Unreal Engine 3 Exposed

Have you ever been hit by a bus and were absolutely happy about it? Maybe you are one of these folks whose sense of humor cannot be wrecked by anything, no matter how horrible or frustrating that something may be. (Your father leaving your mother for Elton John would be a good example.) In that case you won't understand my present state of utter misery and exasperation. No, this is not one of these 'my wife left me for another woman and wouldn't let me watch her have sex with her gal' heartbreaking stories. It's actually quite simple - I've been assigned with writing an article about Epic's new Unreal 3.0 engine, and I'm not that enthusiastic about it.

You may wonder why. Indeed, why? Even posing this simple question demonstrates you've never been forced to deal with this particular subject in the shape of a written essay. The truth is, kind reader, that writing about game engines is a lot like waxing your legs. (Not that you know anything about it. Or maybe you do?) After the initial shock of hot wax sticking to your skin, you need to collect all that's left of your courage and pull the stripe of wax. That hurts, you know. Still, why the comparison to writing about game engines? Well, just think about it: that's something that needs to be done, but will most probably go unnoticed. Articles such as this tend to be boring, as nobody has the patience to skim through the article and read the full specs. The main reason seems to boil down to this: these articles usually do not feature any pictures. People just want to see what it looks and plays like and seldom want just to read about it.

I imagine this is how Shakespeare felt when he presented 'Hamlet' to the public. "Too many words," the critic said. "Let's see some action." After a most engaging dialogue between Hamlet and a skull ensued, he realized the author did not bother to include sex in his play. "Hmm, let me look at the written form and find out what happens next. Maybe the prince *does* get lucky later on," the critic thought with a sly smile. Seconds later, he was clearly shocked on finding out the play included a rather long dialogue between Hamlet and a ghost as well as several mad ramblings of the prince himself and Ophelia's occasional fits of madness. "This gets worse and worse. And there are absolutely *no pictures*!" And with this, the critic threw the manuscript into the mud and left the play. Actors on the stage continued to converse with the ghost, who seemed quite unsatisfied with the effect he was leaving on the public, especially younger kids who tried to peek under his gown.

In case you want to read something really funny about an unorthodox theatric group that performed the most amazing and original Shakespeare ever, check out Paul Bailey's 'An Immaculate Mistake', and if you still want to hang around with me after this incredibly long intro and find out more about Unreal 3.0 engine, I'll try to pull myself together and give you an articulate article. I said I'll try, so don't expect too much.

The demonstration of the Epic's next-gen game graphics engine - the Unreal engine of the third generation - instantly succeeded in drawing attention of the gaming community with its technological progressiveness and the unbelievable dose of reality it featured. This engine, which features even more impressive graphics, also offers next-gen console optimizations and is announced as the engine with 'one of the most mature tool pipelines in the industry'. I think this means the game engine will feature full frontal nudity.

The main programmer at Epic, Tim Sweeney, was very lavish with the info on the latest Unreal engine, so the gaming community has had the opportunity to find out many interesting details about the engine. Sweeny explained this advanced engine is intended for what Epic thinks will be the mainstream in 2006 and next-gen consoles, with DirectX 9.0 as the minimum specification, considering the fact that 1GB video card will let you enjoy the game at full detail. If you cannot afford a 1 Gig video card, Microsoft is rumored to be preparing a program where gamers can trade in their organs in exchange for computer part upgrades. Need more RAM? Simply donate 1 kilo of bone marrow. Donating one of your corneas will get you a new CPU and that 1 Gig video card I just mentioned can be yours for a kidney. Keep in mind that most humans can survive with only one kidney filleting the deadly toxins and bodily wastes from their bloodstream, which is good because NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 is namely the first video card that can run this new engine properly.

"There is a new 100% dynamic, 64-bit-per-pixel high definition rendering engine focus on per-pixel lighting and dynamic shadowing. This includes all of the logical features you would expect in an HDR rendering pipeline, such as lenticular halos and light blooms, dynamically shadowed lights and projectors, normal mapping, displacement mapping, and raytracing effects such as volumetric lighting and refraction. But it goes further than that with entirely new things that haven't been done in real-time before, such as holographic texture mapping, spherical harmonic lighting, and dynamic soft shadows," says Sweeney. Their new engine brings an advanced dynamic shadowing, which enables high-quality shadow renders with characters that cast dynamic soft shadows and shadows that follow the torch moves. The engine supports per-pixel lighting and shadowing, normal-mapping and real-time particle collision. And it makes damn fine meatball sub as well. Mmmm Mmm!

Apart from various advanced graphical features, Sweeney mentioned this new engine will also integrate an entirely new and rewritten physics and animation system which enables a fuller and more complex interaction between objects, as well as a new skeletal animation system which works on the principle of combining motion-captured animation with physics feedback and procedural controllers. The Unreal 3.0 engine will support rigid body physics system with rag doll character animation, complex vehicles, and dismemberable objects. "We are using the physics for vehicles, rag dolls and character animation, even for walking physics and driving large vehicles," Sweeney says. He also adds the engine could support MechWarrior type walking vehicles, but they have decided nothing about it yet. Speaking of rigid, I remember as a boy (OK, let's suppose for the sake of this side story I was actually a boy, and not a girl) seeing the statue of David for the first time at a gallery near my childhood home. I used to get off the school bus, walk to the gallery and spend hours sitting and staring at the wonder and beauty that was the human form, brought forth skillfully and masterfully from within the cold stone. After the weeks on sitting on the same bench, day after day, just staring at that masterpiece I realized that it was not the wonder of the human form that drew me to this spot each day but rather the fact that David, compared to me, was hung like the proverbial horse. It is my hope that the Unreal 3 engine will help me overcome these feelings of inadequacy that have plagued me ever since.

The official presentation boasts with enabled physical properties such as friction with all renderable materials, while complex skeletons consist from up to 4 bone influences per vertex (and are built from 100 to 200 bones). What's most interesting about this aspect of the engine is the fact that characters will animate according to their health status, mood and fatigue, and their bodies will accordingly interact with other characters and objects in their vicinity, following all the changes around them. This will result in a seemingly alive world, an accurate simulation of life, which is apparently governed by the similar rules to the ones in the real world. You will be able to see some really unbelievable things, like breaking the material and body parts which can now be pulled out. "There'll be more integration between hand created animation, physics animation and procedural animation. Now days, all our joints have breaking strength in them," says Sweeney and goes on to explain how body parts will react according to the environmental conditions, so if they are shot they will fly back for a second.