The first images showing what Epic’s next generation Unreal Engine 4 is capable of have been published on Wired. Gamers and developers alike are expected to wet their pants!
Behind closed doors a two-and-a-half minute cinematic demo was presented to a few developers prior to Games Developers Conference in February.
The images come from Unreal Engine 4 Demon Knight demo, built by a team of 14 engineers in just three months, which showed a frozen demon knight waking from his slumber and escaping from a crumbling castle.
Wired described the demo as: “If H. R. Giger and George R. R. Martin took peyote together. And had a baby. And that baby had a fever dream”.
“I had sleepless nights over this damn thing in the beginning, but I think we got the disasters out of the way,” art director Chris Perna told Wired.
The article discusses the history and significance of the engine whilst outlining the need for more powerful hardware to realise Epic’s vision for the next generation of games.
“There is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of our engine team and our studio to drag this industry into the next generation,” says Epic design director Cliff Bleszinski.
“It is up to Epic, and [technology boss] Tim Sweeney in particular, to motivate Sony and Microsoft not to phone in what these next consoles are going to be. It needs to be a quantum leap. They need to damn near render Avatar in real time, because I want it and gamers want it-even if they don’t know they want it.”
Epic Games will demo its next-generation Unreal Engine 4 to gamers and developers at next month’s E3.
Read the in-depth article on Wired
There’s no better way to understand the capabilities of Unreal Engine 4 than to look at the fire-spewing-eyed knight in various stages of rendering. Check out the Wired article for the full Unreal 4 gallery.
Posted on Monday, May 21st, 2012 at 4:20 pm under News, Products. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: Epic games, Unreal Engine
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