Epic Games has revealed the full demo video of its next-generation Unreal 4 Engine, showing of some advanced new lighting effects, impressive draw distance and objects that are far more reactionary to their environment than before.
While we did get a first look at a few images from the video just over a week ago, it's only really now, with the full motion animation that some of the effects can be appreciated.
The most obvious and eye candy like of the new features are the GPU particles. Being able to bring to bear graphics card acceleration in this area allows for many more small scale particles, like dust motes and magical swirly stuff. That's right, that beautiful, bitty, purple or green dust that always appears in games when magic is afoot, can now be rendered in real-time without a pre-determined animation.
Along with these are some much more advanced lighting effects. Secondary reflections and translucency have much more affect on the scene, allowing for increased realism in each of the demo's interior and exterior shots. Coupled with the new particle effects and tweaked volumetric lighting and there are some quite breathtaking scenes in the demo.
However it's only in the developer video released alongside the UE4 engine demo that we can see other graphical advances with this new engine. The improved day/night cycle system has far more lifelike lighting changes and the ability to move in and out of the editor mode at ease, should mean those licensing Epic's next-gen engine will have a far easier time editing together these pretty new effects.
The lava looks great too. Very gloopy and heavy.