Peek under the hood of the most anticipated video game title of the year, Epic Games' Gears of War, and you'll find a new 3-D rendering engine that promises to finally bring out the full potential of next-gen consoles.
Gears, made exclusively for Microsoft's Xbox 360, has
already pre-sold 1 million copies heading into its Nov. 14 release.
Microsoft's director of platform strategy, Scott Henson, has said he
expects the sci-fi shooter will be the second-biggest Xbox game
franchise behind Halo.
Tim Sweeney, Epic's founder, says you ain't seen nothing yet.
Gears will feature a new engine called Unreal Engine 3
that Epic is licensing to other studios eager to flex unused muscles in
the Xbox 360 and bring out the best in the upcoming PlayStation 3.
By allowing gamemakers the ability to perform rendering with shaders
and create per-pixel lighting, Unreal Engine 3 will bring more
believable worlds to life on Xbox 360 and PS3. Gears of War
features large protagonists that can emote through lifelike facial
expressions, in addition to painting vivid, battle-worn landscapes
filled with monstrous creatures.
"Unreal Engine 3 brought a completely new graphics-rendering model
to the table," says Sweeney. "We moved from basically single-level,
30-second loading screens to seamless loading environments that allowed
gamers to play through huge sections of the game with no loading
screens popping up. This allowed for really large outdoor scenes."
Sweeney says this was a huge transition for the technology. In its
previous iterations, Unreal was built for PCs, and only incidentally
powered some console games.
In contrast, Unreal Engine 3 is console-focused from the inside out,
and is geared particularly to next-generation systems. Everyone from
Midway Games to Electronic Arts has optioned the technology for future
game development, he says, and the majority of next-gen and PC games in
production today are using the engine.
"We developed it for Gears of War but found it applicable for other projects," says Sweeney. "There are Grand Theft Auto-style games. BioWare is using it to develop a big RPG called Mass Effect. Gearbox Software is using it for its next-generation Brothers in Arms
games. Sony Online Entertainment is using it for its DC Comics
massively multiplayer online game. In addition to first-person and
third-person shooters, sports games and fighting games, it's really
being used for all genres except for racing."
Some game publishers, like Ubisoft, are even using the technology for PSP games like Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas.
Competing game engines include Valve's Source Engine and Id
Software's Doom III engine. But Epic Games has built a reputation for
creating proprietary technology that works across gaming genres and
platforms.
With the next-gen consoles, such cross-platform development is about to get a lot easier, Sweeney says.
"Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 fall into the same broad category," he
says. "They have multicore, high-end CPUs and Direct X9-type graphics
functionality. Compared to previous console generations, there's less
difference between Xbox 360, PS3 and PC than there has been at any
point in the previous console generations."