Game Stooge

Unreal Engine 4.0 for Xbox 720 and PS4

• Scribbled on March 13th, 2008 by Derrick Schommer
• Filed in Editorial Content, Industry News, Off Topic, Previews

What is in store for the 4th spin of the Unreal Engine? Plenty of jaw dropping optimizations that are so subtle and fluid they’ll mimic life more than they ever have before. The next generation of the Unreal Engine will follow the blood line of console systems, you won’t get an Unreal Engine 4.0 until you see a next generation of consoles hit the market.

Why?

Most hardware platforms have evolved greatly since the 16-bit generation of consoles; once upon a time we would replace n-bit with the numbers 8, 16 then 32. Today’s world is much more complex than simply adding a few more bits and a couple additional copper wires. Tomorrow’s world is filled with complex subsystems, multi-core technology, high bandwidth system buses and shared memory pools.

What?

In order to build another generation of the Unreal Engine you must weave your software around the fabric of multi-core technology, understand the in’s and the out’s to optimizing your software on new breeds of complex hardware. For developers this means paging through technical specifications, inventing new ways of syncronizing objects and environments with sounds and visuals, but for gamers this means awesomely realistic worlds which mimic that of life itself.

Unreal Engine 4.0 will have portions of its core software which will “stay the same” because technology around the ideas hasn’t changed as much, a good example being the network infrastructure. The Internet hasn’t been redesigned or optimized, to many consumers chagrin, but the audio and visuals have undergone many changes in the last few years which warrants code redesign. That may mean EPIC “will rewrite large sections of the engine” around the new technology while leaving some of the older software in-tact.

This doesn’t eman EPIC is done supporting or enhancing the 3rd edition of their Unreal Engine, it just means huge new changes and technology advancements are being held off for hardware which can support them: the 8th generation of consoles.

“Down the road, we will have tens of processing cores to deal with and we need much, much finer grain task-parallelism in order to avoid being burdened by single-threaded code. That, of course, requires us to rewrite very large portions of the engine. We are replacing our scripting system with something completely new, a highly-threadable system. We’re also replacing the rendering engine with something that can scale to much smaller rendering tasks, in- and out-of-order threads. There is a lot of work to do.”

What does that mean to gamers? Imagine a world in which everything had to stop to perform basic tasks like reading a book, dropping a ball or ordering a pizza. How frustrating would it be if you were unable to open a window or turn on the air conditioner until your pizza arrived? Or, imagine for a second, your TV remote ran slower because you were also running the dishwasher at the same time.

In the real world many things occur simultaniously in a fluid well behaved system which we call “life.” Console systems are mimicing “life” by processing data as fast as possible with priority on what we see, but what about the people living next door? Their actions may influence our everday life. If you want to take a nap and your neighbor starts their aweful sounding lawn mower it may annoy you; what they are doing does matter to you, right? Video game hardware works the same way, you may be shooting at some baddie aliens now but it would be great if the aliens in the next room were thinking of what to do to you when you walk through the door.

Parallal processing and multi-core technology with threads of execution mean we’re all living in a virtual world and many things can happen at once. The better developers understand how to utilize such expansive technology the more life-like our video game experiences will be–Unreal Engine 4.0 plans to bring us to the next level of real world game play, let’s give them some time to figure it out. The 8th generation of video game consoles is going to be a wonderful place to live.

source: http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36436/118/1/1/