Speaking to Australian magazine Atomic, Epic founder and senior programmer Tim Sweeney has shed some light on the firm’s latest graphics engine.
The original Unreal engine was widely acclaimed, with developers loving the easy access suite of 3D tools on offer. This latest generation of engine is set to power Unreal Tournament 2004 as well as provide substantial revenue for Epic over the next few years.
“We already have polygon count where it needs to be. We're going to be focusing on per-pixel rendering and getting the quality of each pixel on screen as high as possible,” commented Sweeney. “So there's a bunch of different technologies there: dynamic shadowing technology, stencil buffer and shadow z-buffers. But the whole idea is that every object in the scene should cast realistic shadows with respect to every light source in the scene, and every pixel you see should illuminate properly that way.” Ambitious stuff indeed.
Sweeney continues, “But to do that properly you really want fuzzy shadows everywhere because most light and most environments are quite diffused and if you look around, you very seldom see a really sharp shadow edge somewhere. So a huge amount of effort and processing power goes into implementing fuzzy shadows effectively in real-time. That's been a significant part of our R&D right there.” See how crazy developers are? Fuzzy shadows taking up all that research and development time! The good news is that in terms of light management and dispersal, UT2004 is shaping up to be the best thing, perhaps ever.
Unreal Tournament 2004 is currently slated to hit shelves across Europe on March 19 this year.
The original Unreal engine was widely acclaimed, with developers loving the easy access suite of 3D tools on offer. This latest generation of engine is set to power Unreal Tournament 2004 as well as provide substantial revenue for Epic over the next few years.
“We already have polygon count where it needs to be. We're going to be focusing on per-pixel rendering and getting the quality of each pixel on screen as high as possible,” commented Sweeney. “So there's a bunch of different technologies there: dynamic shadowing technology, stencil buffer and shadow z-buffers. But the whole idea is that every object in the scene should cast realistic shadows with respect to every light source in the scene, and every pixel you see should illuminate properly that way.” Ambitious stuff indeed.
Sweeney continues, “But to do that properly you really want fuzzy shadows everywhere because most light and most environments are quite diffused and if you look around, you very seldom see a really sharp shadow edge somewhere. So a huge amount of effort and processing power goes into implementing fuzzy shadows effectively in real-time. That's been a significant part of our R&D right there.” See how crazy developers are? Fuzzy shadows taking up all that research and development time! The good news is that in terms of light management and dispersal, UT2004 is shaping up to be the best thing, perhaps ever.
Unreal Tournament 2004 is currently slated to hit shelves across Europe on March 19 this year.
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