Unreal Engine 3 updates

[Minos]

Epic is making it even easier for everyone and their grandmother to develop video games, showing off a slew of new features for their wildly popular Unreal Engine 3 at this year's Game Developers Conference.

Now that they've managed to license their engine to just about everyone in the gaming industry, Epic is ready to bring some exciting new features to the Unreal Engine 3, which they'll be showing off at GDC next week. Features like Unreal Lightmass, which coupled with their new Swarm distributed computing framework makes adding high-quality static lighting effects 10 times faster then before. How about a new content browser and search engine, freeing developers from having to manually hunt 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."

They've also got a couple nifty additions in store for online developers, including the addition of Gears of War 2 scalable statistics and data management back end in the form of the Unreal Master Control Program.

"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."

And for those developers who prefer their multiplayer to be massive, Epic China will be showing off their new integrated massively multiplayer online game backend solution, which should have MMO developers frothing at the mouth in joy.

In layman's terms, the Unreal Engine 3 is now even more attractive to game developers across all genres. Expect to see the logo popping up more and more with these new additions to one of the world's most popular engines.

Source: http://kotaku.com/5170689/epic-unveilin ... ies-at-gdc

Fuck yeah

[Psy]

I remember using UnrealED for the first time after being with Hammer for so many years and I was amazed. It really is a great editor and engine which topples Source in every imaginable way.

[sarge mat]

Nice. Wonder how long before they get a new game out so moders can get our hands on it. I will be interested to see what EPIC china has to show.

[-HP-]

+1 lucky mino!

[JeanPaul]

I remember using UnrealED for the first time after being with Hammer for so many years and I was amazed. It really is a great editor and engine which topples Source in every imaginable way.

I wouldn't go that far. Its certainly better than source in many regards but definitely not all. Not to mention Source's 2004 release as opposed to Unreal 3's cameo in 2006. (I believe) So it is a much older engine, and so far is going to hold up ages longer than Unreal.

[Jetsetlemming]

UnrealEd is vastly better than Hammer in every possible way. There is literally not one advantage Hammer's got.

Source engine has vastly more realistic, believable graphics and animation, though

[Pericolos0]

I remember using UnrealED for the first time after being with Hammer for so many years and I was amazed. It really is a great editor and engine which topples Source in every imaginable way.

except performance i guess =)

[2d-chris]

I think Unreal holds its own in performance standards even compared with Source engine. The proven console pipeline also kicks ass.

I like the ideas behind the changes in UE3, but I suppose everyone is more interested in UE4 and what cool new features will define the next - next generation game engine.

GDC this year is going to be amazing

[Sentura]

i just wish unreal had more in terms of community. with those mods you see, it seems few become as known as any source mods.

[Thrik]

I have to say, while Valve makes some excellent games with their engine I seriously can't see any way in which it bests UE3. At first I thought all UE3 games kind of looked the same, but after games like Mirror's Edge — which had quite a Valve style to it IMO — it's impossible to say that. The engine seems to be capable of handling any style and has excellent editing tools, yet is a close cousin to Source and Hammer with regards to overall approach (ie: see Crysis for the opposite end of the spectrum).

I suppose what will keep people working with Source for a long time to come is the unbelievable games Valve produces with it (seriously the best), and the tight communities they have.

I guess the industry agrees, though. Source is pretty much a non-player on the engine licensing scene, whereas UE3 is out of control.

[e-freak]

I can see your point, but certainly, Source sold a good bunch of licenses as well

[robert.briscoe]

When it comes to BSP Source owns Unreal big time - for everything else Unreal is a winner

[Hourences]

Unreal BSP system is like 5 times faster than Source BSP system. Really. I worked quite a bit with both systems, Unreal easily beats Source/Quake like BSP in terms of speed, and complexity. The only thing that is slower is making a cube and modifying existing geometry (because of the rebuilding). For anything that is more advanced than just a cube Unreal is faster and more flexible.

UE3 is licensed by at least 6 to 7 times more developers than Source if that wikipedia list is correct. Most of those developers are also smaller devs, where as Unreal usually targets the large studios. That also goes for the community. Epic seems to mainly focus on large studios and big opportunities where as valve seems to pay more attention to their community and small studios, initatives, etc. Which is a shame for the Unreal community really but understandable from a business perspective. Other reasons are the non consistent UT games (every game is different - doesn't make your audience stick to you), no one playing UT3, more complex tools, and some other reasons.

I hate the "all UE3 games look alike" argument because is it not the engine, as ME demonstrates, it are the developers. Some things in UE3 require quite a different approach. Most developers had no or very little prior experience in UE when they started out with their games, so they ended up taking a look at the GOW or UT3 examples provided, and they directly copied the material setups, post processing, and the style in general because of their inexperience with the tech.

The upgrades are nice, but it would be nice if this too would be released to the community. And that won't happen.

[Jetsetlemming]

I have to say, while Valve makes some excellent games with their engine I seriously can't see any way in which it bests UE3. At first I thought all UE3 games kind of looked the same, but after games like Mirror's Edge — which had quite a Valve style to it IMO — it's impossible to say that. The engine seems to be capable of handling any style and has excellent editing tools, yet is a close cousin to Source and Hammer with regards to overall approach (ie: see Crysis for the opposite end of the spectrum).

I suppose what will keep people working with Source for a long time to come is the unbelievable games Valve produces with it (seriously the best), and the tight communities they have.

I guess the industry agrees, though. Source is pretty much a non-player on the engine licensing scene, whereas UE3 is out of control.

Source is far better at creating believable human characters than any other engine, especially in their animation system, especially with the new stuff introduced with TF2 and then L4D. Source uses a ton of tiny little shader filtered on character models just like every other next gen engine, but it actually makes them look like a person, and not a shiny soulless doll.

Of course, the art design of Valve games helps in that department a ton

[KungFuSquirrel]

Unreal BSP system is like 5 times faster than Source BSP system.

I'll agree with everything you said except for this.

Unreal is by far the superior editor out of the batch when looking at the "traditional" Radiant/Hammer/Unreal trifecta (and I'm saying this as a life-long Hammer/Radiant user), but its BSP construction is archaic by comparison (which, considering the age of Hammer and Radiant's interfaces, is depressing).

The ironic thing is Unreal's BSP tools are by far the most powerful - extrusion, concave shapes, clean intersection/de-intersection, additive/subtractive... No other editors have that strong a geometry creation tool. But factor in still having to rebuild geometry to even preview what you're doing, switching of tools and modes in a clunky interface (the geometry mode windows are just awful), poor/slow texturing, the decreased emphasis on BSP in the engine, and its awful in-game performance, and it's all wasted.

I've done some crazy things in Unreal BSP I'd never be able to do in Hammer or Radiant (even with patches), like mocking up radially-snapping circular static mesh templates, but it was such a chore I'd have been better off doing it in another program. Now, if someone ever takes Radiant's speed of construction - you can't get much faster measured brush creation than a single drag on the grid - and merges that with the power of Unreal's BSP tools, we'll have a glorious tool indeed.