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Pre-GDC: Epic Adds 'Major' Unreal Engine 3 Updates
by Leigh Alexander
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March 16, 2009
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Based in China with over 400 staff, Virtuos is one of the largest providers of outsourced production services
to the games industry, specializing in 3D Art, Animation, Co-development, Engineering and QA.
Its international
management team is led by Gilles Langourieux former Founder and Managing Director of Ubisoft China Studios and
backed by Legend, the number one IT group in China. Since its creation in late 2004, Virtuos’ clients include
leading developers as well as 14 of the top 20 games publishers worldwide.
Website: http://www.virtuosgames.com
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Ahead of the 2009 Game Developers Conference next week, Epic Games is teasing "major" new updates to its Unreal Engine 3 that it plans to showcase for the first time at the event.
Among the new features to be unveiled is a global illumination solver called Unreal Lightmass, which Epic says produces high-quality static lighting and effects including soft shadows with accurate penumbrae; diffuse and specular interreflection and color bleeding.
Epic also says its new Swarm distributed computing framework lets developers generate lighting up to ten times faster. The new features are bundled with Unreal Engine 3, and current licensees can add Unreal Lightmass at no extra cost.
The firm is also highlighting a new Flickr and Google-inspired content browser and search engine powered by a back-end database to help streamline the way users find source content. It adds thumbnail previews, supports content tagging, and asset collection management.
The Unreal Master Control Program, the scalable statistics and data management back-end used to support the online community features for Epic's Gears of War 2 will also be available as a general UE3 feature, Epic adds.
It supports announcements, settings management, population tracking and data collection, even tools like a heat map series displaying regions of player activity within a level.
"Battle-tested by over 6.8 million hours of online player time, Unreal MCP seriously ups the ante for game engines," says Epic vice president Mark Rein. "The online infrastructure required for a modern, triple-A game represents man-years of work, and all of this is now included in Unreal Engine 3."
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And since Epic provokes zero interest by now: nice new desing, although we'll miss the old yellow. Problem is, if I login with Firefox, it will immediatly destroy my session and log me out. Explorer works fine.