http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9840&Itemid=59
By John Gaudiosi
From his very first game, ZZT, which he designed as a kid in his Mom’s basement, Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, has always offered gamers the tools to play with his technology. Over 10,000 user-created levels were made for ZZT, so Sweeney knew there was an audience of gamers who wanted to leave their own mark in interactive entertainment.The just-announced “$1 Million Intel Make Something Unreal Contest,” which will award a grand prize winner a license for the Unreal Engine 3 technology, is the latest example of Sweeney encouraging gamers to follow their programming dreams. Both the PC versions of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament 3 shipped with the complete toolset of UE3, which gives gamers the same technology that Epic is using for Gears of War 2.
Over the years, Epic has watched as an entire ecosystem has grown around Unreal Engine 3 and its many games. In addition to the new games created by Epic and its UE3 licensees, modders are out there using the tools to make their own creations.
"You see a lot of cross-pollination between the different areas," said Sweeney. "Mod makers, programmers, and level designers have moved into the game industry at an unprecedented rate over the last five years. Thirty-percent of Epic has come from mod makers who worked on Half-Life, Quake, Unreal or past games. They learned the tools of the trade as enthusiasts on their own. They worked without pay just for the passion of it and got game industry jobs as a result of what they learned. It's really a great thing because there aren't really university courses that teach you how to build fun games. There's computer science and art, but a lot of that's very general and the particulars of creating games is quite different from that. There are many thousands of people who have moved from the live community to full-time professional gaming jobs."
Although Epic Games has a team of 20 employees devoted solely to the advancement of Unreal Engine 3 on a daily basis, Sweeney said all of the 90 employees play a role in improving the technology.
"Game teams working on Gears of War or Unreal Tournament 3 will add features to extend the engine and make it all available to licensees," said Sweeney. "There's this continuous integration cycle. If you look at the resources that really go into engine development, it's probably 40 or 50 people at any time."
Unreal Engine 3 is a constantly evolving technology with major new features being added all of the time. Sweeney said this process of upgrading and adding new features will continue the whole way through the current generation of consoles before Epic moves on to a new generation of the engine—one that will focus exclusively on the next generation of consoles.
"Gears of War was the first internally developed game on the engine, so it set the baseline for features that we were shipping in late 2006," said Sweeney. "Since then, we've extensively improved the system's support for vehicles since Unreal Tournament 3 is a vehicle-based game with heavy multiplayer. We've extended the network code and improved it since then, since Gears was aimed at small eight-player combat and Unreal Tournament 3 can scale up to 30 or 40 players. We've improved performance and also adapted the engine to support PS3. We've had PS3 up and running for more than two years, but this cycle is when we really optimized the engine for PS3."
Sweeney said that while UE3 is not a massively multiplayer engine, there's multiplayer support that scales up to games with many players. MMO game makers like 38 Studios, Sony Online Entertainment and NcSoft are all using UE3. Sweeney said developers can build very large games with this engine thanks to Unreal Tournament 3. That game features players running around the game environments, other players driving vehicles, full team combat, and AI-controlled bots running around the world. Sweeney said all of this works seamlessly with networking.
"In Gears of War, you can play for hours at a time without ever having the game action pause and a loading screen pop up," said Sweeney. "This makes these large, open-world, city-type environments that weren't practical before become feasible now. Teams can apply this to interesting genres of games besides the shooters that Epic makes. If you build an MMO game with the Unreal Engine you could open that up to mods in a way that's really unprecedented. It's the same thing with racing, fighting and other games. User-created content is extremely easy now."
Sweeney said Epic is already looking to the future. The company has teams working on new games and new features will be implemented into UE3 as those games are developed.
"The next Gears of War game will have improved physics features and new lighting and rendering features," said Sweeney. "Work on the engine will continue through the whole engine cycle. There will be major new features we'll be adding two years from now that games just haven't done yet."
Sweeney is looking forward to pushing UE3 in new directions over the next few years and he has a list of improvements he’d like his team to work on.
"We can do more with networking to get more players in these games and get more complex physics working," said Sweeney. "Right now we have fairly complex vehicle interactions, but there's a lot more that can be done there. There's even more that can be done with animation--further extending the integration between the physics and the hardcode animation. We have quite an extensive system for that, but there's a lot of game-specific work that can be done for improving human characters and their interactions with the environment."
Sweeney said Epic can do a lot more with stretching out lighting systems in these GPUs, including more dynamic lighting, more dynamic shadows, and more interactive effects like specular highlights.
"We've been looking at integrating some radiosity features into the lighting," said Sweeney. "We can have some combination of static and lighting radiosity. None of these are guarantees that we're 100 percent promising right now, but these are all active areas that we plan to work on further for our upcoming games."
Epic will be appearing on a panel at Comic-Con NY April 18-20.
