At last week’s E3, the highlight of the show was the first public showing of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, the game development platform that will power the industry’s next generation.
The previous version, Unreal 3, has been used by a variety of developers in more than 150 games since 2006 including “Borderlands,” “Mass Effect” and “Gears of War.”
Unreal 4 will not only be used for game development, but for film storyboarding, architectural visualization and medical/real world simulations.
“There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation,” says Cliff Bleszinski, Epic’s design director. “It is up to Epic, and [founder] Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap. They need to damn near render ‘Avatar’ in real time, because I want it and gamers want it — even if they don’t know they want it.”
In the past, a single floating ember could slow a scene down. Unreal 4 can portray millions of particles when given sufficient hardware. Moreover, it can display photo-realistic lens flare, bokeh distortion, lava flow, environmental destruction, fire, and detail in landscapes. (See samples in the Wired article.)
Kismet 2, Epic’s new visual scripting tool, allows non-programmers to create and script game elements. And unlike current engines, Unreal 4 allows one to see changes instantly. The engine is filled with a variety of tools that will shorten production schedules and costs.
At last week’s E3, the highlight of the show was the first public showing of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, the game development platform that will power the industry’s next generation.
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