Unreal Engine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Unreal Engine 4)
"Unreal technology" redirects here. For science or technology which is beyond reality, see science fiction.

Unreal Engine
Original author(s)Tim Sweeney
Developer(s)Epic Games
Stable release
5.4
Written inC++
Operating systemWindows, Linux, macOS
LicenseSource-available commercial software with royalty model for commercial use[1]
Websitewww.unrealengine.com/en-US

Unreal Engine (UE) is a series of 3D computer graphics game engines developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter video game Unreal. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of genres of games and has been adopted by other industries, most notably the film and television industry. Unreal Engine is written in C++ and features a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of desktop, mobile, console, and virtual reality platforms.

The latest generation, Unreal Engine 5, was launched in April 2022. Its source code is available on GitHub, and commercial use is granted based on a royalty model, with Epic charging 5% of revenues over US$1 million, which is waived for games published on the Epic Games Store. Epic has incorporated features in the engine from acquired companies such as Quixel, which is seen as helped by Fortnite's revenue.

In 2014, Unreal Engine was named the world's "most successful videogame engine" by Guinness World Records.[2]

History[edit]

First generation[edit]

A screenshot released by Epic of the first version of UnrealEd, displaying a graphical user interface written in Visual Basic[3]

The first-generation Unreal Engine was developed by Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games.[4] Having created editing tools for his shareware games ZZT (1991) and Jill of the Jungle (1992),[5] Sweeney began writing the engine in 1995 for the production of a game that would later become a first-person shooter known as Unreal.[6][7][8] After years in development, it debuted with the game's release in 1998,[9] although MicroProse and Legend Entertainment had access to the technology much earlier, licensing it in 1996.[3] According to an interview, Sweeney wrote 90 percent of the code in the engine, including the graphics, tools, and networking system.[10]

At first, the engine relied completely on software rendering, meaning the graphics calculations were handled by the central processing unit (CPU).[4] However, over time, it was able to take advantage of the capabilities provided by dedicated graphics cards, focusing on the Glide API, specially designed for 3dfx accelerators.[11][12] While OpenGL and Direct3D were supported, they reported a slower performance compared to Glide due to their deficiency in texture management at the time.[13][14] Sweeney particularly criticized the quality of OpenGL drivers for consumer hardware, describing them as "extremely problematic, buggy, and untested", and labeled the code in the implementation as "scary" as opposed to the simpler and cleaner support for Direct3D.[13] With regard to audio, Epic employed the Galaxy Sound System, a software created in assembly language that integrated both EAX and Aureal technologies, and allowed the use of tracker music, which gave level designers flexibility in how a game soundtrack was played at a specific point in maps.[15][16][17] Steve Polge, the author of the Reaper Bots plugin for Quake, programmed the artificial intelligence system, based on knowledge he had gained at his previous employer IBM designing router protocols.[18][19]

According to Sweeney, the hardest part of the engine to program was the renderer; he had to rewrite its core algorithm several times during development. He found the infrastructure connecting all the subsystems less "glamorous".[20][11] Despite requiring a significant personal effort, he said the engine was his favorite project at Epic, adding: "Writing the first Unreal Engine was a 3.5-year, breadth-first tour of hundreds of unique topics in software and was incredibly enlightening."[21] Among its features were collision detection, colored lighting, and a limited form of texture filtering.[12] It also integrated a level editor, UnrealEd,[22] that had support for real-time constructive solid geometry operations as early as 1996, allowing mappers to change the level layout on the fly.[23][11] Even though Unreal was designed to compete with id Software (developer of Doom and Quake), co-founder John Carmack complimented the game for the use of 16-bit color and remarked its implementation of visual 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.[8] "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," he said, adding: "The Unreal engine has raised the bar on what action gamers expect from future products. The visual effects first seen in the game will become expected from future games."[8]

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for PC was developed with the Unreal Tournament version of the engine using assets and environments from the 2001 film.[24]

Unreal was noted for its graphical innovations, but Sweeney acknowledged in a 1999 interview with Eurogamer that many aspects of the game were unpolished, citing complaints from gamers about its high system requirements and online gameplay issues.[19] Epic addressed these points during the development of Unreal Tournament by incorporating several enhancements in the engine intended to optimize performance on low-end machines and improve the networking code, while also refining the artificial intelligence for bots to display coordination in team-based gamemodes such as Capture the Flag.[25] Originally planned as an expansion pack for Unreal,[26] the game also came with increased image quality with the support for the S3TC compression algorithm, allowing for 24-bit high resolution textures without compromising performance.[27] In addition to being available on Windows, Linux, Mac and Unix,[28] the engine was ported through Unreal Tournament to the PlayStation 2 and, with the help of Secret Level, to the Dreamcast.[29][30]

By late 1999, The New York Times indicated that there had been sixteen external projects using Epic's technology, including Deus Ex, The Wheel of Time, and Duke Nukem Forever,[28] the latter of which was originally based on the Quake II engine.[31] Unlike id Software, whose engine business only offered the source code, Epic provided support for licensees and would get together with their leads to discuss improvements to its game development system, internally dubbed the Unreal Tech Advisory Group.[3][32] While it cost around $3 million to produce and licenses for up to $350,000,[28] 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.[33][34][35][36]

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[36]

Unreal Engine 2[edit]

Killing Floor was built in Unreal Engine 2.

In October 1998, IGN reported, based on an interview with affiliate Voodoo Extreme, that Sweeney was doing research for his next-generation engine.[37] With development starting a year later,[28] the second version made its debut in 2002 with America's Army, a free multiplayer shooter developed by the U.S. Army as a recruitment device.[38][39] Soon after, Epic would release Unreal Championship on the Xbox, one of the first games to utilize Microsoft's Xbox Live.[35]

Though based on its predecessor, this generation saw a notable advance in rendering terms as well as new improvements to the tool set.[40] Capable of running levels nearly 100 times more detailed than those found in Unreal, the engine integrated a variety of features, including a cinematic editing tool, particle systems, export plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and Maya, and a skeletal animation system first showcased in the PlayStation 2 version of Unreal Tournament.[41][42] In addition, the user interface for UnrealEd was rewritten in C++ using the wxWidgets toolkit, which Sweeney said was the "best thing available" at the time.[3]

Epic used the Karma physics engine, a third-party software from UK-based studio Math Engine, to drive the physical simulations such as ragdoll player collisions and arbitrary rigid body dynamics.[35][42][43] With Unreal Tournament 2004, vehicle-based gameplay was successfully implemented, enabling large-scale combat.[35][44] While Unreal Tournament 2003 had support for vehicle physics through the Karma engine, as demonstrated by a testmap with a "hastily-constructed vehicle", it was not until Psyonix created a modification out of Epic's base code that the game received fully coded vehicles. Impressed by their efforts, Epic decided to include it in its successor as an official game mode under the name Onslaught by hiring Psyonix as a contractor.[42][45][46] Psyonix would later develop Rocket League before being acquired by Epic in 2019.[47]

A specialized version of UE2 called UE2X was designed for Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict on the original Xbox platform, featuring optimizations specific to that console.[48] In March 2011, Ubisoft Montreal revealed that UE2 was successfully running on the Nintendo 3DS via Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 3D.[49] "The 3DS is powerful, and we are able to run the Unreal Engine on this console, which is pretty impressive for a handheld machine, and the 3D doesn't affect the performance (thanks to my amazing programmers)," said Ubisoft.[49]

Unreal Engine 3[edit]

Screenshots of Unreal Engine 3 were presented by July 2004, at which point the engine had already been in development for over 18 months.[50] The engine was based on the first-generation but contained new features. "The basic architectural decisions visible to programmers of an object-oriented design, a data-driven scripting approach, and a fairly modular approach to subsystems still remain [from Unreal Engine 1]. But the parts of the game that are really visible to gamers – the renderer, the physics system, the sound system, and the tools – are all visibly new and dramatically more powerful," said Sweeney.[51] Unlike Unreal Engine 2, which still supported a fixed-function pipeline, Unreal Engine 3 was designed to take advantage of fully programmable shader hardware.[51] All lighting and shadowing calculations were done per pixel, instead of per vertex. On the rendering side, Unreal Engine 3 provided support for a gamma-correct high-dynamic range renderer.[51] The first games released using Unreal Engine 3 were Gears of War for Xbox 360, and RoboBlitz for Windows, which were both released on November 7, 2006.[52]

Screenshot of the Samaritan demo

Initially, Unreal Engine 3 only supported Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 platforms, while iOS (first demonstrated with Epic Citadel) and Android were added later in 2010, with Infinity Blade being the first iOS title and Dungeon Defenders the first Android title.[53][54] In 2011, it was announced that the engine would support Adobe Flash Player 11 through the Stage 3D hardware-accelerated APIs and that it was being used in two Wii U games, Batman: Arkham City and Aliens: Colonial Marines.[55][56] In 2013, Epic teamed-up with Mozilla to bring Unreal Engine 3 to the web; using the asm.js sublanguage and Emscripten compiler, they were able to port the engine in four days.[57]

Throughout the lifetime of UE3, significant updates were incorporated,[58] including improved destructible environments, soft body dynamics, large crowd simulation, iOS functionality,[59] Steamworks integration,[60] a real-time global illumination solution,[61] and stereoscopic 3D on Xbox 360 via TriOviz for Games Technology.[62][63][64] DirectX 11 support was demonstrated with the Samaritan demo, which was unveiled at the 2011 Game Developers Conference and built by Epic Games in a close partnership with Nvidia, with engineers working around the country to push real-time graphics to a new high point.[65][66][67]

Unreal Development Kit[edit]

While Unreal Engine 3 was quite open for modders to work with, the ability to publish and sell games meant using UE3 was restricted to licenses of the engine. However, in November 2009, Epic released a free version of UE3's SDK, called the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), to the general public.[68]

In December 2010, the Unreal Development Kit was updated to include support for creating iOS games and apps,[69] followed by OS X compatibility in the September 2011 release.[70] By 2013, it reported more than 2 million unique installations.[71]

Unreal Engine 4[edit]

Interactive architectural visualization developed with Unreal Engine 4 (2015)

In August 2005, Mark Rein, the vice-president of Epic Games, revealed that Unreal Engine 4 had been in development for two years.[72] "People don't realise this but we're already two years into development of Unreal Engine 4. It certainly doesn't have a full team yet, it's just one guy and you can probably guess who that guy is," he told C&VG.[73] Speaking in an interview in early 2008, Sweeney stated that he was basically the only person working on the engine, though he affirmed his research and development department would start to expand later that year, developing the engine in parallel with Unreal Engine 3.[74] "In some way, we resemble a hardware company with our generational development of technology. We are going to have a team developing Unreal Engine 3 for years to come and a team ramping up on Unreal Engine 4. And then, as the next-gen transition begins, we will be moving everybody to that. We actually are doing parallel development for multiple generations concurrently," he said.[74]

In February 2012, Rein stated "people are going to be shocked later this year when they see Unreal Engine 4";[75] Epic unveiled UE4 to limited attendees at the 2012 Game Developers Conference,[76] and a video of the engine being demonstrated by technical artist Alan Willard was released to the public on June 7, 2012, via GameTrailers TV.[77] One of the major features planned for UE4 was real-time global illumination using voxel cone tracing, eliminating pre-computed lighting.[78] However, this feature, called Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination (SVOGI) and showcased with the Elemental demo, was replaced with a similar but less computationally expensive algorithm due to performance concerns.[79] UE4 also includes the new "Blueprints" visual scripting system (a successor to UE3's "Kismet"[80]), which allows for rapid development of game logic without using code, resulting in less of a divide between technical artists, designers, and programmers.[81][82]

I could say: 'I'm going to convert this pillar into a blueprint [in the Engine] and add some sort of trap to it.' It means I can really go in and start enhancing my world with interaction that just would not have been possible without a technical artist, a designer and a programmer and now any one of those three can do all of it, provided they have the assets handy. The fact that I can just go in and say, 'If you're within X distance of this thing, start to glow and take my distance to it, normalize it zero to one and then just lerp [linearly interpolate] between two different brightness values, so as I reach for something it gets hot'...that would have been something do-able but very difficult for anybody except a gameplay programmer. And he wouldn't have known how to set up the assets, but now any one of the three could do it.

— Willard, Kotaku, 2012[82]
An Unreal Engine presentation at GDC 2016

On March 19, 2014, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4 through a new licensing model. For a monthly subscription at US$19, developers were given access to the full version of the engine, including the C++ source code, which could be downloaded via GitHub. Any released product was charged with a 5% royalty of gross revenues.[83] The first game released using Unreal Engine 4 was Daylight, developed with early access to the engine[84] and released on April 29, 2014.[85]

On September 4, 2014, Epic released Unreal Engine 4 to schools and universities for free, including personal copies for students enrolled in accredited video game development, computer science, art, architecture, simulation, and visualization programs.[86] Epic opened an Unreal Engine Marketplace for acquiring game assets.[87] On February 19, 2015, Epic launched Unreal Dev Grants, a $5 million development fund aiming to provide grants to creative projects using Unreal Engine 4.[88]

In March 2015, Epic released Unreal Engine 4, along with all future updates, for free for all users.[89][90] In exchange, Epic established a selective royalty schedule, asking for 5% of revenue for products that make more than $3,000 per quarter.[91] Sweeney stated that when they moved to the subscription model in 2014, use of Unreal grew by 10 times and through many smaller developers, and believed that they would draw even more uses through this new pricing scheme.[92]

An Unreal Engine booth at GDC 2017

In an attempt to attract Unreal Engine developers, Oculus VR announced in October 2016 that it will pay royalty fees for all Unreal-powered Oculus Rift titles published on their store for up to the first $5 million of gross revenue per game.[93]

To prepare for the release of its free-to-play battle royale mode in Fortnite in September 2017, Epic had to make a number of Unreal Engine modifications that helped it to handle a large number (up to 100) of connections to the same server while still retaining high bandwidth and to improve the rendering of a large open in-game world. Epic said it would incorporate these changes into future updates of the Unreal Engine.[94]

With the opening of the Epic Games Store in December 2018, Epic will not charge the 5% revenue fee on games that use the Unreal Engine and are released through the Epic Games Stores, absorbing that cost as part of the base 12% cut Epic is taking to cover other costs.[95]

Effective May 13, 2020, and retroactive to January 1, 2020, the royalty exemption amount is increased to US$1,000,000 in lifetime gross revenue per title.[96]

Unreal Engine 4 officially supports the following platforms as of 4.27 (August 2021):[97] Windows,[98] macOS,[98] Linux,[98] iOS,[98] Android,[98] Nintendo Switch,[99] PlayStation 4,[100] Xbox One,[100] PlayStation 5,[101] Xbox Series X/S,[101] Stadia,[102] Magic Leap,[103] HTC Vive,[104] Oculus,[105] PlayStation VR,[106] OSVR,[107] Samsung Gear VR,[108] and HoloLens 2.[109] It formerly supported Google Daydream[110] and HTML5.[111][112]

Unreal Engine 5[edit]

The cave system in the "Lumen in the Land of Nanite" Unreal Engine 5 demo was generated using real-world photogrammetry assets imported into the Nanite engine rather than detailed by hand.

Unreal Engine 5 was revealed on May 13, 2020, supporting all existing systems including the next-generation consoles PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.[113] Work on the engine started about two years prior to its announcement.[114] It was released in early access on May 26, 2021,[115] and formally launched for developers on April 5, 2022.[116]

One of its major features is Nanite, an engine that allows for high-detailed photographic source material to be imported into games.[117] The Nanite virtualized geometry technology allows Epic to take advantage of its past acquisition of Quixel, the world's largest photogrammetry library as of 2019. The goal of Unreal Engine 5 was to make it as easy as possible for developers to create detailed game worlds without having to spend excessive time on creating new detailed assets.[114] Nanite can import nearly any other pre-existing three-dimension representation of objects and environments, including ZBrush and CAD models, enabling the use of film-quality assets.[118] Nanite automatically handles the levels of detail (LODs) of these imported objects appropriate to the target platform and draw distance, a task that an artist would have had to perform otherwise.[119]

Lumen is another component described as a "fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes".[117][119][120] Lumen eliminates the need for artists and developers to craft a lightmap for a given scene, but instead calculates light reflections and shadows on the fly, thus allowing for real-time behavior of light sources.[119]

Virtual Shadow Maps is another component added in Unreal Engine 5 described as "a new shadow mapping method used to deliver consistent, high-resolution shadowing that works with film-quality assets and large, dynamically lit open worlds".[121] Virtual Shadow Maps differs from the common shadow map implementation in its extremely high resolution, more detailed shadows, and the lack of shadows popping in and out which can be found in the more common shadow maps technique due to shadow cascades.[122]

Additional components include Niagara for fluid and particle dynamics and Chaos for a physics engine.[114]

With potentially tens of billions of polygons present on a single screen at 4K resolution, Epic also developed the Unreal Engine 5 to take advantage of the upcoming high-speed storage solutions with the next-generation console hardware that will use a mix of RAM and custom solid-state drives.[119] Epic had worked closely with Sony in optimizing Unreal Engine 5 for the PlayStation 5, with Epic collaborating with Sony on the console's storage architecture.[123] To demonstrate the ease of creating a detailed world with minimal effort, the May 2020 reveal of the engine showcased a demo called "Lumen in the Land of Nanite" running on a PlayStation 5 that was built mostly by pulling assets from the Quixel library and using the Nanite, Lumen, and other Unreal Engine 5 components to create a photorealistic cave setting that could be explored.[114][124] Epic affirmed that Unreal Engine 5 would be fully supported on the Xbox Series X as well, but had been focused on the PlayStation 5 during the announcement as a result of their work with Sony in the years prior.[125]

Epic plans to use Fortnite as a testbed for Unreal Engine 5 to showcase what the engine can do to the industry,[114][126] with the game brought to use Unreal Engine 5 in December 2021.[127] Fortnite's Battle Royale mode received visual improvements via Unreal Engine 5.1 with the launch of Chapter 4 on December 4, 2022.[128] The Matrix Awakens, a tie-in experience ahead of the release of The Matrix Resurrections, was developed by Epic to be a further demonstration of Unreal Engine 5 along with other technology that they had acquired over 2020 and 2021, including their MetaHuman Creator developed and integrated into Unreal Engine 5 with technology from 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, and Quixel.[129]

Additional features planned for Unreal Engine 5 come from Epic's acquisitions and partnerships. The MetaHuman Creator is a project based on technology from three companies acquired by Epic—3Lateral, Cubic Motion, and Quixel—to allow developers to quickly create realistic human characters that can then be exported for use within Unreal.[130] Through partnership with Cesium, Epic plans to offer a free plugin to provide 3D geospatial data for Unreal users, allowing them to recreate any part of the mapped surface of Earth.[131] Epic will include RealityCapture, a product it acquired with its acquisition of Capturing Reality that can generate 3D models of any object from a collection of photographs taken of it from multiple angles,[132] and the various middleware tools offered by Epic Game Tools.[133]

Unreal Engine 5 retains the current royalty model, with developers returning 5% of gross revenues to Epic Games, although this fee is waived for sales made through the Epic Games Store.[134] Further, Epic announced alongside Unreal Engine 5 that they will not take any fee from games using any version of Unreal Engine for the first US$1 million in gross revenue, retroactive to January 1, 2020.[135] Epic unveiled per-seat licensing of the Unreal Engine, starting in April 2024, for its runtime use with non-gaming applications such as in film and television production if their revenues exceed $1 million, with each seat costing $1850/year.[136][137]

In March 2024, Epic Games launched Project Titan, a collaborative art jam to create a free open world sample project for Unreal Engine.[138]

Scripting[edit]

UnrealScript[edit]

UnrealScript
ParadigmObject-oriented, generic
DeveloperTim Sweeney
First appearedMay 1998; 26 years ago (May 1998)
Typing disciplineStatic, strong, safe
OSCross-platform (multi-platform)
Filename extensions.uc .uci .upkg
Websitedocs.unrealengine.com
Influenced by
C++, Java

UnrealScript (often abbreviated to UScript) was Unreal Engine's native scripting language used for authoring game code and gameplay events before the release of Unreal Engine 4. The language was designed for simple, high-level game programming.[139] UnrealScript was programmed by Tim Sweeney,[35] who also created an earlier game scripting language, ZZT-OOP.[11] Deus Ex lead programmer Chris Norden described it as "super flexible" but noted its low execution speed.[32]

Similar to Java, UnrealScript was object-oriented without multiple inheritance (classes all inherit from a common Object class), and classes were defined in individual files named for the class they define. Unlike Java, UnrealScript did not have object wrappers for primitive types. Interfaces were only supported in Unreal Engine generation 3 and a few Unreal Engine 2 games. UnrealScript supported operator overloading, but not method overloading, except for optional parameters.

At the 2012 Game Developers Conference, Epic announced that UnrealScript was being removed from Unreal Engine 4 in favor of C++.[140] Visual scripting would be supported by the Blueprints Visual Scripting system, a replacement for the earlier Kismet visual scripting system.[7][80]

One of the key moments in Unreal Engine 4's development was, we had a series of debates about UnrealScript – the scripting language I'd built that we'd carried through three generations. And what we needed to do to make it competitive in the future. And we kept going through bigger and bigger feature lists of what we needed to do to upgrade it, and who could possibly do the work, and it was getting really, really unwieldy. And there was this massive meeting to try and sort it out, and try to cut things and decide what to keep, and plan and...there was this point where I looked at that and said 'you know, everything you're proposing to add to UnrealScript is already in C++. Why don't we just kill UnrealScript and move to pure C++? You know, maximum performance and maximum debuggability. It gives us all these advantages.'

— Sweeney, Gamasutra, 2017[141]

Verse[edit]

Verse is the new scripting language for Unreal Engine, first implemented in Fortnite.[142] Simon Peyton Jones, known for his contributions to the Haskell programming language, joined Epic Games in December 2021 as Engineering Fellow to work on Verse with his long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and others.[143] Conceived by Sweeney,[144] it was officially presented at Haskell eXchange in December 2022 as an open source functional-logic language for the metaverse.[145] A research paper, titled The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming, was also published.[146]

The language was eventually launched in March 2023 as part of the release of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at the Game Developers Conference, with plans to be available to all Unreal Engine users by 2025.[142]

Marketplace[edit]

With Unreal Engine 4, Epic opened the Unreal Engine Marketplace in September 2014. The Marketplace is a digital storefront that allows content creators and developers to provide art assets, models, sounds, environments, code snippets, and other features that others could purchase, along with tutorials and other guides. Some content is provided for free by Epic, including previously offered Unreal assets and tutorials.[147] Prior to July 2018, Epic took a 30% share of the sales but due to the success of Unreal and Fortnite Battle Royale, Epic retroactively reduced its take to 12%.[148]

Usage[edit]

Video games[edit]

Unreal Engine was originally designed to be used as the underlying technology for video games. The engine is used in a number of high-profile game titles with high graphics capabilities, including Hogwarts Legacy,[149] PUBG: Battlegrounds, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Valorant and Yoshi's Crafted World, in addition to games developed by Epic, including Gears of War and Fortnite.[150][151][152] Polish game developer CD Projekt is also planning to use the engine after retiring their in-house REDengine; their first game to use Unreal will be a remake of The Witcher.[153][154][155][156]

Film and television[edit]

Unreal Engine has found use in film making to create virtual sets that can track with a camera's motion around actors and objects and be rendered in real time to large LED screens and atmospheric lighting systems. This allows for real-time composition of shots, immediate editing of the virtual sets as needed, and the ability to shoot multiple scenes within a short period by just changing the virtual world behind the actors. The overall appearance was recognized to appear more natural than typical chromakey effects.

External videos
video icon Industrial Light & Magic - The Virtual Production of The Mandalorian

Among the productions to use these technologies were the live action television series The Mandalorian and Westworld and the animated series Zafari and Super Giant Robot Brothers. Jon Favreau and Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic division worked with Epic in developing their StageCraft technology for The Mandalorian, based on a similar approach Favreau had used in The Lion King.[157][158][159][160][161] Favreau then shared this technology approach with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, the producers for Westworld. The show had already looked at the use of virtual sets before and had some technology established, but integrated the use of Unreal Engine as with StageCraft for its third season.[162][163]

Orca Studios, a Spanish-based company, has been working with Epic to establish multiple studios for virtual filming similar to the StageCraft approach with Unreal Engine providing the virtual sets, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, which restricted travel.[164]

In January 2021, Deadline Hollywood announced that Epic was using part of its Epic MegaGrants to back for the first time an animated feature film, Gilgamesh, to be produced fully in Unreal Engine by animation studios Hook Up, DuermeVela and FilmSharks.[165] As part of an extension of its MegaGrants, Epic also funded 45 additional projects since around 2020 for making movies and short films in the Unreal Engine.[166] By October 2022, Epic was working with several different groups at over 300 virtual sets across the world.[167]

Other uses[edit]

Unreal Engine has also been used by non-creative fields due to its availability and feature sets. It has been used as a basis for a virtual reality tool to explore pharmaceutical drug molecules in collaboration with other researchers, as a virtual environment to explore and design new buildings and automobiles, and used for cable news networks to support real-time graphics.[168]

In March 2012, Epic Games announced a partnership with Virtual Heroes of Applied Research Associates to launch Unreal Government Network, a program that handles Unreal Engine licenses for government agencies.[169] Several projects originated with this support agreement, including an anaesthesiology training software for U.S. Army physicians, a multiplayer crime scene simulation developed by the FBI Academy, and various applications for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity with the aim to help intelligence analysts recognize and mitigate cognitive biases that might affect their work.[170][171] Similarly, the DHS Science and Technology Directorate and the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command and Research Laboratory employed the engine to develop a platform to train first responders titled Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment (EDGE).[172]

Awards[edit]

The engine has received numerous awards:

Legal aspects[edit]

See also: Epic Games v. Apple

The state of the Unreal Engine came up in Epic's 2020 legal action against Apple Inc. claiming anticompetitive behavior in Apple's iOS App Store. Epic had uploaded a version of Fortnite that violated Apple's App Store allowances. Apple, in response, removed the Fortnite app and later threatened to terminate Epic's developer accounts which would have prevented Epic from updating the Unreal Engine for iOS and macOS.[191] The court agreed to grant Epic a permanent injunction against Apple to prevent Apple from taking this step, since the court agreed that would impact numerous third-party developers that rely on the Unreal Engine.[192]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Unreal Engine End User License Agreement". Unreal Engine. Archived from the original on August 26, 2018. Retrieved August 26, 2018.
  2. ^ a b "Most successful videogame engine". Guinness World Records. July 16, 2014. Archived from the original on December 22, 2015.
  3. ^ a b c d Lightbown, David (January 9, 2018). "Classic Tools Retrospective: Tim Sweeney on the first version of the Unreal Editor". Game Developer. Archived from the original on August 23, 2018. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  4. ^ a b Sweeney, Tim (2005). "GPU Gems 2 – Foreword". Nvidia Developer. Archived from the original on October 3, 2017. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
  5. ^ Edwards, Benj (May 25, 2009). "From The Past To The Future: Tim Sweeney Talks". Gamasutra. Archived from the original on August 9, 2017. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
  6. ^ Plante, Chris (October 1, 2012). "Better with age: A history of Epic Games". Polygon. Archived from the original on October 4, 2017. Retrieved August 19, 2020.
  7. ^ a b Nutt, Christian (March 21, 2014). "Epic's Tim Sweeney lays out the case for Unreal Engine 4". Game Developer. Archived from the original on October 3, 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  8. ^ a b c Keighley, Geoffrey. "Blinded By Reality: The True Story Behind the Creation of Unreal". GameSpot. Archived from the original on May 19, 2001. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
  9. ^ Horvath, Stu (May 17, 2012). "The Imagination Engine: Why Next-Gen Videogames Will Rock Your World". Wired. Vol. 20, no. 6. Condé Nast. Archived from the original on May 30, 2015. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  10. ^ Brightman, James (March 13, 2012). "An Epic Interview With Tim Sweeney". GamesIndustry.biz. Archived from the original on July 9, 2019. Retrieved July 9, 2019.
  11. ^ a b c d Thomsen, Mike (February 23, 2010). "History of the Unreal Engine". IGN. Archived from the original on July 12, 2017. Retrieved August 13, 2017.
  12. ^ a b Hand, Randall (July 21, 2009). "Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines". VizWorld. Archived from the original on July 24, 2009. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  13. ^ a b Wilson, Billy (October 23, 1998). "Talkin' nasty with Epic's code-p1mp, Tim Sweeney". Voodoo Extreme. Archived from the original on May 1, 1999. Retrieved July 20, 2019.
  14. ^ O'Brien, Chris; Wilson, Billy (March 28, 2000). "Ask Sweeney, part 2". Voodoo Extreme. Archived from the original on August 15, 2000. Retrieved July 20, 2019.
  15. ^ Brandon, Alexander (2004). Audio for Games: Planning, Process, and Production. New Riders. p. 70. ISBN 9780735714137.
  16. ^ "Interview - Carlo Vogelsang on Lightning Quick 3D Audio with OpenAL". Creative Labs. June 30, 2003. Archived from the original on August 10, 2003. Retrieved July 8, 2019.
  17. ^ Brandon, Alexander (March 27, 1998). "Interactive Music: Merging Quality with Effectiveness". Game Developer. Archived from the original on February 20, 2020. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  18. ^ Sweeney, Tim. "Licensing FAQ". Epic MegaGames. Archived from the original on October 6, 1999. Retrieved September 9, 2021.
  19. ^ a b Gestalt (October 28, 1999). "Tim Sweeney of Epic Games". Eurogamer. Archived from the original on August 9, 2020. Retrieved April 16, 2020.
  20. ^ "Next gen engines". Tolstiy's Place. Archived from the original on November 21, 2001. Retrieved August 7, 2020.
  21. ^ Edwards, Benj (February 19, 2021). "Before Fortnite, There Was ZZT: Meet Epic's First Game". How-To Geek. Archived from the original on December 28, 2021. Retrieved March 23, 2021.
  22. ^ Smith, Tom (July 16, 2013). "Unreal: Epic's would-be Doom... er... Quake killer". The Register. Archived from the original on August 12, 2017. Retrieved August 13, 2017.
  23. ^ Wilson, Billy; O'Brien, Chris; Heir, Manveer; Howarth, Robert (May 25, 2000). "Talkin' nasty with Epic's Tim Sweeney". Voodoo Extreme. Archived from the original on June 20, 2000. Retrieved August 13, 2017.
  24. ^ "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone". IGN. August 10, 2001. Archived from the original on April 4, 2021. Retrieved August 25, 2020.
  25. ^ Kosak, Dave. "Beyond Unreal". GameSpy. Archived from the original on June 21, 2001. Retrieved April 16, 2020.
  26. ^ Reinhart, Brandon (June 9, 2000). "Postmortem: Epic Games' Unreal Tournament". Gamasutra. UBM plc. Archived from the original on October 17, 2016. Retrieved October 8, 2016.
  27. ^ "This Is Unreal Tournament". Next Generation. April 16, 1999. Archived from the original on November 12, 1999. Retrieved January 24, 2021.
  28. ^ a b c d Herz, J.C. (December 2, 1999). "GAME THEORY; For Game Maker, There's Gold in the Code". The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 19, 2017. Retrieved September 24, 2017.
  29. ^ "Unreal Tournament". IGN. October 9, 2000. Archived from the original on July 17, 2016. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  30. ^ "Interview With Dreamcast Unreal Tournament Team". IGN. December 8, 2000. Archived from the original on October 9, 2019. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  31. ^ Thompson, Clive (December 21, 2009). "Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem". Wired. Vol. 18, no. 1. Archived from the original on May 2, 2020. Retrieved May 2, 2020.
  32. ^ a b Lightbown, David (October 23, 2018). "Classic Tools Retrospective: The tools that built Deus Ex, with Chris Norden". Game Developer. Archived from the original on June 29, 2019. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  33. ^ Reinhart, Brandon (June 9, 2000). "Postmortem: Epic Games' Unreal Tournament". Game Developer. Archived from the original on July 29, 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  34. ^ "History of Unreal - Part 1". Beyond Unreal. May 31, 2005. Archived from the original on July 7, 2011. Retrieved July 5, 2009. Probably the biggest draw to Unreal was the ability to mod it. Tim Sweeney (Founder of Epic) wrote a simple scripting engine into the game called UnrealScript.
  35. ^ a b c d e Busby, Jason; Parrish, Zak; Wilson, Jeff (July 21, 2009). Introduction to Unreal Technology. InformIT. Archived from the original on September 30, 2012. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  36. ^ a b McDonald, T. Liam (November 1998). "The 3D Engine Wars". Maximum PC. Vol. 3, no. November 1998. p. 43. ISSN 1522-4279. Archived from the original on October 16, 2019. Retrieved September 17, 2017.
  37. ^ "Tim Sweeney Looks Ahead". IGN. October 23, 1998. Archived from the original on June 27, 2019. Retrieved June 27, 2019.
  38. ^ McLeroy, Carrie (August 27, 2008). "Improving "America's Army"". U.S. Army. Archived from the original on November 19, 2017. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
  39. ^ Kennedy, Brian (July 11, 2002). "Uncle Sam Wants You (To Play This Game)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 13, 2017. Retrieved December 12, 2017.
  40. ^ McLean-Foreman, John (April 6, 2001). "An Interview with Epic Games' Tim Sweeney". Game Developer. Archived from the original on August 22, 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  41. ^ McDonald, Thomas L. "Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!". Maximum PC. No. January 2001. p. 44.
  42. ^ a b c "Tim Sweeney & CliffyB Interview". Planet Unreal. October 22, 2002. Archived from the original on October 24, 2002. Retrieved September 27, 2017.
  43. ^ Parker, Sam (March 22, 2002). "GDC 2002: Unreal technology, new benchmark". GameSpot. Archived from the original on September 8, 2017. Retrieved January 6, 2022.
  44. ^ Parker, Sam (March 16, 2004). "Unreal Tournament 2004 Review". GameSpot. Archived from the original on July 11, 2019. Retrieved July 11, 2019.
  45. ^ hal (March 24, 2004). "BU Interviews: Psyonix". Beyond Unreal. Archived from the original on November 15, 2016. Retrieved November 29, 2016.
  46. ^ Wawro, Alex (July 21, 2015). "Why some old designs are worth revisiting: A Rocket League story". Game Developer. Archived from the original on May 11, 2019. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  47. ^ Statt, Nick (May 1, 2019). "Epic buys Rocket League developer Psyonix, strongly hints it will stop selling the game on Steam". The Verge. Archived from the original on May 1, 2019. Retrieved July 11, 2019.
  48. ^ Edge Australia. "The unreal thing". Edge Australia. No. 1. p. 68. Retrieved August 26, 2017.
  49. ^ a b Parrish, Kevin (March 25, 2011). "Ubisoft: 3DS Can Handle Unreal Engine 2". Tom's Guide. Archived from the original on January 21, 2016. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
  50. ^ Reed, Kristan (July 1, 2004). "Unreal Engine 3 Interview". Eurogamer. Archived from the original on March 15, 2013.
  51. ^ a b c Maximum PC. "Game Engines – Exposed!". Maximum PC. No. Fall 2004 (Special ed.). Future US. pp. 59, 62–64. Archived from the original on October 16, 2019. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
  52. ^ Caron, Frank (March 13, 2008). "Unreal Engine 4 to "exclusively target" next-gen consoles". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on January 23, 2019. Retrieved January 22, 2019.
  53. ^ Crossley, Rob (December 20, 2010). "Unreal Engine 3 game comes to Android [Update 1]". Develop. Archived from the original on August 11, 2017. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
  54. ^ De Vere, Kathleen (January 6, 2012). "A Top-Grossing iOS Game Like Epic's Infinity Blade II Can Earn More Than $5 Million a Month". Adweek. Archived from the original on August 11, 2017. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
  55. ^ Sottek, T.C. (October 7, 2011). "Adobe Flash 11 adopts Unreal Engine 3 for better browser games". The Verge. Archived from the original on July 6, 2017. Retrieved August 11, 2017.
  56. ^ Crossley, Rob (June 7, 2011). "Wii U powered by Unreal Engine 3 tech". Develop. Archived from the original on August 11, 2017. Retrieved August 12, 2017.
  57. ^ Ligman, Kris (May 2, 2013). "See Epic's Unreal Engine 3 running in HTML5". Gamasutra. Archived from the original on August 11, 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  58. ^ Callaham, John (March 19, 2009). "Epic Games to show off new Unreal Engine 3 features at GDC". Big Download. Archived from the original on March 18, 2009.
  59. ^ Shimpi, Anand Lal (December 29, 2009). "Epic Demonstrates Unreal Engine 3 for the iPod Touch, iPhone 3GS". AnandTech. Archived from the original on July 8, 2012.
  60. ^ "Steamworks Integration Now Available to Unreal Engine 3 Licensees". Epic Games. March 11, 2010. Archived from the original on May 17, 2010.
  61. ^ "Geomerics Announces New Enlighten Integration with Unreal Engine 3". Archived from the original on June 5, 2012. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  62. ^ Ingham, Tim (June 17, 2010). "E3 2010: Epic makes 3D Gears Of War 2 - We've seen it. It's mega. But retail release not planned". Computer and Video Games. Archived from the original on July 28, 2012. Retrieved February 12, 2011.
  63. ^ "TriOviz for Games Technology Brings 3D Capabilities to Unreal Engine 3". Epic Games. October 6, 2010. Archived from the original on March 9, 2012.
  64. ^ Fletcher, JC (October 11, 2010). "Epic's Mark Rein goes in-depth with Unreal Engine 3's TriOviz 3D". Joystiq. Archived from the original on March 12, 2012.
  65. ^ Hamilton, Kirk (February 8, 2013). "Apparently, The Story Behind Epic's Dazzling 2011 Tech Demo Is A 'Doozy'". Kotaku. Archived from the original on October 6, 2014. Retrieved October 4, 2014.
  66. ^ Gies, Arthur (March 18, 2014). "Epic Games working on new, unannounced IP (UPDATE)". Polygon. Archived from the original on October 6, 2014. Retrieved October 4, 2014.
  67. ^ Gaudiosi, John (September 21, 2011). "Epic Games Founder Tim Sweeney Pushes Unreal Engine 3 Technology Forward". Forbes. Archived from the original on October 7, 2014. Retrieved October 4, 2014.
  68. ^ IGN Staff (November 5, 2009). "Epic Games Announces Unreal Development Kit, Powered By Unreal Engine 3". IGN. Archived from the original on September 15, 2014. Retrieved September 14, 2014.
  69. ^ "Epic Games Releases Unreal Development Kit With iOS Support". IGN. Ziff Davis. December 16, 2010. Archived from the original on September 15, 2014. Retrieved September 14, 2014.
  70. ^ Grant, Christopher (September 19, 2011). "Unreal Engine 3 comes to Mac OS X, courtesy of September UDK release". Joystiq. Archived from the original on January 19, 2012.
  71. ^ Brian, Steiner (June 24, 2013). "How the Unreal Engine Became a Real Gaming Powerhouse". Popular Mechanics. Archived from the original on March 27, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  72. ^ Houlihan, John (August 18, 2005). "Rein: 'We've been working on Unreal Engine 4 for two years'". Computer and Video Games. Future Publishing Limited. Archived from the original on January 10, 2014. Retrieved August 19, 2005.
  73. ^ Howarth, Robert (August 18, 2005). "Unreal Engine 4?". IGN. Archived from the original on January 5, 2022. Retrieved September 9, 2020.
  74. ^ a b Valich, Theo (March 12, 2008). "Tim Sweeney, Part 3: Unreal Engine 4.0 aims at next-gen console war". TG Daily. Archived from the original on April 14, 2010. Retrieved March 13, 2008.
  75. ^ Parrish, Kevin (February 11, 2012). "Epic Revealing Unreal Engine 4 Later This Year". Tom's Hardware. Archived from the original on February 28, 2012. Retrieved March 1, 2012.
  76. ^ Shaw, Patrick (February 27, 2012). "Unreal Engine 4 Behind Closed Doors at GDC". Wired. Archived from the original on March 1, 2012. Retrieved March 6, 2012.
  77. ^ "Unreal Engine 4 - GT.TV Exclusive Development Walkthrough". GameTrailers TV. June 7, 2012. Archived from the original on November 23, 2018. Retrieved August 22, 2018 – via YouTube.
  78. ^ Burnes, Andre (June 7, 2012). "Epic Reveals Stunning Elemental Demo, & Tim Sweeney On Unreal Engine 4". Nvidia. Archived from the original on June 10, 2012. Retrieved June 12, 2012.
  79. ^ Papadopoulos, John (April 20, 2013). "Epic Games' Tim Sweeney Explains Lack Of 'SVOGI' In Unreal Engine 4". Dark Side of Gaming. Archived from the original on April 11, 2020. Retrieved February 14, 2018.
  80. ^ a b Grayson, Nathan (July 20, 2012). "Fortnite's Jessen Talks Minecraft, PC Gaming, UE4". Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Archived from the original on May 1, 2018. Retrieved May 1, 2018.
  81. ^ Thier, Dave (June 29, 2012). "Epic's Tim Sweeney on How Unreal Engine 4 Will Change The Way Games Are Made, and Why You Care". Forbes. Archived from the original on October 6, 2014. Retrieved October 4, 2014.
  82. ^ a b Totilo, Stephen (June 8, 2012). "How Unreal Engine 4 Will Change The Next Games You Play". Kotaku. Archived from the original on October 24, 2012.
  83. ^ Orland, Kyle (March 19, 2014). "Unreal Engine 4 now available as $19/month subscription with 5% royalty". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on August 8, 2018. Retrieved August 8, 2018.
  84. ^ "Zombie Studios Licenses Unreal Engine 4". UnrealEngine.com. December 18, 2012. Archived from the original on January 23, 2019. Retrieved January 23, 2019.
  85. ^ "Making it in Unreal: How Daylight survived public pressure and became the very first UE4 game". PCGamesN. November 24, 2014. Archived from the original on January 23, 2019. Retrieved January 22, 2019.
  86. ^ Sykes, Tom (September 5, 2014). "Unreal Engine 4 now free for academic use". PC Gamer. Archived from the original on April 4, 2018. Retrieved April 4, 2018.
  87. ^ Seppala, T. (September 5, 2014). "Would-be game makers can sell each other new levels, art in Unreal Engine 4". Engadget. Archived from the original on July 19, 2021. Retrieved July 19, 2021.
  88. ^ Nutt, Christian (February 19, 2015). "Epic Games offers up $5 million in Unreal Dev Grants". Game Developer. Informa. Archived from the original on March 12, 2015. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  89. ^ Sirani, Jordan (March 2, 2015). "Unreal Engine 4 is Free for Everyone". IGN. Ziff Davis. Archived from the original on March 14, 2015. Retrieved March 12, 2015.
  90. ^ Nutt, Christian (March 2, 2015). "Unreal Engine 4 is now free-to-download for everyone". Game Developer. Informa. Archived from the original on March 15, 2015. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  91. ^ Devin, Connors (September 3, 2014). "Epic Games Opens Unreal Engine Marketplace to Developers - Update". The Escapist. Archived from the original on September 5, 2014. Retrieved August 21, 2018.
  92. ^ Gaudiosi, John (March 3, 2015). "Why Epic Games is giving away its game technology". Fortune. Time Inc. Archived from the original on March 8, 2015. Retrieved March 13, 2015.
  93. ^ Graft, Kris (October 6, 2016). "Oculus, Epic make deal to give Unreal Engine devs a royalties break". Game Developer. Archived from the original on October 30, 2016. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  94. ^ McAloon, Alissa (October 4, 2017). "Developing Fortnite: Battle Royale prompted engine-wide Unreal improvements". Game Developer. Archived from the original on February 24, 2018. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  95. ^ Frank, Allegra (December 4, 2018). "Epic Games is launching its own store, and taking a smaller cut than Steam". Polygon. Archived from the original on January 20, 2019. Retrieved December 7, 2018.
  96. ^ "Unreal Engine | Frequently Asked Questions". Unreal Engine. Archived from the original on September 6, 2021. Retrieved July 23, 2020.
  97. ^ "Sharing and Releasing Projects". Unreal Engine Docs. Retrieved August 19, 2021.
  98. ^ a b c d e Kumparak, Greg (April 3, 2014). "Unreal Engine 4 Gets Support For Making Linux And SteamOS Games". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  99. ^ Skrebels, Joe (October 16, 2016). "Nintendo Switch Will Support Unreal Engine 4". IGN. Archived from the original on August 1, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  100. ^ a b Connors, Devin (April 24, 2014). "Epic Adds Xbox One, PlayStation 4 Support to Unreal Engine 4.1". The Escapist. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  101. ^ a b "Unreal Engine 4.25 released!". Unreal Engine. Archived from the original on May 6, 2020. Retrieved May 6, 2020.
  102. ^ "Unreal Engine Support for Google Stadia Now Available". Archived from the original on February 3, 2020. Retrieved February 3, 2020.
  103. ^ Koolonavich, Nikholai (March 19, 2018). "Magic Leap Release Developer SDK, Unreal Engine 4 Support Announced". VRFocus. Archived from the original on March 19, 2018. Retrieved March 19, 2018.
  104. ^ Kastrenakes, Jacob; Robertson, Adi (April 30, 2015). "Steam's virtual reality just got a boost from the maker of Unreal Tournament". The Verge. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  105. ^ Sykes, Tom (June 9, 2013). "Unreal Engine 4 gets Oculus Rift support, could spell good things for future indie games". PC Gamer. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  106. ^ Feltham, Jamie (June 5, 2014). "Unreal Engine 4.2 Update Adds Project Morpheus Support On PS4 & PC". VRFocus. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  107. ^ Matney, Lucas (March 15, 2016). "Native OSVR support comes to Unreal game engine". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  108. ^ Lang, Ben (September 16, 2014). "Samsung Gear VR and Google Project Tango Support Coming to Unreal Engine 4". Road To VR. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  109. ^ Ryan, Vance (May 31, 2019). "Unreal Engine 4 support for HoloLens 2 released in early access". Unreal Engine. Archived from the original on October 15, 2019. Retrieved June 11, 2019.
  110. ^ Graft, Kris (May 19, 2016). "Google's new VR headset gets Unreal Engine 4 support". Game Developer. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved August 10, 2017.
  111. ^ Cifaldi, Frank (March 29, 2013). "Interview: Epic goes all-in on HTML5 with UE4 support". Game Developer. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  112. ^ "Developing HTML5 Projects". Unreal Engine Docs. Archived from the original on January 5, 2022. Retrieved January 5, 2022.
  113. ^ Statt, Nick (May 13, 2020). "Epic Games announces Unreal Engine 5 with stunning PlayStation 5 demo". The Verge. Archived from the original on March 21, 2022. Retrieved December 11, 2020.
  114. ^ a b c d e Takahashi, Dean (May 13, 2020). "Epic Games: Unreal Engine 5 will bring a generational change to graphics". Venture Beat. Archived from the original on February 16, 2022. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  115. ^ Makuch, Eddie (May 26, 2021). "Unreal Engine 5 Gets Stunning Demo With Incredible Graphics, Enters Early Access". GameSpot. Archived from the original on December 28, 2021. Retrieved May 26, 2021.
  116. ^ Sinclair, Brendan (April 6, 2022). "Epic launches Unreal Engine 5". GamesIndustry.biz. Archived from the original on April 7, 2022. Retrieved April 5, 2022.
  117. ^ a b Valentine, Rebekah (May 13, 2020). "Epic Games announces Unreal Engine 5 with first PS5 footage". GamesIndustry.biz. Archived from the original on May 20, 2020. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  118. ^ Tarantola, Andrew (May 13, 2020). "Epic Games teases its new, nearly-photorealistic Unreal Engine 5". Engadget. Archived from the original on May 13, 2020. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  119. ^ a b c d Orland, Kyle (May 14, 2020). "How Epic got such amazing Unreal Engine 5 results on next-gen consoles". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on May 14, 2020. Retrieved May 14, 2020.
  120. ^ McWhertor, Michael (May 13, 2020). "Here's Unreal Engine 5 running on the PlayStation 5". Polygon. Archived from the original on May 13, 2020. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  121. ^ "Virtual Shadow Maps". Unreal Engine Docs. Archived from the original on February 7, 2022. Retrieved February 7, 2022.
  122. ^ Dimitrov, Rouslan. "Cascaded Shadow Maps" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on January 15, 2022. Retrieved February 7, 2022.
  123. ^ Statt, Nick (May 13, 2020). "Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the PS5 is so impressive it's 'going to help drive future PCs'". The Verge. Archived from the original on May 13, 2020. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  124. ^ Takahashi, Dean (May 13, 2020). "Epic Games shows off a stunning Unreal Engine 5 demo on PlayStation 5". Venture Beat. Archived from the original on May 18, 2020. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  125. ^ Maher, Cian (May 16, 2020). "Unreal Engine 5 will be "fully supported on both PS5 and Xbox Series X"". VG247. Archived from the original on May 16, 2020. Retrieved May 16, 2020.
  126. ^ Bailey, Dustin (May 13, 2020). "Fortnite moves to Unreal Engine 5 next year". PCGamesN. Archived from the original on September 25, 2020. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  127. ^ Capel, Chris (December 5, 2021). "Fortnite has finally moved to Unreal Engine 5 with Chapter 3". PCGamesN. Archived from the original on December 5, 2021. Retrieved December 5, 2021.
  128. ^ "Welcome to Fortnite Battle Royale Chapter 4 Season 1". Fortnite. Archived from the original on February 13, 2023. Retrieved February 13, 2023.
  129. ^ Egan, Toussaint (December 9, 2021). "The Matrix Awakens imagines the future of storytelling in Unreal Engine 5". Polygon. Archived from the original on December 10, 2021. Retrieved December 9, 2021.
  130. ^ Kerr, Chris (February 10, 2021). "Epic Games' new MetaHuman Creator will let devs everywhere build high fidelity humans". Game Developer. Archived from the original on February 22, 2022. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  131. ^ Takahashi, Dean (March 30, 2021). "Epic Games teams up with Cesium to bring 3D geospatial data to Unreal". Venture Beat. Archived from the original on March 30, 2021. Retrieved March 30, 2021.
  132. ^ Kerr, Chris (March 9, 2021). "Epic Games acquires photogrammetry software developer Capturing Reality". Game Developer. Archived from the original on February 22, 2022. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  133. ^ Francis, Bryant (January 7, 2021). "Epic acquires RAD Game Tools". Game Developer. Archived from the original on January 7, 2021. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  134. ^ "Unreal Engine EULA". Unreal Engine. Retrieved January 5, 2024.
  135. ^ Machkovech, Sam (May 13, 2020). "Unreal Engine is now royalty-free until a game makes a whopping $1 million". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on May 13, 2020. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
  136. ^ Francis, Bryant (October 6, 2023). "Epic Games to update Unreal Engine pricing for devs outside game industry". Game Developer. Retrieved October 6, 2023.
  137. ^ Scullion, Chris (March 12, 2024). "Epic confirms its new Unreal Engine pricing, keeps its promise not to change it for game developers". Video Games Chronicle. Retrieved March 12, 2024.
  138. ^ Games, Epic. "Project Titan Announcement - Epic Games". Archived from the original on March 7, 2024.
  139. ^ "UDK - Design Goals of UnrealScript". Unreal Engine Docs. Archived from the original on July 3, 2013. Retrieved June 26, 2013.
  140. ^ Schultz, Warren. "Unreal Engine 4 - First Look". About.com. Archived from the original on May 24, 2012. Retrieved December 29, 2017.
  141. ^ Wawro, Alex (March 1, 2017). "For Tim Sweeney, advancing Epic means racing into AR and VR". Game Developer. Archived from the original on July 20, 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2022.
  142. ^ a b "Dive into Epic's announcements from GDC 2023". Unreal Engine. March 23, 2023. Archived from the original on March 23, 2023. Retrieved March 23, 2023.
  143. ^ Peyton Jones, Simon (November 5, 2021). "An Epic future for SPJ". Haskell Community Discourse. Archived from the original on May 20, 2022. Retrieved May 4, 2022.
  144. ^ "Interview with Simon Peyton Jones". Haskell Foundation. March 25, 2022. Archived from the original on March 27, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023. So Tim Sweeney is the founder and CEO of Epic and he is a computer scientist and has been interested in programming for a long time. So he knows about Haskell and loves Haskell actually. So I think that's why he thought of people like me and Lennart and was keen to have us. But Verse isn't a Haskell clone by any means. It's a language that Tim has been designing sort of in his head actually for – I don't really quite know how long, I should ask him – around a decade. So it's informed by functional programming and imperative programming and game programming and logic programming. There's a lot going on in Verse. Lennart's and my job is to sort of reverse engineer Verse out of tim's head and get it set down in a kind of formal semantics that everybody else can make make sense of.
  145. ^ "Beyond Functional Programming: The Verse Programming Language (Simon Peyton Jones)". YouTube. December 12, 2022. Archived from the original on December 12, 2022. Retrieved December 12, 2022.
  146. ^ Augustsson, Lennart; Breitner, Joachim; Claessen, Koen; Jhala, Ranjit; Peyton Jones, Simon; Shivers, Olin; Steele, Guy; Sweeney, Tim (March 2023). "The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming" (PDF). Simon.PeytonJones.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 15, 2023. Retrieved March 27, 2023.
  147. ^ Brown, Fraser (September 4, 2014). "The Unreal Engine Marketplace is open for business". PCGamesN. Archived from the original on July 13, 2018. Retrieved July 12, 2018.
  148. ^ Chalk, Andy (July 12, 2018). "Fortnite is making so much money that Epic is giving Unreal Marketplace creators a big raise". PC Gamer. Archived from the original on July 13, 2018. Retrieved July 12, 2018.
  149. ^ Vergara, Nico (February 2, 2023). "Is Hogwarts Legacy on Unreal Engine 5?". VideoGamer. Archived from the original on February 2, 2023. Retrieved February 27, 2023.
  150. ^ Bradshaw, Tim; Kruppa, Miles (August 12, 2020). "Epic and Unity rev their engines for the next era of entertainment". Financial Times. Archived from the original on August 12, 2020.
  151. ^ Bradshaw, Tim; Kruppa, Miles (August 13, 2020). "Epic and Unity rev their engines for the next era of entertainment". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on December 5, 2021.
  152. ^ Dealessandri, Marie (January 16, 2020). "What is the best game engine: is Unreal Engine right for you?". GamesIndustry.biz. Archived from the original on November 17, 2021. Retrieved July 19, 2021.
  153. ^ "The Witcher - A New Saga Begins". March 21, 2022. Archived from the original on April 12, 2022. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
  154. ^ "CD Projekt will swap REDengine for Unreal Engine 5 to create the next Witcher saga". Game Developer. March 22, 2022. Archived from the original on April 5, 2023. Retrieved April 6, 2023.
  155. ^ Patel, Ashkay (September 9, 2022). "After Cyberpunk 2077's Disastrous Launch, CDPR Is Ditching REDengine For Unreal". The Gamer. Archived from the original on January 19, 2023. Retrieved April 6, 2023.
  156. ^ Nightingale, Ed (October 26, 2022). "CD Projekt Red announces remake of first Witcher game". Eurogamer. Archived from the original on May 21, 2023. Retrieved August 26, 2022.
  157. ^ Lodderhose, Diana (May 21, 2023). "Technologies Like AI & Unreal Engine Are A Having Big Impact On The Entertainment Business, But Where Will It Go From Here?". Deadline.com. Archived from the original on July 31, 2023. Retrieved July 31, 2023.
  158. ^ "Upcoming Animated Series 'Zafari' Is Being Rendered Completely With The Unreal Game Engine". Cartoon Brew. September 12, 2017. Archived from the original on February 14, 2018. Retrieved July 31, 2023.
  159. ^ Grubb, Jeff (November 19, 2019). "Why 'The Mandalorian' cites Fortnite dev Epic Games in its credits". Venture Beat. Archived from the original on January 5, 2022. Retrieved August 1, 2020.
  160. ^ Desowitz, Bill (February 20, 2020). "'The Mandalorian': How ILM's Innovative StageCraft Tech Created a 'Star Wars' Virtual Universe". Yahoo News. Archived from the original on January 5, 2022. Retrieved August 1, 2020.
  161. ^ Good, Owen (February 20, 2020). "How Lucasfilm used Unreal Engine to make The Mandalorian". Polygon. Archived from the original on November 13, 2020. Retrieved August 1, 2020.
  162. ^ Vary, Adam (March 12, 2020). "'Westworld' Showrunners on the Series' Bold New Direction for Season 3". Variety. Archived from the original on March 9, 2022. Retrieved August 1, 2020.
  163. ^ Failes, Ian (June 25, 2020). "'Westworld's' journey into the LED screen revolution". Befores & Afters. Archived from the original on January 5, 2022. Retrieved November 17, 2020.
  164. ^ Hopewell, John (June 3, 2020). "'Mandalorian'-Style Virtual Technology Sound Stage Orca Studios Opens in Spain". Variety. Archived from the original on May 7, 2021. Retrieved August 1, 2020.
  165. ^ Wiseman, Andreas (January 21, 2021). "'Fortnite' Creator Epic Games Makes Foray Into Movies With Animated Pic 'Gilgamesh'". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on January 21, 2021. Retrieved January 21, 2021.
  166. ^ Takahashi, Dean (April 26, 2021). "Spire Animation Studios kicks off Epic Games' new Unreal Shorts animated film program". Venture Beat. Archived from the original on October 6, 2021. Retrieved April 26, 2021.
  167. ^ Giardina, Carolyn (October 22, 2022). "Too Much Volume? The Tech Behind 'Mandalorian' and 'House of the Dragon' Faces Growing Pains". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on February 4, 2023. Retrieved February 5, 2023.
  168. ^ Yee, Erica (December 14, 2018). "The real reason Epic landed a $15 billion valuation is not Fortnite's viral video game success". CNBC. Archived from the original on November 9, 2021. Retrieved July 19, 2021.
  169. ^ Robertson, Adi (March 28, 2012). "Epic licensing Unreal Engine 3 for FBI training sim and other 'serious games'". The Verge. Archived from the original on November 15, 2022. Retrieved November 15, 2022.
  170. ^ "Unreal games engine licensed to FBI and other US agencies". BBC. March 28, 2012. Archived from the original on July 4, 2017. Retrieved July 18, 2017.
  171. ^ Brightman, James (March 27, 2012). "Epic Games launches Unreal Government Network for serious games applications". GamesIndustry.biz. Archived from the original on August 22, 2016. Retrieved June 24, 2017.
  172. ^ Barrie, Allison (November 21, 2013). "Army, DHS join forces for virtual training tech for first responders". Fox News. Archived from the original on November 16, 2015. Retrieved June 29, 2017.
  173. ^ Cowley, Dana (November 15, 2018). "Unreal Engine Wins Technology & Engineering Emmy® for Animation Production". Unreal Engine. Archived from the original on November 17, 2018. Retrieved November 16, 2018.
  174. ^ "Engineering Emmy Winners Announced". Emmys.com. October 8, 2020. Archived from the original on February 4, 2022. Retrieved October 10, 2020.
  175. ^ Davenport, Chris (March 4, 2021). "Epic Games' Unreal Engine Will be Recognized at Annie Awards". Gamerant. Archived from the original on April 27, 2021. Retrieved March 7, 2021.
  176. ^ "Front Line Awards 2004". Game Developer Magazine. January 2005. p. 14.
  177. ^ "Front Line Awards 2005". Game Developer Magazine. January 2006. p. 17.
  178. ^ "Front Line Awards 2006". Game Developer Magazine. January 2007. p. 14.
  179. ^ "Front Line Awards 2007". Game Developer Magazine. January 2008. p. 24.
  180. ^ "Front Line Awards 2009". Game Developer Magazine. January 2010. p. 11.
  181. ^ "Front Line Awards 2010". Game Developer Magazine. January 2011. p. 19.
  182. ^ "Front Line Awards 2011". Game Developer Magazine. January 2012. p. 10.
  183. ^ "Front Line Awards 2012". Game Developer Magazine. January 2013. p. 13.
  184. ^ French, Michael (July 16, 2009). "Develop Awards: The Winners In Full". Develop. Archived from the original on July 22, 2016. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  185. ^ Crossley, Rob (July 15, 2010). "Develop Awards: Unreal Engine wins tight race". MCV. Develop. Archived from the original on July 22, 2016. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  186. ^ Hoggins, Tom (July 21, 2011). "Develop Industry Excellence Award winners announced". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on July 22, 2016. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  187. ^ French, Michael (July 10, 2013). "Game development stars honoured in Brighton". Develop. Archived from the original on July 22, 2016. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  188. ^ Kayser, Daniel (July 14, 2016). "Unreal Engine 4 Wins Develop Industry Excellence Award for Best Engine". Unreal Engine. Epic Games. Archived from the original on July 22, 2016. Retrieved July 15, 2016.
  189. ^ Cowley, Dana (July 25, 2017). "Develop Industry Excellence Awards 2017: Best Engine". Unreal Engine. Archived from the original on August 5, 2017. Retrieved July 26, 2017.
  190. ^ Barton, Seth (July 12, 2018). "The Develop Awards 2018: All the winners!". MCV. Archived from the original on February 13, 2021. Retrieved July 18, 2018.
  191. ^ Bell, Elliot (August 14, 2020). "Daily Crunch: Apple removes Fortnite from the App Store". Archived from the original on June 5, 2021. Retrieved August 14, 2020.
  192. ^ Statt, Nick; Peters, Jay (October 9, 2020). "Epic judge permanently restrains Apple from blocking Unreal Engine, but won't force Fortnite". The Verge. Archived from the original on February 4, 2022. Retrieved October 9, 2020.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Unreal Engine.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unreal_Engine&oldid=1220971804#Unreal_Engine_4"