That’s why I would download it. I can watch the cinematic on youtube without half a day waiting for my machine to open an 8K project :slight_smile:
Even when they published just the assets and the tiny tiny scene there were people everywhere: ‘can not open it/ my cpu blue screened/ waited for 4 hours to load…’.
If there is no lighter version for this much bigger thing here, they can as well just skip it.

I’d be happy to down res everything and provide a light version but my internet is slow. I hope someone else does this as I think there are a lot of people with low/mid PCs who like to look at how things are done in that map.

Well I think mid range cards will probably handle this fine in a few years.
Personally I’m hoping they have a sparse virtual texture solution in the works for DX12 which will make some of these concerns redundant.

As a stress test it is quite superb.

When oh when will this release drop, the suspense is killing me!