General Features Object-Oriented Design, Plug-in Architecture, Save/Load System: • Extensible, object-oriented C++ engine with software framework for persistence, dynamic loading of code and content, portability, debugging.
• Designed with ease of content creation and programming in mind, with the goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists to develop assets in a visual environment with minimal programmer assistance; and to give programmers a highly modular and extensible framework for building, testing, and shipping games in a wide range of genres.
• Source control friendly software architecture, scalable to large teams and multi-platform projects.
Scripting • UnrealScript gameplay scripting language provides automatic support for metadata; persistence with very flexible file format backwards-compatibility; support for exposing script properties to level designers in UnrealEd; a GUI-based script debugger; and native language support for many concepts important in gameplay programming, such as dynamically scoped state machines and time-based (latent) execution of code.
• Visual AI Scripting Tool enabling designers to create complex interactive in-game scenarios, such as player objectives, versatile triggering of game events, and interactive cinematics.
Built-in Editors • Visual physics modeling tool built into UnrealEd, supporting creation of optimized collision primitives for models and skeletal animated meshes; constraint editing; and interactive physics simulation and tweaking in-editor.
• AI paths are viewable and editable by level designers in UnrealEd, allowing customization and hinting
• "UnrealMatinee", a timeline-based visual sequencing, animation, and spline path tool. Designers use this to create in-game cinematics, both interactive and non-interactive by sequencing animations, moving objects including cameras, controlling sounds and visual special effects, and triggering gameplay and AI events.
• Visual Sound Tool in UnrealEd gives sound designers complete control over sounds, sound levels, sequencing, looping, filtering, modulation, pitch shift, and randomization. Sounds parameters are separated from code to an extent that sound designers can control all sounds associated with gameplay, cinematics and animation sequences.
Physics Basic Physics, Collision Detection, Rigid Body, Vehicle Physics: • Rigid body physics system supporting player interaction with physical game object, ragdoll character animation, complex vehicles, and dismemberable objects.
• All renderable materials have physical properties such as friction
• Physics-driven sound
• Fully integrated support for physics-based vehicles, including player control, AI, and networking
Lighting Per-vertex, Per-pixel, Volumetric, Lightmapping, Gloss maps, Anisotropic: • Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions.
Shadows Shadow Mapping, Projected planar, Shadow Volume: • Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for three shadow techniques: *Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene. *Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft, fuzzy shadows on the scene using 16X-oversampled shadow buffers. *Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.
• pre-computed shadow masks; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps
• All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.
Texturing Basic, Multi-texturing, Bumpmapping, Mipmapping, Volumetric, Projected, Procedural: • Supports all modern texturing techniques.
Shaders Vertex, Pixel, High Level: • The material framework is modular, so programmers can add not just new shader programs, but shader components which artists can connect with other components on-the-fly, resulting in dynamic composition and compilation of shader code.
Scene Management General, BSP, Portals, LOD: • Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.
Animation Inverse Kinematics, Keyframe Animation, Skeletal Animation, Facial Animation, Animation Blending: • Skeletal animation system supporting up to 4 bone influences per vertex and very complex skeletons
• Animation is driven by a tree of animation objects including: Blend controllers, data-driven controllers, physics controllers, and procedural animation controllers.
• Export tools for 3D Studio Max, Maya for bringing weighted meshes, skeletons, and animation sequences into the engine.
Meshes Mesh Loading, Skinning, Progressive, Tessellation, Deformation: • Most of our characters are built from two meshes: a realtime mesh with thousands of triangles, and a detail mesh with millions of triangles. We provide a distributed-computing application which raytraces the detail mesh and, from its high-polygon geometry, generates a normal map that is applied to the realtime mesh when rendering. The result is in-game objects with all of the lighting detail of the high poly mesh, but that are still easily rendered in real time.
Surfaces & Curves Splines, Patches:
Special Effects Environment Mapping, Lens Flares, Billboarding, Particle System, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Sky, Water, Fire, Explosion, Decals, Fog, Weather, Mirror: • Volumetric environmental effects including height fog and physically accurate distance fog.
Terrain Rendering, CLOD, Splatting: • Artists can build terrain using a dynamically-deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly-blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation, and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes. Further, the terrain system supports artist-controlled layers of procedural weathering, for example, grass and vegetation on the flat areas of terrain, rock on high slopes, and snow at the peaks.
Networking System Client-Server, Peer-to-Peer: • Internet and LAN play is fully supported on PC and all console platforms.
• Unreal Engine gameplay network programming is high-level and data-driven, allowing UnrealScript game code to specify variables and functions to be replicated between client and server to maintain a consistent approximation of game state. The low-level game networking transport is UDP-based and combines reliable and unreliable transmission schemes to optimize gameplay, even in low-bandwidth and high-latency scenarios.
• Client-server model supporting up to 64 players as provided. Also supports non-dedicated server (peer-to-peer mode) with up to 16 players.
• Supports network play between different platforms (i.e. dedicated PC serving console clients; Windows, MacOS and Linux clients playing together.)
• A “master server” component is provided for tracking worldwide servers, providing filtered server lists to players, etc. Worldwide game stats tracking system.
Sound & Video 2D Sound, 3D Sound, Streaming Sound: • Support for all major output formats of each platform, including 5.1 surround sound and certification-quality Dolby Digital.
• 3D sound positioning, spatialization, Doppler shift
• Supports all major sound formats of each platform, including PCM, ADPCM, console-specific proprietary sound compression formats, and Ogg Vorbis.
• Support for sound streaming on consoles.
Artificial Intelligence Pathfinding, Decision Making, Finite State Machines, Scripted: • Rich multi-level AI system supporting path-finding, complex level navigation, individual decision making, and team-based AI.
Rendering Fixed-function, Render-to-Texture: • 64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.
• Powerful material system, enabling artists to create arbitrarily complex realtime shaders on-the-fly in a visual interface that is comparable in power to the non-realtime functionality provided by Maya.
Comment