Gears of War


 

Interview: Epic's Mark Rein

-- March 29, 2006 by: Chris Remo

Epic Games is currently developing two high profile shooters, Gears of War (X360) and Unreal Tournament 2007 (PS3, PC), but these days the company is known for a lot more than just its internally developed titles. During last week's Game Developers Conference, Epic held a press briefing that showed off many of the developer tools being used in the company's Unreal Engine 3 middleware. Epic's reputation has been steadily growing in the game industry as more and more developers pick up licenses to its various Unreal engines. The company doesn't show any sign of letting up on its efforts to create more comprehensive tools, judging from what was displayed during the briefing by Epic developer Alan Willard and vice president Mark Rein.

Amongst the chief goals of the Unreal Engine 3 toolset is to separate and clarify the duties of programmers, artists and designers. For example, small tasks that generally require programming that is perhaps too complex for a designer to tackle but still fairly trivial for a dedicated programmer can now frequently be handled entirely by the designer with Unreal Kismet. Kismet is a flowchart-like system allowing designers to script out scenarios and events using a sequential visual guide, meaning programmers need not be involved in such tasks.

There's what was described as a post-processing shader tool, which operates much like post-processing filter effects used in audio and video editing. The difference is that this applies to a realtime game engine. Shader programmers can create a specific shader plugin, which can then be easily applied and reused using a simple GUI. Such plugins can also be chained together.

Unreal Engine 3's level editor displays a realtime fully rendered preview of the level in progress in a window. This allows level designers to quickly see the effects of changes on the fly. The editor will tell designers at what point on the map the next segment of the level will begin to load, and those positions can be modified according to the designer's needs.

So, all impressive and useful stuff. Epic also showed off new demos of Gears of War (X360) as well as the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament 2007, both of which of course looked very nice. Later in the week, I had the chance to sit down with Epic's Mark Rein and chat a bit about the company's current activities.

Shack: As a middleware provider, Epic is working pretty closely with both Microsoft and Sony on tools for the next generation consoles. Do you have any particular feelings on their approaches to the technology, or just how they're approaching the console market in general?

Mark Rein: Well, one thing we've learned from working with both companies is that they both have a clear love of games, they both want to have a great consumer entertainment product, technologically they both have their various strengths, and I guess weaknesses but we don't see a lot of weaknesses in these consoles. I think Microsoft is more about building the total integrated platform and Sony is more about building the open platform. I don't want to pass judgment on which is better. Wait until later to pass judgment on who is more successful. We're just happy that they're both working closely with us, they both have great hardware that makes our engine look really good, and they're both helping us out with optimization and with the hardware. Obviously we have finished hardware on the 360. We're a very lucky group right now to be able to work with such great equipment and great companies.

Shack: Do you see any particular advantages towards the open platform or the more centralized route? Is it good that the market supports both?

Mark Rein: Well, you know, we've been working with Xbox Live for a long time now, and it works really well. I personally love it, I think they've done a great job with that. We haven't really done much on more of an open platform on the console side; we didn't do any online stuff with PlayStation 2. Our licensees did, but we really didn't, we just did Unreal Tournament and moved on. But, you know, we're very experienced with that kind of environment on the PC side, it's something we're very familiar with. We're very happy with it, very comfortable with it. I don't really see a preference towards one or the other. We have to develop those technologies anyway for our PC products. We have to do Xbox Live for Gears of War since it's on the 360, so we're really happy to support both environments and let the consumers decide what they want.

Shack: Speaking of consoles and PCs, there seems to be a shift at Epic towards more console stuff. Gears of War is 360-exclusive and has been a showcase for the system, and UT2007 is being positioned as a showcase PS3 title even if it's not exclusive to that platform. Do you see a move towards consoles in general at your company?

Mark Rein: Well, I think what you're really seeing is just the fact that our engine now fits consoles really well. We weren't a great fit--well certainly no fit at all--for the original PlayStation, a decent fit for Xbox, and a real squeeze for PlayStation 2 and GameCube. But for the new systems, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, they really fit in well with where we were heading and what we were designing and what our philosophies are this time around, so I'm not sure that the emphasis is really any different than it has been. We've always wanted to be cross-platform. We put a lot of emphasis on Xbox with Unreal Championship 2, and I think we made a great product there. It was kind of late in the life in the engine, whereas this time around the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 are great consoles that fit in well with the engine.

So I would say yes, there's definitely emphasis to make sure we're doing well on those platforms, but it's just kind of a natural progression to say, "Yes, these are platforms that work well with our engine." Remember in the past, even with Unreal Engine 2, we had it on PC, Macintosh, Linux, Xbox, PlayStation 2, so we've always considered ourselves a multiplatform company even when multiplatform sometimes meant multiple PC platforms. Now multiplatform means, you know, multiple PC and console platforms. The emphasis has always been to be as multiplatform as we can, and now we're just good at it.

Shack: Right.

Mark Rein: We're great at it.

Shack: There you go.

Mark Rein: We're fantastic at it. [laughs] I shouldn't just say we're good at it, we're definitely quite good at it.

Turn the page for Mark's thoughts on growing development costs and team sizes, Unreal modding, and Dell.

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