Unreal Engine 3 (A GDC trailer showing off the latest features)

Epic Games to Show Major Unreal Engine 3 Upgrades at GDC 2009

Whats New in Unreal Engine 3
Find out why top developers and publishers use Unreal Engine 3 to power their games for PC, Xbox 360® and PLAYSTATION®3. Epic will showcase the most recent upgrades to the Unreal Engine in a private theater within its expo suite, ES 144, located in the West Hall.

Unreal Lightmass, a new global illumination solver, will be shown for the first time at GDC. Unreal Lightmass produces high-quality static lighting with next-generation effects, such as: soft shadows with accurate penumbrae; diffuse and specular interreflection; and color bleeding. Furthermore, Epic's new Swarm distributed computing framework enables lighting to be generated up to 10 times faster. The new lighting features are bundled with Unreal Engine 3 and benefit all current and future engine licensees. Like all of Epics engine features, Unreal Lightmass is available at no additional cost to licensees.

A new content browser and search engine, powered by a back-end database, enables designers to find game assets near-instantly among large amounts of source content. With thumbnail previews, support for content tagging, and asset collection management, the Unreal Content Browser frees artists from the need to manually open files to look for game assets.

We looked at how easy it was to search the net with Google, and find photos on Flickr, and redesigned Unreal Engine 3's content searching and tagging along those lines, said Tim Sweeney, chief executive officer and technical director of Epic Games. The result was a productivity boon for artists and designers.

To power the online community features of Gears of War 2, Epic developed a scalable statistics and data management back end. Now available as a general feature of Unreal Engine 3, the Unreal Master Control Program (MCP) is a high-reliability online service architecture supporting announcements, settings management, online population tracking, and data collection for hardware, profile, and game stats. Unreal MCP includes a set of tools for visualizing gameplay, including such features as heat maps displaying regions of player activity within a level.

"Battle-tested by over 6.8 million hours of online player time, Unreal MCP seriously ups the ante for game engines," says Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games. "The online infrastructure required for a modern, triple-A game represents man-years of work, and all of this is now included in Unreal Engine 3."

In addition, Epic Games China will share details regarding its integrated, massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) backend solution for Unreal Engine 3.

Licensees of the Unreal Engine can take advantage of free training sessions on topics including game optimization, content and programming tips, rendering, animation, physics and visuals, as well as workflows for the Unreal Editor, level design and tools at GDC.

Hours for Epics booth are the same as expo hours: Wednesday, March 25, 10:00 a.m. 6:00 p.m., Thursday, March 26, 10:00 a.m. 6:00 p.m., and Friday, March 27, 10:00 a.m. 3:00 p.m. Demos will run on the half hour each day of the show, and appointments are not required.

Those wishing to individually meet with Epic should email Mark Rein, mark.rein@epicgames.com, and specify three possible meeting times, the number of people planning to attend, and whether those individuals would like to see a technology demonstration, chat with Epic business representatives, speak with Epic technical representatives or see to other matters. Availability may be limited, so please respond early. Those unable to confirm an appointment in advance are invited to drop by, and Epic will do its best to accommodate visitors.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• unreal
• engine
• epic
• games
• gears
• of
• war
• ps3
• xbox
• 360
• playstation
• gdc
• 2009
• game
• developers
• conference
• tournament
• middleware
• sony
• microsoft
• nintendo

[dogGsix]

Anybody looking to use the Unreal Engine for their games they can go use UDK for free if you want. Unreal engine is mainly for big companies like BioWare and such. UDK is the free version with some restrictions. UDK is mainly for smaller indie developers or some people who want to make their own free games. They have a commerial use license but after you make your first 50K you get a 25% royalty charge. Also with the actual Unreal engine for big companies you get the source code so you can edit

[lugin1212]

Pls make a new halo with unreal engine pls Then i would love u forever

[GordonFreeMANness]

@themodman101 You suck dicks. Ultimarage lied. You believed. You're a moron. He's a moron. Do morons work at Crytek only? Well, I guess it is 100 percent true: MORONS ONLY!!!

[themodman101]

@GordonFreeMANness

Thats completely incorrect, and Ultimarage is correct.

[loadedbros]

a link could help...

[TrendKillStudios]

@UltimaRage Performance can be increased by the engine, or other softwares. While most of it is determined by your hardware. Unreal Engine uses a few technology to have great looking games, while allowing the user with lower end hardware to have great performance too.

[Nadav667]

You just need a couple hundered thousand dollars and you got it.

[UltimaRage]

Yeah... I'm a level designer. That's impossible - performance is entirely dependent on the power of the hardware. I have an extensive knowledge of game design and am soon going to be working for Crytek.

If that was even technologically feasible, then why don't game companies use this Leadwerks Engine 2.3 instead of the engines they do use? Actually, they'd implement the same feature in their engines... rendering calculations for all rasterization techniques are freely available.

[GordonFreeMANness]

What I mean that Leadwerks Engine 2.3 give you the same performance no matter 1 or 1 million polygons are on screen at the same time. CryEngine 3 can't do the same thing.

[UltimaRage]

Polycount support isn't an engine feature. Any modern engine can support as many polygons as the hardware can render. Additionally, polygons are no longer the only aspect that needs to be considered. Now particles and lighting have become the norm, performance is much more dependent on how many shaders are in a scene, for example. In Crysis, there are over 18,000 shaders at any one time.