Unreal Engine 4 announced

More polys, more shader shizzle, more yadayada. Gimme gameplay

But yeah, one could be pretty pissed fro a developer perspective that they're sitting on more advanced tech than the so called modern unreal engine 3.

What?!? Unreal 4 Engine? Quick, someone hold my chin up while I slap my face!

Man, that is seriously messed up! The Unreal 3 Engine has barely scratched the surface and those guys are already working on the Unreal 4 Engine? Sweet Jesus! That's just insane!

:: Turns to John Carmack sleeping in his chair :: Carmack. CARMACK! Wake up you f$#@ing code slacker! You have alot of work ahead of you to regain your title as king coder. Tim Sweeney is mopping your ass, man!

The defense rests, your honour.

Cheers,

NRG

Not much to discuss really, only a logical next step. This surprises me as much as the making of yet another FIFA 200x game

Edit: Also, it's not insane. Nobody is just gonna sit down to see what happens in an industry this competitive.

I don't think dev's should be pissed that Epic are "holding back" technology for future engines - most people's current systems can't run UE3, let alone what they most likely have in store for UE4.

Reno, you make sense.

Quote from ReNo

I don't think dev's should be pissed that Epic are "holding back" technology for future engines - most people's current systems can't run UE3, let alone what they most likely have in store for UE4.

Yeah, I don't think we're going to be hearing much about UE4 for sometime. There arn't even any UE3.0 games on the market yet, so I doubt the first thing Epic wants to do is undermine their own business by instilling doubt in potential buyers minds of weather their current tech is worth purchasing if they have some other, better thing on the horizon.

First of all, this horizon is, I'd say, 5 or 6 years away.

Secondly, only one guy, is researching and experimenting with new technology that's probably not even able to run on today's or tomorrow's machines in a game quality situation. Think next week.

Also, it's not like whatever they've put together for UE4 so far is even in any kind of shape to be licenced or used to create anything more than window with a floating HDR'd teapot in it. Well, that would be my guess anyway.

If anything, I'd say Mark Rein probably blurbed.

Its like when Todd Hollenshead said in 1999 after Quake III was released that John Carmack was working on brand new technology (Doom 3). Five years later, hey look, the first game using that "brand new technology" was released.

interesting read thanks for the link

geez! we haven't even seen what other developers are doing for Unreal engine 3 and already there's a 4 in the works!. How come this announcement isn't on other gaming sites including Epics own website, makes me wonder if Mark Rein was just stirring up the rumors a bit. hehe

Of course their engine department isn't twiddling thumbs, the UE3 technology lock must have been a while ago considering the count of licensees they have distributed the engine to by now.

But by comparing the detail of information on the UE4 engine and on the restrooms in Epic's new offices provided by Rein, you can see where the priorities of the article/interview are

I don't really enjoy all this new gen stuff that much as I do with old games.

It is only logical, stupid, but logical. I'm wondering how they are going to bypass the natural circle of engine development, like Q3 engine, the developers that licenced it, tweaked it to hell, so are they just announcing it way ahead? Or are they confident that they are going to get developers to licence a new engine when they could just tweak the "old" engine to support the new shader and lighting models and whatnot.

Quote

"Unreal Engine 4 will be totally groundbreaking and the way games will be done in the future,"

Ah how I love these kinds of comments, they seem to be there with everything this industry does, "I'm making a new pot of coffee, it is going to totally revolutionise how you drink coffee" or "I just wrote a new name generator for this game, it is so groundbreaking that you have to use seatbelts to play the game" and bull like that :roll:

Quote from FrieChamp

Of course their engine department isn't twiddling thumbs, the UE3 technology lock must have been a while ago considering the count of licensees they have distributed the engine to by now.

No they are still working on UE3 to polish it up and add a few remaining features and tools. The day it reaches lock down is that day seven years from now when no one is using it anymore.

And as I said in my above post, it's not a whole department working on it, it's one guy doing r&d and probably programming up a few ideas.

Quote from TomWithTheWeather

And as I said in my above post, it's not a whole department working on it, it's one guy doing r&d and probably programming up a few ideas.

I think that is pretty close to truth. I'm pretty sure that the whole UE3 was built while considering the next generation, that is afterall Epics primary income. And if what Carmac said "many current engines have bits of Quake1 engine still in them" is true, UE4 has been developed since UE2 or something.

This all might just be some sort of publicity stunt.

This isn't news.

Define 'working on' . For all we know its just the Unreal 3 engine with too many polies and shader passes*

*shaders do work on passes right? atleast bloom does.

Of course firms are "working on" what comes far out in the future. Its only good to get a good early start on things so that they are ready in time. At Sands of War we do also got an experimental version of beta 3 running, but this does not mean that it will come any time soon.

I do however also believe that this guy is driving it a bit too far by saying stuff like that they have been working with UE4 for 2 years...

2 years sounds about right. Next month it'll be 2 years ago that I started working there. While nobody really said much to the contractors, we'd hear rumors that someone was working on something that wasn't UE3 and was next-next-gen.