Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, which was featured in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in various genres of three-dimensional (3D) games and has been adopted by other industries, most notably the film and television industries. Written in C ++, Unreal Engine provides a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of desktop, mobile, console, and virtual platform platforms.
The latest release is Unreal Engine 4, which was launched in 2014 under a subscription model. Since 2015, it can be downloaded for free, with its source code available on a GitHub private repository. Epic allows its use in commercial products based on a royalty model, typically asking developers for 5% revenue from sales, though with the success of Fortnite, which became a test for Unreal Engine for Epic, Epic waives this fee for developers who publish their games through the Epic Games Store. On May 13, 2020, Epic announced that their share of royalties for games developed in Unreal Engine was waived until the developers earned their first US $ 1 million in revenue, January 1, By 2020 indirectly applies. Unreal Engine 5 is scheduled to be released late. 2021.
First Generation
The first-generation Unreal Engine was developed by Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney. After creating editing tools for JZ of ZZT (1991) and Jungle (1992), Sweeney began writing engines for the production of a game in 1995 that later became known as Unreal. The person will become the shooter. After years of development, it began with the release of the game in 1998, although the micro process and Legend Entertainment had access to the technology much earlier, it was licensed in 1996. According to an interview, Sweeney wrote 90 percent of the code in the engine. With ZZT, he used the IBM Model M keyboard while programming.
At first, the engine relied solely on software rendering, meaning that graphics calculations were controlled by the CPU. However, over time, it was able to take advantage of the capabilities provided by the graphics card, focusing on the Glide API, specifically designed for the 3FX accelerator. While supporting, OpenGL and Direct3D reported slower performance than Glide due to their lack of texture management at the time. Sweeney was particularly critical of OpenGL drivers, describing them as "extremely problematic, buggy, and untold", and labeled the code as "scary" in the implementation, as in That Direct opposed the simpler and cleaner support for 3D. Concerning audio, Epic employed the Galaxy Sound System, a software program in assembly language that integrates both EAX and Aerial technologies and allows the use of tracker music, a specific Tier gives designers flexibility in how to play the soundtrack on point. Sweeney stated that the most difficult part of the engine for the program was the renderer, as he had to rewrite it several times during development, although he did not support the infrastructure connecting all subsystems. Found it less "glamorous". [20] Despite the need for a significant personal effort, he stated that Engine was his favorite project at Epic, which states: "Writing the first Unreal Engine was a 3.5-year, first-time tour of hundreds of unique topics in software and incredibly Was enlightening."
Its features were collision detection, colored lighting, and a limited form of texture filtering. The engine also integrated a level editor, UnrealEd, with support for real-time creative solid geometry operations until early 1996, allowing mappers to alter flight level layouts. Even though Unreal was designed to compete with ID software (developer of Doom and Quake), co-founder John Carmack praised the game for its use of 16-bit color and visualization. Commented on the implementation of effects such as volumetric fog. "I doubt that any important game will be designed with 8-bit color from now on. Unreal has done an important job in pushing towards direct color, and that gives artists a lot more freedom," he wrote in an article. It is written by Geoff Kegley for GameSpot. He said, "Light blossoms [light shells], the amount of fog, and overall skies I was planning to carry, but Epic got first with Unreal," he said, adding that "Unreal Engine" has raised the bar on what gamers expect from future products. The visuals that first appear in the game will be expected from future games."
Unreal was known for its graphical innovations, but Sweeney recognized in an interview with Eurogamer in 1999 that many aspects of the game were unplugged, citing complaints about its high system requirements and issues with online gameplay. Epic addressed these points during the development of unrealistic tournaments incorporating several enhancements to the engine to optimize performance on low-end machines and improve networking code while refining the artificial intelligence for the bot. To demonstrate coordination in a team-based environment. The game came with increased image quality with support for the S3TC compression algorithm, allowing 24-bit high-resolution textures with little loss in performance. In addition to being available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac, and Unix, the engine was ported to Playcast 2 and through the Unreal Tournament, with the help of Secret Level, in the Dreamcast.
By the end of 1999, The New York Times indicated that sixteen exterior projects had arrived, using Epic's technology, including Deuce X, The Wheel of Time, and Duke Nukem Forever, the latter of which was originally the Quake engine. was based on. Unlike ID Software, whose engine business offered only source code, Epic provided support for licensees and met with them to discuss improvements to the game development system. While production and licensing up to $ 350,000 cost about $ 3 million, Epic allowed players to modify their game with the inclusion of UnrealEd and the ability to modify a scripting language called UnrealScript. Provided, sparking a community of excitement around a game engine. The game can be extensible for many generations.
The long-term goal with unrealistic technology was to build a codebase that could be extended and improved through several generations of games. Meeting that goal is necessary to keep the technology fairly general-purpose, writing clean code, and designing the engine very elaborately. The initial plan to design an extensible multi-generation engine came to give us a major advantage in licensing the technology as it approached completion. When we did one or two licensing deals, we realized that this was a legitimate business. Since then, it has become a major component of our strategy.
- Sweeney, Maximum PC, 1998
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