Next, next, next generation Unreal Engine

Version 3 of the Unreal Engine is in development. Tim Sweeney on UE3 (Beyond Unreal) has the latest info on it, direct from the lead developer/architect. He’s been involved since the first version which ran Unreal; the second version ran Unreal Tournament and UT2003. Since this engine is aimed at the kind of machine that will be “mainstream in 2006”, some of the numbers being tossed around are pretty formidable.

Sweeney offered no answer when asked how much space a game that uses “2k by 2k” everywhere might take up. “UT2004 required 5.5 gigs of hard drive”, so I guess the sky’s the limit. If you look at the rendered character to the left (in engine, as mentioned on the screenshot itself), you see the incredible detail afforded by the high-res textures. As far as the video card goes, the requirements are:

“DirectX 9 cards will be minimum spec, so any DirectX 9 shipping today will be capable of running our game, but probably at reduced detail. If you only have a 256 meg video card you will be running the game one step down, whereas if you have a video card with a gig of memory then you’ll be able to see the game at full detail.”

Only a 256 meg video card??!!?? Anyone else feeling old?

Unreal Engine 3 describes Epic’s new engine in detail, covering the advanced graphics, physics, animation and content creation technologies. The scene to the right had “[o]ver 100 million triangles of source content contribute to the normal maps which light this outdoor scene.” That’s in the editing tool — before generating the compressed game level output where “[w]ireframe reveals memory-efficient content comprising under 500,000 triangles.” A mere 500,000 polygons!

The engine’s completely written in C++, is Unicode-friendly, compiles for multiple platforms (consoles, etc.), has its own flexible storage format and includes script/level debuggers and much more. Check the licensing page and you’ll see it can be yours for $750,000 for a single-platform royalty-free license. Each additional platform is $100,000. But if you read through the engine specs again, you’ll find it’s probably worth it for larger game projects.

This engine is probably only available for development right now and may still be in development itself; as Sweeney said, they seem to be aiming for the 2006 market with it. Still, it really looks like Unreal already has their act together today.