This Tech cannot be ignored and I’m really curious how UnrealEngine will challenge it.
In my opinion, this is the type of tech needed to deliver the Superman Game Players have been begging decades for.
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Interesting vaporware demo or maybe you can actually do all this now in SC? 
Either way, not convinced this kind of immense scale interests Epic. Its never really been their thing (mega-large-worlds / sci-fi / planets). Every time it comes up (Ask Anything posts) its just 
.
But of course it’d be amazing if you could do even half of this in Unreal and not need Unigine or hope that Star-Engine / Dual-Universe gets licensed to Indies around 2030 if we’re lucky. 
New types of AI building tools would still be needed to populate entire worlds too anyway. And how many of those giant procedural tools even exist yet, except for select studios here and there? BTW: What kind of rig specs did you end up using for the Superman / Matrix fly-throughs (assuming you’re actually flying in real-time and its not just all sequenced)??? 
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I would like to think that if its of interest to Game Devs, its of interest to Epic. Especially when we talk about Metaverses, Multiverses, MMOs and the likes. After all, UnrealEngine is The most powerful real-time 3D creation tool.
I would use this scale and transitioning to put all my games in one map and travel between them smooth in a load-screen less way both online and off. Not just levels. I’m thinking both outer and inner spaces.
I’m experimenting with this idea now on a small scale, encapsulating environments within Sky Sphere/Cubes without world partitioning. I’m going 100% 3D Multiplayer shared and individual Spatial Inventory System, Shops, Customization Environments.
I 1000% agree with use of Procedural Generation and Generative AI to assist in world building and entity creation no matter the scale. I’m integrating such Tech in my own Player Collaborative Construction Tools.
In regards to my Superman fly through. Yes, its in real-time featuring a Hyper-cinematic Camera System. Efforts towards my Game. I’m using all AMD Hardware: Ryzen 9 5950 16-Core 3.4Ghz & Radeon RX 6700 XT, 32G Ram.
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I second that it’s only of interest to a very narrow group of devs.
Especially, as you can make a very similar effect without having to model entire solar systems 
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I don’t know how large or small the group of devs are who are interested. But I do know if the power is available it will get used and most likely abused.
I’m very interested in discussing how similar effects can be pulled off in UE5. I can imagine using Niagara Fluids to achieve some of them.
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How would fluids be used?
Some mentioned in the SE Demo Vid: Dynamic Fire & Smoke, Dynamic Volumetric Clouds, Fluid-like Wormhole FX, Physically Based Advanced Water FX.
Practically every object in the world could be driven by the Niagara Particle Systems LOL. I might challenge myself to dev a game world using only Niagara.
I think you could build it using only
HDR
A few planet meshes
The normal sky atmos ( with clouds )
Planes ( instead of water system )
Level streaming
If you do it right, 90% of player wouldn’t know the difference
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This is true, but its also not true. 
Sure, there are ways to cheat. YT is full of examples that we’ve probably all seen. But the results never quite look right. Sure you can accelerate the orbit atmosphere transition, like doing a sequenced cut-scene or fixed-point zoom in out on top of a point on a planet where you’ll be landing (and then later taking off from presumably).
But obviously that lacks the impact of bouncing in and out of the atmosphere, or freestyle flying through curved atmosphere. The transition from space to orbit? That’s the easiest bit. But it can feel or look fake / unreal. Steaming is a mixed bag too. Its just too easy to run up against non-seamless lag. Lighting for deep space vs orbit vs landing? That’s another aspect. 
But like you say, what if 90% of gamers don’t care / won’t notice, then should you invest 100’s or 1000’s of work hours to achieve the perfect results? Look at the long running Eden project on here or similar unfinished projects. Plus what about all of the 3rd-Party plugins that are available now. How about the Worldscape plugin or Max D’s Shader World. @TechLord, still addicted to buying things on the marketplace??? 
If so, ever tried these or similar packs?
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It’s not convincing to see lods, landscape detail and meshes pop into existence at 20:50 at 200 meters distance before seeing a huge landscape 10KM away in (faked full detail?) Unreal already has ways of faking it, it’s impressive to see it deal with lighting correctly at small and large scale but tech is only new tech if it really deals with everything.
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I possess Shader World, however, I have yet to use it within my asset horde. Worldscape looks really cool but I need the pricepoint to cool down. LOL.
I’m not just interested in outer space, im also Interested in inner space at the micro, nano, quantum scales. Think Star Trek and Fantastic Voyage have a Baby.
Would entering a Cell the scale of a Planet be rendered in the same fashion as entering a Celestial Planet?
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This is CryEngine 3 with some additions, right?
“Large nominal units” is very different from “large scales of objects” – this demo shows mostly the former, which really isn’t that hard with some camera/perspective tricks; the latter is much harder. Seamless distance travel is largely a question of defining transition points and shifting/scaling coordinate systems.
To be fair, Kerbal Space Program (version 1, the only good version) also does most of this 
– on top of Unity! It’s more of a production problem, than an engine problem. (But the 64-bit coordinates we got in 5.0 help!)
Having built a full-earth simulation and rendering MMO engine in the past (sold to the US Government) I can tell you that normal players don’t actually want “earth scale.” The earth is massively, vastly, full of stuff that has no gameplay value. And there’s no reason a “virtual” earth should be the size, or even shape, of the real earth – the whole point of “virtual” is to make something that works better for some use cases than “real.”
Real distances between cities is boring. Real city sizes are boring. Real planet sizes are boring. Luckily, this game has compressed most of that, as will any game. They also have a lot of content at this point, and content is king! I think the Star Citizen developers are cool for chasing their dream, despite all the various ups and downs, and I’m happy to see them finding ways to keep that going, but if I were to build a universe-scale game today (or even just Kerbal Space Program 3) I’d do it on Unreal.
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Big fan of space sims. But as time drags on, it feels like SC demos all start to look the same (lack creativity). With all the resources they have, it’d be great to see different worlds that look completely different from anything else so far. Maybe they’ve got some?
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What I wonder the most is, with all the procedural tools they probably have by now, can you feed in a particular style of architecture, and build entire worlds? What if you feed the AI models images of Renaissance Italy… Aztec-Mayan-Inca culture… Ancient Greece / Rome… South East Asia Temples… Fuse all that with sci-fi concept art. What do you get?
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For sure aiming for the super real, often just results in the super bland. But hey, there’s armies of cesium / google noobs out there right now that didn’t get the memo.
Who knows maybe something will come from that. Doubt it though as game dev is never easy. Easier to get lost in human hubris… Realistically how can you expect to design mega worlds anyway, when you’ve only seen maybe 5% / 10% / 20% of what’s on this rock??? 
Star Wars? hehe. Reminds me of Battlefront 2.
That is really cool. I tried to get into procedural city and building layout sim for a world and learnt it’s a lot more complex than it sounds to get results like real life. The one and only game I can think of (but great example) that could be earth size and work is Project Zomboid, because it turns every corner into a story. (I considered minecraft but… no)
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Took a quick look and I can actually see what you mean…
Oh well, nothing is ever really new I guess, is it, right???
Its all has been tried / done / borrowed before in reality.
Can happily retire now maybe, knowing it was covered.
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