Unreal Engine can always give developers stronger capabilities, a ‘what you see is what you get’ platform. You know, many early engines still required you to edit text files yourself, or couldn’t preview the results. Later this year, when people get to see Unreal Engine 4, they will be stunned by its profound special effects,” said Mark Rein. At the ongoing annual D.I.C.E. Summit, we also hope to learn more about this new engine. The famous American media outlet Wired recently had the honor of seeing Epic’s monumental “new work,” the demo of Unreal Engine 4. In about two and a half minutes of rendered animation, they were soaked through, and praised it as the “bastard child“ of H. R. Giger, the father of “Alien,” and “George R. R. Martin,” author of “A Song of Ice and Fire.”
Epic Games recently announced news of “Unreal Tournament 4” made with “Unreal Engine 4,” and this news caused quite a stir abroad.
As early as August 2005, Epic Games vice president Mark Rein revealed that they had already started developing “Unreal Engine 4.” Following the previous generation engine “Unreal Engine 3,” the president of Epic Games said they hoped the game engine they developed could be used to make more and more distinctive games. Today, countless games have used the “UT” engine to successfully develop many well-known hit games, such as “Lineage 2” and even the future “Lineage 3,” and so on; even the major Japanese company SQUARE ENIX has used this engine for game development. “Unreal Engine 4” will first be used for game development on the third-generation next-gen consoles Xbox One and PS4, and will finally attack the PC market across the board. Players will truly get to enjoy the ultra-realistic “Unreal Tournament 4” around 2010-2012.
Platform support
But at the same time, Epic gave a basically negative answer to the question of whether Unreal Engine 4 supports WiiU. In an earlier interview, Epic co-founder Mark Rein said Epic did not plan to bring Unreal 4 to the WiiU, though he also said at the time: “If consumers want a port of an Unreal Engine 4 game on the WiiU, they may still get to play one.”
So this time someone specifically raised the question again, and we got a clearer answer. “NO!”
“No, I mean, that statement isn’t the right answer. We don’t plan to. The WiiU has Unreal Engine 3, doesn’t it? It has created a great many excellent games. And after Unreal 4 comes out, Unreal 3 won’t disappear. But we want to bring Unreal 4 to the next generation of consoles. That is our focus. If you want to make WiiU games, you can use Unreal 3; it already supports the WiiU.”
This makes it very clear that the WiiU has no Unreal Engine 4, and that games made with Unreal Engine 4 will not appear in support of it either. Earlier, EA also announced that the Frostbite 3 engine does not support the WiiU, which means more third parties will therefore not consider porting major titles to the WiiU. Although Nintendo can continue to rely on its own camp to stay competitive, considering the WiiU’s problem of having fewer games than expected, we have to say that the WiiU’s prospects will be further overshadowed after this.[2]
Skeletal animation system
◎ Skeletal animation system; supports the effect of up to 4 bones simultaneously influencing each vertex, as well as complex skeletal structures.
◎ Animation is driven by an animation object tree, including:
· Blend controllers, performing multi-way blending between nested animation objects.
· Data-driven controllers, encapsulating motion capture or hand-made animation data.
· Physics controllers, connected to the rigid body dynamics engine, used to implement ragdoll-system player and NPC animation and physical responses to forces.
· Procedural animation controllers, implemented in C++ or UnrealScript, to achieve features such as making an NPC’s head and eyes track a player walking through a level, or making a character perform different actions based on health and fatigue, and so on.
◎ Export tools made for 3D Studio Max and Maya, used to export skinned meshes, skeletons, and animation sequences into the engine.
Gameplay systems
◎ Provides an object-oriented game framework supporting ordinary game objects (such as players, NPCs, items, weapons, and triggers).
◎ A rich multi-level AI system, supporting pathfinding, complex level traversal, individual decision-making, and squad AI
· A pathfinding framework sensitive to ordinary game objects such as triggers, doors, and elevators, allowing complex traversal settings so that NPCs can press switches, open doors, and navigate around obstacles.
· A traversal framework with a route network for short-term tactical combat, cover, and retreat.
· A squad-based AI framework, suitable for first-person shooters, third-person shooters, and tactical combat games.
◎ AI paths are visible in UnrealEd and can be edited by level editors, allowing customization and hints
◎ A visible AI scripting tool that lets designers create complex interactive gameplay setups, such as player objectives, generic game event triggers, and interactive cutscenes
◎ UnrealMatinee, a timeline-based visual sequencing, animation, and curve path tool. Designers can use this tool to create in-game cutscenes, which can be interactive or non-interactive, by sequencing animations, moving objects including cameras, controlling sound and visual effects, and triggering game and AI events. The “Matinee” tool in UnrealEd, capable of editing event sequences based on a timeline
◎ Support for output formats on various platforms, including 5.1 surround sound and high-quality Dolby Digital audio.
◎ 3D sound source positioning, Doppler effect. Doppler effect: refers to the fact that when a sound-emitting object is moving, the pitch of the sound changes in height with the object’s speed of movement — a change in sound frequency. This principle is also applied in the 3D sound generation principles of sound cards. ◎ The visual sound tools in UnrealEd can give sound designers comprehensive control over sound effects: sound intensity, order, looping, filtering, modulation, pitch shifting, and randomization. Sound parameters are separated from the code, allowing designers to control all sound related to games, cutscenes, and animation sequences.
◎ Support for the main sound formats on all platforms, including PCM, ADPCM, console-specific sound compression formats, and Ogg Vorbis.
◎ Support for sound streaming on consoles.
◎ Internet and LAN play has long been a major feature of Epic’s competitive games such as Unreal Tournament 2004. Unreal Engine has long provided a flexible, advanced networking architecture suitable for all types of games.
◎ Internet and LAN play are fully supported on PC and all console platforms The server browser included in the game Unreal Tournament 2004
◎ Unreal Engine’s network game programming is high-level and data-driven, allowing Unreal script code to specify the variables and functions that communicate between client and server, in order to maintain a synchronized approximation of the game state. The underlying game network transport is based on UDP and can combine reliable and unreliable transmission methods to optimize the feel of the game, even in environments with low bandwidth and high latency.
◎ Client-server mode supports up to 64 players playing simultaneously. It also supports non-server mode (peer-to-peer mode) with 16 players playing simultaneously.
◎ Support for network interconnection between different platforms (for example, a PC server with console clients; Windows, MacOS, and Linux clients playing together).
◎ All game features are supported in network play mode, including vehicle-based multiplayer games, team competition with NPCs and bots, cooperative play in single-player mode, and so on. Support for automatic downloads, including consistent Unreal script code across platforms. This feature makes everything from user-created maps to bonus packs to complete game mods freely obtainable The global illumination technology “Unreal Lightmass,” which can generate high-quality static lighting and soft shadows with precise penumbrae, mutual diffusion and reflection, color bleeding, and other next-generation technologies, along with a new distributed computing framework “Swarm,” which can generate lighting up to ten times faster.
◎ “Unreal Content Browser,” based on a backend database, supports thumbnail previews, content tags, and content collection management, letting developers quickly find the resources they need among massive amounts of content, without having to manually open files one by one to check. ◎ The extensible statistics and data management backend “Unreal Master Control Program,” as a highly reliable online service architecture, supports news announcements, settings management, online player tracking, and the collection of hardware, configuration, and game state data, and includes a series of visualized game state tools, such as heat maps of player activity areas
Physics collision
The rigid body collision system lets players make full use of object collisions in the game, character animation collisions, and complex realistic vehicles and object explosions for entertainment. All rendered objects and models can have dynamic properties set, including friction.
Physics collision sound effects
Many dynamics-related functions and settings are provided, including player operation, artificial intelligence, and network functionality. In Unreal’s editor you can directly set the dynamics of objects and models, and it supports simple collision optimization and adjustment; motion constraint editing; interactive physics simulation and quick tweaking in the editor.
Authoring tools
Unreal’s editor (abbreviated “UnrealEd”) is an authoring tool designed around the concept of “what you see is what you get.” It can well compensate for some of the shortcomings that cannot be achieved in 3D Studio Max and Maya, and apply them well to game development. In the visual editing window, game developers can directly and freely place and control the properties of in-game characters, NPCs, item props, AI waypoints, and light sources, and everything is rendered in real time. (And this real-time rendering also includes dynamic light and shadow effects.) There is also complete data property editing functionality, which lets level designers freely set the objects in the game, or lets programmers directly perform optimization settings through script writing. The real-time map editing tool lets game art developers freely adjust the elevation of terrain, or directly blend and embellish map layers using brushes with alpha channels. And collision data and displacement maps can be generated directly in map editing. A graphical material editing tool. Developers can freely adjust the color, alpha channel, and texture coordinates in materials, and programmers can define the required material content. Unreal’s material editor uses the same “material node editing” approach as Maya and Darktree. When operating it, whether dragging or linking lines, it’s very convenient — at least much easier to use than the “material hierarchy editing” approach in Max, which I often use. And art production staff can use multiple simple material types in the material editing tool to blend a complex and beautiful advanced material type, and can reference the lighting influence in the scene in real time. The editor’s resource manager functionality is also very powerful, allowing quick and accurate searching, viewing, and organizing of the various resources in game development. Unreal’s editor also provides art production staff with complete export tools for models, skeletons, and animation data, and lets them be edited uniformly together with the sound files and story scripts needed for editing game events. The editor also provides developers with a “play test” button; just click it with the mouse and you can test the game content you’ve edited. This way, you can watch the game screen in the “test window” while making real-time adjustments and modifications in another window, which is very convenient. For artists using 3ds Max and Maya, complete import and export plugins are provided. Models can be imported into Unreal Engine, including the model’s topology, texture coordinates, and smoothing.
In the Unreal engine, so that programmers doing game development can write better, 3 very specific writing examples and 100% open source code are provided, along with the editor, the Max/Maya export plugins, and some of the game code used by the company for internal game development. Unreal’s game scripting language also provides a great deal of automated metadata for game developers to reference and use. The engine is not only compatible with multiple file formats, it also allows level and quest editors to directly view the content and properties of game scripts in the editor and modify them directly
---Excerpted from Baidu
