Unreal Engine 4

INTRODUCTION

Let’s start from the beginning. What is a game engine? A game engine is a system that is designed for the creation and development of video and computer games. The game engine provide a software framework that developers use to create games for video game consoles and personal computers.

The game engine usually includes:

-          Rendering engine for 2D and 3D graphics,

-          Physics engine,

-          Collision detection

-          Sound,

-          Scripting,

-          Animation,

-          Artificial intelligence,

-          Networking,

-          Streaming,

-          Memory management,

-          Threading,

-          Localization support and

-          Scene graph.

Today the market of games evolved at exponential rate. There are so much games and their size is very large. They are two or three times bigger than operating system. But the core of every game is an engine. Game engine are available for game developers to code a game quickly and easily building from the ground up. There are so many game engines and I don’t want to describe all of them because it’s time consuming. If you’re interested you can read about them at Wikipedia/List_of_game_engines.

For those of you who don't know what Unreal engine is the Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by the Epic Games, first shown in the 1998 first person shooter game Unreal. This first Unreal Engine was developed for first-person shooters; it has been successfully used in a variety of other games including: stealth, MMORPGs and other RPGs. This game engine was originally written in C++ and features high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today.

Unreal engine 1

Unreal Engine 1 marked his debut in 1998. This was the first generation of Unreal Engine which had integrated rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networking, scripting and file system management into one complete engine. Unreal Engine 1 provided an advanced software rasterizer and a hardware-accelerated rendering path using the Glide API which is specifically developed for 3dfx GPUs. The Unreal Engine 1 was soon updated for OpenGL and Direct3D. Large parts of the game at that time were implemented into a custom scripting language called Unreal Script. Although revolutionary at that time the Unreal Engine 1 had poor networking performance. Aside from it’s shortcomings Epic games had a huge success with this engine and implemented him into two games called Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

Unreal  Engine 1 became very popular in gamers and developers community due to his modular engine architecture and the inclusion of a scripting language which made it easy to mod.

Here is the video of Unreal Engine 1. 

Unreal Engine 2

Four years later Epic released Unreal Engine 2 with the game America’s Army. The core code of Unreal Engine 2 was nothing like it’s predecessor because it was completely re-written and modified. The physics engine powered the ragdoll physics in Unreal Tournament 2003 and Unreal Championship. The code of Unreal Engine 2 was updated to support GameCube and Xbox. Support for PlayStation 2 was previously added in UE1.

UE2.5 was the update of the original version of Unreal Engine 2 and had updated rendering performance and added vehicles physics, a particle system editor for Unreal ED and 64-bit support in Unreal Tournament 2004. Specialized version UE2.5X was developed for Unreal Championship 2 for the original Xbox platform and it featured optimizations specific to that console.

Here is video demo of UNREAL ENGINE 2.

Unreal Engine 3

The first screenshot of Unreal Engine 3 were presented in 2004. At that point this engine was in development for nearly 18 months. This third generation of Unreal Engine was designed for Direct X versions 9-11 for Windows and Xbox 360 as well as systems using OpenGL, including the PlayStation 3, OS X, iOS and so on. This engine brought support for many advanced techniques including HDRR per-pixel lighting and dynamic shadows. It also builds on the tools available in previous versions.

Here is the video of UNREAL ENGINE 3. 

Unreal Engine 4

The new version of Unreal Engine should be out soon and this is the most world class game engine to date. According to Unreal Engine site the new Unreal Engine 4 will give you the power to do more than ever before. The architecture will offer you fully dynamic lighting feature, cutting down development time and ensuring less iteration on creative ideas. With significant new visual features will enable you to achieve high-end visuals while remaning both scalabe and accessible to make games for low spec PCs.

In 2005 Mark Rein the vice president of Epic Games, revealed that Unreal Engine 4 had been in development since 2003. Until mid-2008, development was exclusively by Tim Sweeny who is a technical director and founder of Epic Games. On June 7, 2012 a video of the Unreal Engine 4 was shown via Game Trailers TV. The major feature of the Unreal Engine 4 is a real-time global illumination using voxel cone tracing, eliminating the need for pre-computed lighting. UE4 also features new developer features which reduce iteration time and allow direct updating of C++ code. Unreal Engine 4 also brought new features for the debugger Kismet. The Kismet is a visual scripting engine that debuted in UE3 and with these new features in UE4 the Kismet allows developers to directly visualize code while testing. The can then jump to the source code and edit in Visual Studio. With this new engine you can easily select and click on the elements in the game so you can easily change the3 game world.

For example in previous engines if you wanted to change the relationship between your weapon and how long it’ll take to kill the creature, you will probably spend a couple of hours iterating and if you have to spend a lot of time waiting for a build every single time you’re talking one change and waiting for 15 minutes for the compiler to compile program, and then play the game, get to the point in game where you can test it, test it and then repeat the procedure all over again. Obviously using these previous engines to modify your game was time consuming. Now with new engine when you make your change you can easily play, when it compiles, finish, “defeat the big boss” and thane escape and repeat procedure all over again. The conclusion is that the Unreal Engine 4 is much faster, easily accessible and user friendly then his predecessor.

Thanks for reading, here is the video preview of new Unreal Engine 4. Enjoy.