Unreal Engine 3 is the previous release of the Unreal Engine developed by Epic Games. Unreal Engine 3 was the used by DONTNOD Entertainment to develop the games Remember Me and Life Is Strange.
History[]
Creation[]
The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased 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 other RPGs. With its code written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today.[1]
Unreal Engine 3[]
The first screenshots of Unreal Engine 3 were presented in 2004,[2] at which point the engine was in development for 18 months already.[3] Unlike Unreal Engine 2, which still supported fixed-function pipeline, Unreal Engine 3 was designed to take advantage of fully programmable shader hardware (in DirectX 9 terms, it required shader model 3.0).
All lighting calculations were done per-pixel, instead of per-vertex. On the rendering side, Unreal Engine 3 also provided support for a gamma-correct high-dynamic range renderer. UE3 expected that content was authored in both high- and low-resolution version and baked normal maps for run-time; a major difference to previous generations where the game content was modeled directly (since normal mapping is a per-pixel operation and almost all the dynamic lighting in UE1 and 2 was calculated per-vertex using a Gouraud Shading technique)
The third generation of the Unreal Engine is designed for DirectX (versions 9-11 for Windows, Windows RT and Xbox 360), as well as systems using OpenGL, including the PlayStation 3, OS X, iOS, Android, Stage 3D for Adobe Flash Player 11, JavaScript/WebGL for HTML5 Web Browsers, PlayStation Vita, and Wii U. Initially, Unreal Engine 3 only supported Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 platforms, while Android and iOS were added later in 2010 (with Infinity Blade being the first iOS title and Dungeon Defenders the first Android title). OS X support was added in 2011.[4] 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 iteration has garnered a great deal of support from many prominent licensees. Epic has announced that Unreal Engine 3 runs on both Windows 8 and Windows RT.[5] The first released console game using Unreal Engine 3 was Gears of War and the first released PC game was RoboBlitz.
Unreal Engine 4[]
- Main article: Unreal Engine 4
The current release is Unreal Engine 4, designed for Microsoft's DirectX 11 and 12[6] (for Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Windows RT); OpenGL (for OS X, Linux, PlayStation 4, iOS, Android, Ouya[7] and Windows XP[8]); and JavaScript/WebGL (for HTML5 Web browsers.[9]
External Links[]
References[]
- ↑ The Imagination Engine: Why Next-Gen Videogames Will Rock Your World - Wired, Archive URL
- ↑ First Look: Unreal Engine 3.0
- ↑ Unreal Engine 3 Interview
- ↑ Unreal Engine 3 comes to Mac OS X, courtesy of September UDK
- ↑ Unreal Engine 3 now on Windows 8 and Windows RT
- ↑ Microsoft: DX12 will improve Xbox One performance
- ↑ Unreal Engine On The Ouya
- ↑ Unreal Engine 4.2 Release
- ↑ Epic Games' Sweeney on the future of Unreal, VR and democratic game development