Unreal engine

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The Unreal engine is one of the most popular game engines for action games. First illustrated in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal, it has been the basis of many such games since, including Unreal Tournament and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. It is developed by Epic Games.

The Unreal engine includes support for a scripting language called UnrealScript, which can be used to quickly modify many aspects of the game without having to delve into the [[C++]] internals.

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Games using the Unreal engine

Template:Cleanup-verify Many other software companies have licensed the Unreal engine in order to speed up development of their own titles. These include Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Fallen and Ion Storm Inc.'s Deus Ex. Newer versions of the engine are being used for PC games such as Running With Scissors, Inc.'s Postal², 3D Realms' Duke Nukem Forever, the U.S. Army's America's Army, and Ion Storm's Deus Ex: Invisible War.

Versions of the Unreal engine are available for IBM PC (Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux), Apple Macintosh (Mac OS, Mac OS X) and many other Consoles.

Below is a comprehensive list of published video games utilising the Unreal engine [1]:

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Unreal Engine 1

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Unreal Engine 1.0

Image:Unreal screenshot.jpg Builds 1-226: The original Unreal engine was publicly started with the release of Unreal, although licensees like Legend Entertainment and MicroProse had possessed the technology much earlier. 226f was the final patch to Unreal. Features in the Unreal engine not present in other related engines of the time include Dynamic Lighting, Detail Textures, and a few others.

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Released Games
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Unreal Engine 1.5

Image:UnrealIscreen.jpg Builds 300-436: The enhanced version of the original builds. The codebase was forked and the version number jumped to 300 and incremented from there until version 436. Major enhancements were to the renderer, to provide proper Direct3D support, and eventually to integrate Warren Marshall's new UnrealEd 2. Additionally, the PS2 and Dreamcast versions of this engine debuted in this timeframe, and initial skeletal animation support was integrated.

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Released games
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Unreal Engine 2

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Unreal Engine 2.0

Image:Ut2003screen.jpg Builds 500-2227: The builds of the second generation Unreal engine started at 500, licensees first saw them after 600, and they were publicly available as build 927 with the release of America's Army. When Epic took over finishing UT2003, build numbers jumped to 2000+.

Technical improvements include significant overhauls to both the rendering and map editor systems: enhanced lighting & shading, hardware vertex & pixel shader support, improved texture compression, bump mapping and cube mapping, a new particle system, smooth skinned geometry support for animated characters and complex animated geometry in game environments, facial animation support (including lipsynced animation), large scale terrain support, seamless mixing of BSP meshes and terrain, hardware transform and lighting support, rewritten PlayStation 2 support, new support for GameCube and Xbox, a new physics engine called "Karma", and more.

The engine is sometimes incorrectly called "UT2003 engine", "U2 engine", "UT2 engine", or similar. Licensees sometimes refer to it as "Unreal Warfare", though the original origins of the term "Unreal Warfare" are both vague and confusing. At one point, "Unreal Warfare" was a code name for a project Epic was working on - whether this project was a game or a build of the engine itself is still unclear. Theories vary: some think that this was merely the codename for the Onslaught gametype implemented in UT2004, while others believe it's the original code name for Gears of War. On a related note, Epic is adding a gametype to UT2007 that has been referred to as both "Unreal Warfare" and "Conquest," though Epic representatives have been quick to note that the final gametype name is not set in stone.

The engine naming scheme itself is Unreal Engine N, or Nth-generation Unreal engine.

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Announced games
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Released games
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Unreal Engine 2.5

Builds 2500-3369: Enhanced version of Unreal Engine 2 with optimized rendering codes. The rendering system provides optimized support for DirectX versions 7 and 8, OpenGL, and even software rendering with Pixomatic (licensed separately). While 2.5 does not make extensive use of DirectX 9 features, it does use the DirectX 9 API and thus provides an easy starting point for licensees interested in adding DirectX 9.x graphical features. Unreal Engine 2.5 also features multipass bump-mapping (normal map/bump map/specular map/diffuse map/gloss map/environment map/opacity map/mask map etc), per-pixel lighting and per-pixel shading, virtual displacement mapping and high dynamic range rendering and soft shadows and other DirectX 9 or higher (and same class OpenGL) graphical features. Unreal Engine 2.5 adds support for 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux. It is also optimized for the Xbox memory management system.

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Announced games
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Released games
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Unreal Engine 3

Image:Unreal3engine-berserker.jpg

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Unreal Engine 3.0

Builds 3500 and above: Unreal Engine 3 incorporates support for DirectX 9 and next generation APIs including XNA, DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.x. It discards legacy support to improve performance and obtain visual quality unachievable with older generations of graphics processors. Unreal Engine 3 will be using the NovodeX physics engine, rather than the internally-developed Karma physics engine used in Unreal Engine 2.x. The lighting and shadowing is vastly improved, with real-time per-pixel lighting and shadowing techniques such as 16x sampled shadow depth buffers for characters, stencil shadow volumes for dynamic lights affecting the scene and pre-computed shadow-masks for static light interactions. Unreal Engine 3 also allows for shader models 2, 3 and 4.

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Announced games
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Unreal Engine 3.5

Epic is using UE3.0 for Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 2007. However, Epic will continue improving and extending UE3 over the entire console cycle, so there are at least 3.5 years of significant enhancement coming(even after shipping UT2007 in 4/4 2006). Unreal Engine 3.5 provide on DirectX 11, 12 and shader model 5 or higher technology support.

Tim Sweeney says regarding the timeline, they'll be actively developing the Unreal Engine 3 throughout the current hardware generation through 2009.

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Unreal Engine 4

Mark Rein (vice-president of Epic Games) revealed on August 18 2005 that the company has been working on Unreal Engine 4 for the past two yearsTemplate:Fn. The engine targets the next generation of consoles after the coming generation, as well as the PC. The only person to work on the engine so far is Tim Sweeney, lead programmer at EpicTemplate:Fn.

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See also

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References

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External links


Unreal series

Unreal | Unreal II: The Awakening | eXpanded MultiPlayer

Unreal Tournament | Unreal Tournament 2003 | Unreal Tournament 2004 | Unreal Tournament 2007

Unreal Championship | Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict

Totally Unreal

Unreal engine | UnrealScript | Vehicles

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