"The Unreal Engine running in a browser without any plugins, purely on HTML 5, WebGL and JavaScript? Pull the other one, lass, it's got bells on," says someone or other. "I bet you believe everything The Man tells you." No, curious character! It's real and everything! Why, you can see for yourself, as Epic has released a browser version of its old UE3 tech demo Epic Citadel for us all to marvel at.
Although Epic Games publicly has high praise for PS4, the wizards at Digital Foundry have determined that maybe "the next generation of console hardware isn't quite as powerful as Epic was hoping for." How did they come to this conclusion? By comparing the first Unreal Engine 4 tech demo, running on a PC equipped with an Nvidia GTX 680, with the latest presentation running on a PlayStation. By analyzing the two, minute differences where the PS4 comes short can be found.
One of the biggest changes for the upcoming console generation is the switch to x86 architecture. That means working on PS4 (and likely the next Xbox) will be very similar to working on a PC. Already, Far Cry 3's tech director has spoken out on how great a decision that is. But what does Epic Games--developer of the near-ubiquitous Unreal Engine--have to say about it? Well, they're gushing as well.
"It's really important for us because we know the PC, we know the evolution of the PC and we work closely with those vendors on those parts," Epic VP Mark Rein said. "There's nothing that we have to guess about--we know what the processors can do, we know what the CPUs can do and we're using those same parts on the actual development hardware that we use. It just makes it a lot smoother and it also means we can build on our particular strength."
At its Game Developers Conference presentation, Epic Games announced details about the scalability and ease-of-use tools of its upcoming Unreal Engine 4. The company went into great detail about the engine's capabilities, and showed off a new trailer to illustrate its strengths.
Epic Games showed off all the bells and whistles of its Unreal Engine 4 at GDC this week, giving developers an up close look at the ease of use of the tools and just how realistic the technology can make game look.
To emphasize the point, Epic's Mark Rein closed the presentation with a fairly long "Infiltrator" trailer showing a spy making his way into a factory of sorts. The spy has a cool gadget that reflected images to hide his location. The trailer showed off quite a bit of the tools that had been showed previously. At the end, the dropped some of the pretty art to show the trailer in a wire mesh that was so complicated that even the highest end graphics card had trouble processing it in real time.
Heavy Gear Assault, the mech game that recently announced crowd-funding plans, will be based on Unreal Engine 4. MekTek Studios and the perfectly named Stompy Bot Productions announced use of the engine today, and released a new trailer to show off just what it can do with UE4 behind it. It takes a lot of horsepower to make a robot rollerskate.
It's time to fight more dinosaurs. At a PlayStation "Indie Arcade" event at GDC 2013, Lukewarm Media revealed Primal Carnage: Genesis--an Unreal Engine 4-powered single-player follow-up to its multiplayer shooter.
Coming to both PS4 and PC, the game aims to "resurrect the immersive dinosaur first person experience that people have been waiting for" across a mix of tropical and man-made environments. Instead of coming in a traditional $60 box, Lukewarm plans to release the adventure episodically.
Epic has decided to show off its Unreal Engine 3 tech on Android, with the release of Epic Citadel for Android devices. The free app offers plenty of pretty visuals, and houses a few new features to boot.
Epic Games has announced the formation of an as-of-yet unnamed Seattle studio that will focus on further developing Unreal Engine 4 technology. The studio is hiring, looking in particular for senior-level people with experience in online game services and infrastructure.
As this generation comes to a close, Epic's next multiplatform engine is starting to take shape. Unreal Engine 4 is the next iteration of Epic's popular game engine, and it promises to do more than make games look prettier.
"The biggest improvement in Unreal Engine 4 is philosophical," Epic co-founder Tim Sweeney said. "We want designers and creative people to take charge of as much of the game production process as possible."
Read more: 'We want designers and creative people to take charge' »
Epic Games' Fortnite will be the company's first game to take advantage of Unreal Engine 4. Debuted at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, the cartoony action title is being described as "a co-op sandbox survival game," with building at the core of the game.
"Everything you find allows you to build and improve your structure," producer Tanya Jessen told an audience at a Comic-Con panel.
As promised, at E3 Epic properly lifted the wraps off its next-generation engine, Unreal Engine 4. While the real-time cinematic teased before is jolly nice and all, the real highlight is a good long look at the tech and tools themselves.
While corners of the Internet speculate and bicker about the hardware powering the next console generation, Epic last week lifted the wraps off the engine that'll surely power plenty of next-gen games, Unreal Engine 4. Blowing its own trumpet a little, Epic spoke of its "responsibility" to make sure the next consoles from Microsoft and Sony can support the sort of prettiness it's putting out.
Shacknews had the opportunity to sit down on a private, invite-only press conference with Epic Games. At one point during the presentation, the Unreal Engine 4 logo appeared on the screen. (It's blue now, FYI.) Epic Games' Mark Rein told us that the company was showing off its next-generation engine at Game Developers Conference--but only to developers. The public reveal will happen later this year, Rein reconfirmed.
But what is Unreal Engine 4? And how does it compare to Samaritan, the high-powered Unreal Engine 3 demo that's been shown off for years? "If Samaritan looked like a piece of crap, that's what Unreal Engine 4 would look like," Rein told us.
In 2010, Epic Games released the Epic Citadel tech demo to show off what the Unreal Engine could do on an iPhone. Now, it's re-released that same demo running in a web browser on Flash 11, for you to have a look yourself. Epic also showed off Unreal Tournament 3 and Dungeon Defenders running in Flash, with only a moderate performance hit.
"It has great performance at 5760x1080 on FF nightly, but it calculates FOV badly so it's really ..."
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