The Imagination Engine

As some of you may already know, news broke yesterday of Epic games new Unreal Engine 4, which you can check out here.

“UE4 represents nothing less than the foundation for the next decade of gaming. It may make Microsoft and Sony rethink how much horsepower they’ll need for their new hardware. It will streamline game development, allowing studios to do in 12 months what can take two years or more today. And most important, it will make the videogames that have defined the past decade look like puppet shows.”

Epic games are set to wow the crowds with their new software at E3, something which I simply can no wait to see, while the current images don’t exactly set my eyeballs to WOW mode, knowing a little about what is going on behind the scenes on a technical level is mind blowing, the abilitity to render millions of particles, real time dynamic lighting of every surface, every object, every reflection and being able to push physics and graphics the like this world has never seen is a feat to behold, the fact their boffins have this running on a single GTX 680 makes the current generation of consoles look like simple calculators in comparison.

In just 3 months a team of only 14 engineers have built this demo to show off their new game engine, but rather than a scripted CGI show-reel, they built a full-featured, top-of-the-line game demo, ok its not the biggest demo but its all there, it could also be “the first title of the next generation”.  “I had sleepless nights over this damn thing in the beginning, but I think we got the disasters out of the way,” says art director Chris Perna, the man responsible for the look and feel of the demo. Lead artist Wyeth Johnson adds, “In the time I have been here, we have never not pulled it off.” Johnson, a six-year veteran of Epic, is referring not only to the company’s ability to deliver on tight deadlines but also its track record of wowing the skeptics.

Source: Wired