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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 . 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.

The Unreal Engine is modular. Epic rewrites different parts of it, but it is still the same engine. As such, there are no concrete versions, only numbered "builds" which may or may not contain certain features. Licensees eventually stop merging builds from Epic, but often continue incrementing the build number on their own (instead of the specific "Licensee Version" number), so occasionally disparities arise, as you'll see with Unreal Tournament 2003. Also, with the exception of America's Army, Epic's release of a game marks the first game of that generation engine. AA was the first licensee product to ship before Epic's product of that generation engine.

Contents

Projects using the Unreal engine

  1. redirect
Many other software companies have licensed the Unreal engine in order to speed up development of their own titles. These include ' 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 ' [link].

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 [link]:

Unreal Engine 1

Unreal Engine 1.0

The Unreal engine was initially developed for the Unreal game. It featured large maps and a wide color palette in contrast to competing 3D game engines.
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The Unreal engine was initially developed for the Unreal game. It featured large maps and a wide color palette in contrast to competing 3D game engines.

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, Procedurally Animated Textures, 512x512 texture size support, and a few others. The engine's renderer supported a wide variety of graphics APIs, including a Software Renderer, 3DFX Glide, S3 Metal, PowerVR SGL, Direct3D 5 and 6, and OpenGL.

Released projects

Unreal Engine 1.5

Unreal Tournament uses Unreal Engine 1.5, an improvement of the original engine.
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Unreal Tournament uses Unreal Engine 1.5, an improvement of the original engine.

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. The core code was completely re-written. Major enhancements were to the renderer, to enhancing and optimizing Direct3D 6 and 7, OpenGL 0.x and 1.x support, and eventually to integrate UnrealEd 2. Additionally, the PS2 and Dreamcast versions of this engine debuted in this timeframe, and initial skeletal animation support was integrated, and S3TC texture compression, high resolution texture size 1024x1024 support.

Released projects

Unreal Engine 2

Unreal Engine 2.0

Unreal Tournament 2003 uses the second generation of Unreal engine, a large improvement in visual quality and ease of development over the previous engines.
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Unreal Tournament 2003 uses the second generation of Unreal engine, a large improvement in visual quality and ease of development over the previous engines.

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+.

Core code and rendering engine are completely re-written. Technical improvements include significant overhauls to both the rendering and map editor systems such as enhanced lighting & shading, rendering API optimizing and enhancing of provide to Direct3D 8 and same level of OpenGL 1.x. hardware vertex and 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 lip synced animation), large scale terrain support, seamless mixing of indoor meshes(BSP meshes, static meshes, dynamic meshes and out door terrain meshes(heghit meshes), hardware transform and lighting support, very high resolution texture size 2048x2048 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 itself is named Unreal Engine N for Nth-generation Unreal engine.

Announced projects
Released projects
Unreal Engine 2 Runtime Edition
Unreal Engine 2 Runtime Edition used in many non-gaming projects including construction simulation and design, training simulation, driving simulation, virtual reality shopping malls, movie storyboards, continuity, pre-visual, etc.

Unreal Engine GeForce FX Technology Demo, A very highly detailed scene with bump maps, rich textures, and dynamic lighting: the flexibility of the GeForce FX shading allows for elaborate lighting calculations resulting in the soft self shadowing in the folds of statue’s cloak and the subtle shadows in the corner of the room.
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Unreal Engine GeForce FX Technology Demo, A very highly detailed scene with bump maps, rich textures, and dynamic lighting: the flexibility of the GeForce FX shading allows for elaborate lighting calculations resulting in the soft self shadowing in the folds of statue’s cloak and the subtle shadows in the corner of the room.

Unreal Engine 2.5

Builds 2500-3369: Enhanced version of Unreal Engine 2 with an optimized rendering engine. The core technology re-written and very enhancing and the rendering system provides optimized support for Direct3D 8 and same level of OpenGL 1.x, and even software rendering with Pixomatic (licensed separately). While 2.5 does not make extensive use of Direct3D 9 and OpenGL 2.x level of features, it does use the Direct3D 9 API and thus provides an easy starting point for licensees interested in adding Direct3D 9 and OpenGL 2.x level of graphical features. UDN site Unreal Engine 2.5 support 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, high dynamic range rendering, soft shadows and other modern graphical features present in the Direct3D 9 and OpenGL 2.x feature Set. It supports large textures, with resolutions up to 4096x4096. improving and enhancing UnrealEd toolsets, to included new particle system editor. The Unreal Engine 2.5 adds support for 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux operating systems. One fork of the Engine is also highly optimized for the Xbox hardware shader pipeline based on a few graphical enhancements, The Xbox memory management system, Xbox GUI system, editor, and Xbox live support. These Xbox optimized features are integrated into the Unreal Engine 2X, but is an off-shoot of the Unreal Engine 2.5.

Announced projects
Released projects

Unreal Engine 3

A berserker from Unreal Engine 3 technology demo (later revealed to be Gears of War content), revealing a detailed model with normal mapping and real-time soft self-shadowing
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A berserker from Unreal Engine 3 technology demo (later revealed to be Gears of War content), revealing a detailed model with normal mapping and real-time soft self-shadowing

Unreal Engine 3.0

Builds 3500 and above: Unreal Engine 3 incorporates support for Direct3D 9 and next generation APIs including XNA, Direct3D 10 and same level of OpenGL 2.x. The core code and rendering system and all modules were completely rewritten. 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. Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere. Unreal Engine 3 also allows for shader models 2, 3 and 4, volumetric environmental effects including height fog, Extensible particle system with visual editor, supporting particle physics and environmental effects, Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, spherical harmonic lighting, parameterized Phong lighting, custom artist controlled per material lighting models including anisotropic effects, many virtual displacement mapping technologies(including parallax mapping, offset mapping, relief mapping, photonic mapping, uber bump mapping and etc other techniques with horizon mapped self-shadowing and z-bias correction) and "real" displacement mapping(not virtual, this is the vertex texturing, virtual mesh generate for the only using gray-scale height maps) support, light attenuation functions, pre-computed shadow masks, directional light maps, and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps, non-power-of-two size textures support, physics based animations, new terrain system using a dynamically-deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly-blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes and powerful upgrade to UnrealEd toolsets, including a COLLADA import pipeline and many other engine elements, seamlessly loading support, newly powerful multi-threaded rendering support. and including the all features of Artificial Studios's Reality Engine technologies.

Announced projects
Single License
Multiple Licenses
Non-gaming projects
Unreal Engine 3 Runtime Custom License is used in many non-gaming projects including construction simulation and design, training simulation, driving simulation, virtual reality shopping malls, movie storyboards, continuity, pre-visual, etc.

[UPDATE] According to Mark Rein, no such license exists from the architecture. The only form available is Unreal Engine 3 with the toolset and sourcecode meant for games.

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.

Tim Sweeney says that, regarding the timeline, development of Unreal Engine 3 will continue throughout the current hardware generation through 2009.

Rendering system provide on 2009 and beyond graphics API. the Direct3D 11, 12 and same level of OpenGL. UnrealEd toolsets are improving and enhancing. and all of the other modules and engine elements very improving and extending. altogether exciting highly enhancedments it.

Unreal Engine 4

Mark Rein, the vice-president of Epic Games, revealed on August 18 2005 that Unreal Engine 4 has been in development over the past two years(1). 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 Epic(2).

See also

References

External links


Unreal series
Unreal | | eXpanded MultiPlayer

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

Unreal Championship |

Totally Unreal

Unreal engine | UnrealScript

 

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