Unreal Engine 3.0 on iPhone GDC Impressions

My first session at GDC 2010 was "Bringing Unreal Engine 3 to iPhone" and I was excited to hear all about Epic Games' plans for the iPhone, iPod touch and the like. What I got, however, was a programming-heavy talk about the challenges with bringing the technology, made in C++, to the iPhone, which uses Objective-C and Xcode.

Epic Games' Unreal Tournament 3

It won't be much use to you all filtered through my brain--I've only dabbled in programming. The most interesting bit I took away was that the were able to put the engine onto the iPhone 3GS (required) 90% intact as C++ code. The remaining 10% is the platform-specific Objective-C that interacts with the engine.

The engine was shown briefly running on an iPhone 3GS and it looked great. It doesn't run at 30fps yet, but using some creative shader techniques, Epic was able to preserve much of the look of UE3 while shrinking it down to Apple's latest and greatest iPhone.