NEWS
by Mark Barley
Unreal Engine 4 Debuted, Looks Incredible
Epic have officially debuted their next video games engine, the Unreal Engine 4, showing off screenshots of the engine running and basically looking all kinds of badass.
Wired went live with a feature featuring the next-gen engine with a ton of info. The website describes the demo they were shown as “If H. R. Giger and George R. R. Martin took peyote together. And had a baby. And that baby had a fever dream”. The demo was nearly three-minutes long.
The demo features an armored demon creature sitting on a throne and waking to a magma vent spewing smoke and lava. The demo then shows a volcano spewing magma and the like. The demo then shifted to a first person perspective of what was happening. According to Wired;
“[Epic’s senior technical artist Alan] Willard maneuvers his avatar into a dimly lit room where a flashlight turns on, revealing eddies of dust—thousands of floating particles that were invisible until exposed,” said the Wired piece.
“In another room, globes of various sizes float in the air. Willard rolls a light-emanating orb along the floor (think of a spherical flashlight that rolls like a bowling ball) and beams of light wobble and change direction, illuminating parts of the room and revealing the clusters of floating spheres with a kind of strobe effect,” said the text.
Epic revealed that the demo that was shown was a product of three months of develop time with 14 engineers within Epic working on it. The demo was shown using a Nvidia Kepler GTX 680 graphics card. “In another room, globes of various sizes float in the air. Willard rolls a light-emanating orb along the floor (think of a spherical flashlight that rolls like a bowling ball) and beams of light wobble and change direction, illuminating parts of the room and revealing the clusters of floating spheres with a kind of strobe effect,” said the text.
“I had sleepless nights over this damn thing in the beginning, but I think we got the disasters out of the way,” said art director Chris Perna.
Epic's Cliff Bleszinski stated that next-gen graphics need to be on par with James Cameron's film Avatar. “There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation,” he said.
“It is up to Epic, and Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap.
“They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it – even if they don’t know they want it.”
Bleszinski went on to say that one particle in a game can slow down performance and that the demo shown used millions of such particles to keep the demo up to full speed. “It is up to Epic, and Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap.
“They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it – even if they don’t know they want it.”
“Mark my words, those particles are going to be whored by developers.”
You can be sure that Epic will have a huge presence at next month's E3 in Los Angeles and you can also bet that the Unreal Engine 4 will be a big part of their presentation. Get all the screens through the link at the top.
