Unreal Engine 3 Exposed

Apart from the new rendering engine and physics system, Unreal 3.0 engine seems to have plenty more tricks up its sleeve. The engine is helping raise the tools creation to a new level through the new bump-map and spherical harmonic lighting preprocessing tool. What's so special about this powerful tool is that it enables characters to "light with the visual fidelity of their several-million-triangle source art and a new visual shader editing interface enabling artists to create real-time shaders with the same level of complexity of what was previously only possible with offline renderers." And that's fancy, city-folk talk that means it makes things real purty.

Wow... nice!

Anyone wants some?

The engine also allows an impressive AI, with advanced path finding, complex level navigation, individual decision making, and team-based AI. Characters are enabled to perform both simple and complex actions, or a re-sequence of actions in a very satisfying manner, interacting with their environment by following an advanced pattern which allows them to act and move in an intelligent manner. This means the bots can act like the annoying 14 year old that plague the online world like genital warts. The plan is for the bots to be able to curse you and invite you to engage in sexual congress with your parents when you do really well or just when you join the game.

With this new engine, Epic aims at obtaining greater visual perfection with advanced and more detailed graphics, as well as a more realistic physics system with the goal of creating a more believable and authentic gaming experience. The engine is also optimized for multiplayer with full Internet and LAN support for the PC and consoles. Their third generation engine is mostly intended for massive, huge outdoor settings and large levels. "Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 200,000 to 1,200,000 visible triangles," says their official statement. In order to reach the throbbing, massive, 1,200,000 visible triangles, you'll have to buy it dinner and a movie first and then take things slow. No wait, that's just me.

Epic believes many companies will be interested in licensing the engine, as it would allow them to use many of its advanced features with ease, as their new engine contains many options needed for creation of MMOs - many famous developers in the MMO genre decided for Epic's technology before, so it only seems logical they would decide to do so again in the future. "The Unreal 3 engine has been designed for fast action games with a quick response time, so we can support really fast action game play on a broadband or better net connection, but with significant amounts of lag. That's always been a design factor that's on our minds."

Epic insists on not making any comparisons between their engine and some of the current most advanced game engines because their engine is not intended for any of the games currently on the market. Still, they do admit being compared to their rivals id and Valve is a great compliment, although their engine isn't intended for the present game hardware. Epic is future-oriented, with an intention to raise the gaming experience onto another level. In Sweeney's own words, "Unreal Engine3 is essentially one generation ahead of the hybrid DirectX7-9 engines shipping in 2004." Their new engine is perhaps half-way there, but the prospect of a completely new and technologically advanced game engine does not mean it is going to serve as a replacement for Epic's Unreal engine of the second generation. After several major upgrades, this series is supposed to support games that will appear as late as 2006/7 (So suck eggs and play the Sims till it's ready, fanboi!).

On the other hand, Unreal 3.0 engine will be intended for mainstream and high-end market PCs, so their roles have been clearly defined. Both of them are planned to be quite long-lasting, like myself. Epic also intends to optimize the engine for the next-gen consoles by taking extra care their resources are spent adequately. What does that mean? I assumed it means porn and beer but I was wrong. Here's Epic's Mark Rein explanation: "If you look carefully at the detail that we're showing on the screen, it's 2,000 times more detailed than the last generation, so that's a lot of data. So, we have to be more intelligent. If we get four times more memory in the next console, or eight times more memory, we're not going to get 2,000 times more memory! So we definitely have to be very careful and efficient about loading things in from the disk."

Rein also added the new engine is particularly designed for multi-threading, and its main purpose is to provide astonishing visuals without using extra memory. The programmers had to adjust its options in order to support this, but they however managed to create an engine that can process huge numbers of polygons and textures, allowing great detail without using additional resources such as extra memory. Epic intends to make use of the fact the next-gen gaming consoles will feature a significant improvement in graphics, taking full benefit from their possibilities. There are no explicit details as to which console system their new engine is primarily intended for, but judging from Epic's insinuations the gaming community decided it was Microsoft's Xbox, and Epic has done nothing to discourage such speculations. Of course, they could surprise all of us and opt to offer it only for the Nintendo 64. You never know.

Another topic of possible interest is definitely video games that would run on this engine, and Epic has stated there are already several titles which would definitely support the Unreal 3 engine. Epic is currently working on an entirely new project that will run on their new engine. Apart from that, several development teams are using or planning to use their engine for their own projects, and one of these is supposedly Sigil Games Online's MMORPG Vanguard. Also rumored is a Tetris sequel. (Goddamn liar. - Ed)

Epic is certainly encouraged by the technical possibilities the future offers, trying to capture a part of it in their new engine. They are ever talking about the future, imagining what it would be like in a decade or two when it will be possible to create photorealistic settings and imitate real body physics almost to perfection. It's a bold new world out there. Shame we're all gonna perish in one devastating global conflict.

I'm just kidding, relax, man... play some games.