A look at Epic's latest Unreal Engine 3 additions

Hopefully they can hold us over for awhile. We're going to have this current gen of systems for sometime now. So Unreal 4 is probably a ways away. At least for us Console only gamers.

Any improvement is a good one.

That's what game development looks like? >_>

I guess the 360 isn't maxed out?

This time without all the lawsuits plz.

What's going on, Joystiq, I saw this video a few months ago.

Still wish they'd release an updated UT3 Editor :(

Yes it is old (I think I saw it about 8 weeks ago), but as someone who develops with the unreal 3 engine these upgrades are absolutly amazing. It was almost as exciting as seeing some of the new games at E3.

The tools that come with unreal 3 are among, if not the best, in the business. With the new aditions, they are very polished, very usable and flexible. UnrealScript could use a nice integrated IDE.

My favorite upgrade is having the emmisive channels of materials (complex textures) produce the appropriate light without the need to manually place spot lights every time you use the material.

@Whiskey Jak
I'm not sure you are right about 'pre-made' assets if I understand you correctly. The video above shows the assets from gears as a demonstration. All assets have to be imported into the editor to be placed in levels, which makes them 'pre-made'.

Unless you mean modding with UT3 editor, where you can use UT3's assets, in which case it is normal to 'borrow' assets when doing so.

Depends on the engine/editor. Game development can look quite different depending on what you're doing - some may work almost exclusively with pencil, paper and Photoshop, while others are going to be using a text editor to write code, and others might be working with audio software and even going hands-on to do field research. It's a very complex and involved process that requires a shitload of work, but there's also a huge variety of stuff to do.

Game development isn't just coding, and you don't actually need much technical knowledge to get into it depending on what you want to do. If you want to be a designer specifically, your best bet is to have strong reading, writing and communications skills, plus a great familiarity with games, an understanding for how they work (at both micro and macro levels), and the ability to iterate and build towards a goal. Office software, Adobe Illustrator, etc. are all vital to being a designer, and very little programming/scripting/art skill may be needed. Go to some games you like and write a fake design document for them, map out individual levels and plot player progression through them - leave no detail untouched, as everything from lighting colour, audio, dialogue, item positioning, etc. is important.

The Unreal Editor is part of the Unreal Engine, and frankly in its current form is pretty much a bitch to use (I've only really managed to make some very simple maps with it). The best editor I've ever had a chance to use is Sandbox 2 for CryEngine 2, and it's quite powerful while still being fairly user-friendly - but there is definitely a learning curve, and it still takes a long time to do anything worthwhile. It actually comes with the Crysis demo if you want to try it out.

If you're interested in game development, you'll probably want to figure out what you want to do. A portfolio is a must, and the bigger and more impressive it is, the better. Create a multiplayer map, make a mod for an existing game, do your own custom models and textures, program your own game engines, do some script editing, whatever. If you enjoy it, and can produce good results, then there's no reason why you shouldn't look into it as a potential career path - and don't be afraid if you can't get professional-quality results, because even though there are some amazing mods out there, most of them are the work of small teams of people and take years to make.

Finally, read web sites like GameDev.net and Gamasutra for high-quality articles on all aspects of game design. Even personal blogs, like Shamus Young's, are a valuable source of information. It's all good stuff.

The lighting was pretty impressive.

I'm curious how powerful a computer it takes to develop with this/any engine.

The MCP is cool, but the article downplays the lighting too much. Lighting seems like such a simple and obvious thing until you try lighting complex scenes in a 3D environment. While the lighting features aren't as innovative as the MCP, they're pretty freakin' significant.

Glad to see they used the correct plural of penumbra, penumbrae.

Thats good stuff for them, but MCP? Yeah I knew those as heatmaps from halo 3. from almost two years ago. Not saying bungie's the best but touting old tech as a new totally awesome feature is just a bit ridiculous. Great to have it in there but please don't blow it up more than it needs to be.

unreal engine does so many great things, yet it cant do true widescreen.

So it looks like they just integrated this http://www.geomerics.com/products.htm into their engine, which developers can license directly and add to their existing game engine anyway.

I know that it'll take some time, but I kind of hope that games don't like like the images pictured for quite a while. While they are good, they still have something that seems 'off' about them.