Unreal Engine (Epic Games)

First generation: Unreal & Unreal Tournament[edit] The first-generation Unreal Engine was developed by Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games.[3] Having been programming since an early age and creating editing tools for ZZT (1991) and Jill of the Jungle (1992),[4] Sweeney began writing the engine in 1995 for the production of a game that would later become a first-person shooter known as Unreal.[5][6] After years in development, it debuted with the game's release in 1998,[7] although MicroProse and Legend Entertainment had access to the technology much earlier, licensing it in 1996.[8] According to an interview, Sweeney "wrote 90 percent of the code in the engine."[9] A screenshot of the first version of UnrealEd, displaying a user interface written in Visual Basic.[8] Among its features were collision detection, colored lighting, and a limited form of texture filtering.[10] The engine also integrated a level editor, UnrealEd,[11] that had support for real-time constructive solid geometry operations as early as 1996, allowing mappers to change the level layout on the fly.[12][13] Even though Unreal was designed to compete with id Software, developers of Doom and Quake, the game was praised by John Carmack for the use of 16-bit color and ambient effects such as volumetric fog. "I doubt any important game will be designed with 8-bit color in mind from now on. Unreal has done an important thing in pushing toward direct color, and this gives the artists a lot more freedom," he said in an article written by Geoff Keighley for GameSpot. "Light blooms [the spheres of light], fog volumes, and composite skies were steps I was planning on taking, but Epic got there first with Unreal."[6] Another notable feature was the introduction of real-time direct illumination in 1995.[14] At first, the engine relied on software rendering, meaning the graphics calculations were handled by the CPU.[3] However, over time, it was able to take advantage of the possibilities provided by graphics cards, a process that required Sweeney to rewrite the core rendering algorithm several times.[13] As a result, software and hardware rendering coexisted in the foundational software, with the latter focusing on 3dfx's Glide API.[10] While supported, OpenGL and Direct3D reported slower performance compared to Glide due to deficiency in texture management.[15][16] With regard to audio, Epic employed the Galaxy Sound System, a software programmed in assembly language that supported both EAX and Aureal capabilities and allowed the use of module music, a set of formats created through trackers that contained recorded samples and sequencing information for playback.[17][18][19] In addition to being available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac and Unix,[20] the engine was ported through Unreal Tournament to PlayStation 2 and, with the help of Secret Level, to Dreamcast.[21][22] By late 1999, The New York Times indicated that the number of external projects using Epic's technology was 16, naming the likes of Deus Ex, The Wheel of Time, and Duke Nukem Forever,[20] the title from 3D Realms that was set to debut the Duke Nukem series on the GameCube console.[23] Unlike id Software, whose engine business was only based in supplying the source code via XCOPY, Epic provided technical support for licensees and met with them to discuss improvements to its game development system.[8][24] While it cost around $3 million to produce and licenses for up to $350,000,[20] Epic gave players the ability to modify its games with the incorporation of UnrealEd and a scripting language called UnrealScript, sparking a community of enthusiasts around a game engine built to be extensible over multiple generations of games.[25][26][27][28] The big goal with the Unreal technology all long was to build up a base of code that could be extended and improved through many generations of games. Meeting that goal required keeping the technology quite general-purpose, writing clean code, and designing the engine to be very extensible. The early plans to design an extensible multi-generational engine happened to give us a great advantage in licensing the technology as it reached completion. After we did a couple of licensing deals, we realised it was a legitimate business. Since then, it has become a major component of our strategy. — Sweeney, Maximum PC, 1998[28]