| Developer(s) | Epic Games |
|---|---|
| Stable release | Build 9249 / December 2011 |
| Written in | C++, C#, UnrealScript, HLSL, Cg, CUDA |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Game engine |
| License | Proprietary, UDK free for noncommercial use[1][2] |
| Website | http://www.unrealengine.com/ |
The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first illustrated in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Although primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in a variety of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs and RPGs. With its core written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today.
The latest release is the UE3, designed for Microsoft's DirectX 9 (for Windows and Xbox 360), DirectX 10 and 11 (for Windows Vista and later), OpenGL for Linux, Mac OS X, PlayStation 3, iOS, Android, and Stage 3D for Adobe Flash Player 11.
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A great deal of the gameplay code can be written in UnrealScript, a proprietary scripting language, and as such, large parts of the gameplay can be modified without delving deep into the engine internals. Additionally, as with other middleware packages, the Unreal Engine also provides various tools to assist with content creation, both for designers and artists.
Making its debut in 1998, the first generation Unreal Engine integrated rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networking and file system management into one complete engine. Some trade-offs were necessary to maintain performance levels with the hardware that was available at the time. For example, Epic decided to use "cylindrical collision detection" over the "IK collision detection" system in an effort to maintain playable framerates on systems that were common at the time of its release. 3DFX's fall from the top spot in 3D acceleration caused Epic to add support for D3D and OpenGL. Initially the performance of the new APIs was awful when compared to that of Glide. The initial network performance was also very poor when compared to its biggest competitor, Quake 2. Internally, Epic used this engine for Unreal and Unreal Tournament. The release of Unreal Tournament marked great strides in both network performance and D3D & OGL support.[3]
Unreal Engine 1 used the Glide API, specifically developed for 3dfx GPUs,[4] and was updated for OpenGL and Direct3D. Probably the biggest reason for its popularity was that the engine architecture and the inclusion of a scripting language made it easy to mod.[5][6] One other improvement of Unreal compared to the previous generation of engines was its networking technology, which greatly improved the scalability of the engine on multiplayer. Unreal was also the first to use a real client–server model in the engine architecture.[7]
The second version made its debut in 2002 with America's Army. This generation saw the core code and rendering engine completely re-written. In addition, it featured the new UnrealEd 2, which was followed later by UnrealEd 3, which was later integrated along with the Karma physics SDK. This SDK was what powered the ragdoll physics in Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Championship. Other engine elements were also updated, with improved assets as well as adding support for the GameCube and the Xbox. Support for the PlayStation 2 console was previously added in UE1.
UE2.5, an update to the original version of UE2, improved rendering performance and added vehicles physics, a particle system editor for UnrealEd and 64-bit support in Unreal Tournament 2004. A specialized version of UE2.5 called UE2X was used for Unreal Championship 2 on the original Xbox platform. It featured optimizations specific to that console. For other platforms, these optimizations were not introduced until UE3. EAX 3.0 is also supported for sound.
On March 24, 2011, Ubisoft Montreal revealed that UE2.5 was successfully running on the Nintendo 3DS.[8]
The third generation of the Unreal Engine (UE3) is designed for DirectX (versions 9-11 for Windows and Xbox 360), as well as systems using OpenGL, including the PlayStation 3, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and Stage 3D for Adobe Flash Player 11.[9] Its renderer supports many advanced techniques including HDRR, per-pixel lighting, and dynamic shadows. It also builds on the tools available in previous versions. In October 2011, the engine was ported to support Adobe Flash Player 11 through the Stage 3D hardware-accelerated APIs. Epic has used this version of the engine for their in-house games. Aggressive licensing of this current iteration has garnered a great deal of support from several big licensees.
Mark Rein, the vice-president of Epic Games, revealed on August 18, 2005 that Unreal Engine 4 had been in development since 2003.[10] The engine targets the next generation of PC hardware and consoles after the seventh generation. The only person to work on the Unreal Engine 4 core system design up to that point was Tim Sweeney, technical director and founder of Epic Games.[11] However, at the 2006 Game Developers Conference, Tim Sweeney stated that development would not begin in earnest on the next version until some time in 2008.
Sweeney gave a speech at PoPL06 (the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages) that described aspects of how the Unreal Engine 3 worked at the time and "what we would like to write" in future. He predicted the next generation of games consoles would arrive in 2009, at which time game designers would work with CPUs that had 20 or more cores, 80 or more hardware threads and more than a teraflop of computing power.[12]
In March 2008, Sweeney predicted that the number of developers working on Unreal Engine 4 would be ramped up to three or four engineers by the end of that year, and implied that it would be aimed predominantly at the next generation of consoles rather than PCs[13] However, Rein later confirmed Unreal Engine 4 was coming to PC first, and clarified that when Tim Sweeney "[...] was talking about Unreal Engine 4 [...] he mentioned something along the lines of it being exclusively for the next generation of consoles [...] what he meant was, it won't run on this generation of consoles."
Due to its focus on the next console generation, Michael Capps, President of Epic Games, indicated that Unreal Engine 4 should be ready between 2012 and 2018.[14]
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