NVISION 08 | DAY TWO

by John Gaudiosi

Tim Sweeney, founder and technical director at Epic Games, was on hand at NVISION 08 to show just how far Unreal Engine 3 has come since the original Gears of War shipped in 2006. Sweeney spent an hour walking a packed ballroom through some of the latest UE3 tools and showed some footage of Gears of War 2 running within the engine. After showing the newest technology from his team in Raleigh, NC, Sweeney sat down to discuss the state of gaming today, the direction his company is taking as a growing independent developer and what he predicts the future of gaming will hold.

How has Epic worked with nVidia over the years with Unreal Engine 3?
Hardware really sets the limitations for what software can and can’t do. In every major generation we’ve worked with nVidia architects to talk about what they’re going to be doing five years from now and what’s the real advantage of that. The process is really critical because software without hardware to run it is useless and hardware without software is underpowered. It’s a continual struggle to for the software guys and hardware guys to keep up with each other. I see a long positive evolution happening there.

How have you seen Unreal Engine evolve over the years?
We’ve gone from a single programmer to over 20 engineers working on the engine. Between 2000 and 2005, 40 games shipped using Unreal Engine technology. From 2006 through 2012, Unreal Engine 3 has been designed to support DirectX 9 and consoles with complex pixel shaders and per-pixel lighting and shadowing.

What have you been able to add to Unreal Engine 3 technology since the first Gears of War?
Since Gears of War we have added nVidia’s Softbody Dynamic System, which allows us to create extremely bouncy objects. In Gears of War 2 we use this quite extensively for gameplay features. It allows us to have rigid body and soft body physics in the game environment. We’ve also made significant improvements in the lighting pipeline. Almost all shadows were pre-computed in Gears 1. We added the ScreenSpace ambient system to Gears 2 so we have light absorption and shadowing effects everywhere in the game. This applies to all static and dynamic objects in a scene. There’s a new destruction system using nVidia PhysX and some custom tech that we created, which allows you to completely take apart the environment dynamically. A new fracture system allows us to take static objects and cut them up to pre-defined fracture patterns. There are also vertex coloring tricks with chunks that are broken off the objects. You can have a gradient that goes from inside to outside so a concrete wall will have different layers of textures and colors as its blown apart.

Do you keep up with all of the games using your technology today?
We play all of the games being made using Unreal Engine 3. It’s really cool seeing what people are doing with the technology, creating games completely visual styles and gameplay styles than what we’re doing ourselves. It’s very different from previous generations of Unreal where the engine was basically used for shooters.

What role does the mod community play with your engine?
The mod community has always been a real big focus of Unreal Engine. The original engine had a huge mod community that grew around that. Everything we’ve done since that has been to grow and sustain that market. With Unreal Engine 3 we have all of these systems that used to require all of this complex programming and now they can be used without any programming experience at all. There are visual scripting systems thatuse flow charts and graphical tools to make gameplay sequences. You can use the engine to create Machinima. There are a lot of cool prospects with this engine.

How have you seen modding grow?
At the same time, it can be quite daunting to use Unreal Engine 3 by yourself. This is a powerful engine that’s usually used by 50 person teams to build games. We’re seeing mod teams grow larger because doing this all by yourself can be a chore. Mod projects are growing more complex. We’re seeing all types of cool thing happening there. I think we’re going to see all types of new Machinima as game engines are used to tell cinematic stories.

When it comes to getting a job in games, is modding the best way in the door of a company like Epic?
At least 40 percent of the people at Epic came from the mod community. They started out building stuff in their spare time for the love of it with Unreal or Quake or Half-Life and thenlater over time got into it professionally. There’s no better way to prove your talent than creating cool stuff by yourself. In many cases it’s more important than a college degree or any type of fancy credentials. The mod community continues to grow. One of the greatest things about Unreal Engine 3 is that it’s this ecosystem of thousands of professionals in the industry who know it and tens of thousands of mod authors who are potential new recruits that can do neat things on top of that.

Where do you see the next Unreal Engine going with the next round of hardware?
Future games could be somewhere between single player and MMO experiences. I think there’s a lot of space to explore there. We’re really just beginning to see this start. It wasn’t until this generation that online became a big part of gaming with Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. The next time around we’ll see what type of innovations the PC and the next generation of consoles will bring.