Oath to IT
It's time to make games even more UNREAL
Many of us "old people in the barn" remember the days when you sat up until 3 o'clock playing that fast phased awesome game called Quake. It lived long in our hearts until 1999-2000 when Quake 3 Arena was out, but got hard competition by no other game than Unreal Tournament.
Why am I walking through memory lane with you guys, stirring up that nostalgia you ask?
Well because now, 16 year after the initial release of the Unreal Engine 1, and almost 14 years after the first stable release with UT99 comes Unreal Engine 4.
March 19th was the big date, the day that we have longed for a long time. Epic Games have teased us with a demo and awesome pictures for almost 2 years now since they publicly showed it in May 2012.
In todays consol generator the ability to make even better games with greater looking atmospheres with dynamic lightning is a piece of cake, but to do it they need new and updated engines. This is why the Unreal Engine 4 is such a great asset for developers.
If you guys remember the development cost that Sony announced together with the release of Playstation 4, you could see that the cost had drastically dropped since Playstation 2 and 3. This together with the new Unreal Engine 4 that will be a lot cheaper and user friendly than it's predecessors. What this means for the game industry is that there will be many more games from smaller game developers with better quality. They are given every chance to succeed.
This is not only good news for Consoles, far from it. The PC-front will gain greatly from this new engine, but not only from Unreal Engine 4. Crytek (amongst others) have acknowledged that their Cryengine will support the AMD Mantle and also be available for Linux.
Epic Games will release Unreal Engine 4 to both small developers and the giants in the industry, and all will be able to use it. This is thanks to it's new license model that makes it possible for smaller companies to use the engine for only $19/month + 5% of revenues from the game. With this they also get Github and Unreal Editor. Crytek has announced that they will release a similar model with their CryEngine that will cost only $9,99/month and no royalty fees.
All and all with the new engine we can see much more details, greater realism with lights, particles and gravity. It comes with support for HDR-effects, support for thousands of light sources, the particles will also be able to absorb and reflect light. The surroundings will be adaptable with details that support tessellation and also physic accelerating particles that uses the calculation power within the GPU.
All in all, I think we will be seeing an explosion of great looking games when people start to get a hang of the new engine. I for one cannot wait!
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