You read the title right, we have to wait a good amount of time for the next Unreal engine, But Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney assures everyone that the new engine will be worth the wait. The Unreal Engine 3 (current generation) has been around since 2006 and has moved mostly from it’s core PC usage to consoles and handleheld devices.
Tim Sweeney shares what they have been doing with the Unreal Engine 4.
“I spend about 60 percent of my time every day doing research work that’s aimed at our next generation engine and the next generation of consoles,” he said
“This is technology that won’t see the light of day until probably around 2014, but focusing on that horizon enables me to do some really cool things that just aren’t practical today, but soon will be.”
Sweeney then explained his belief that the biggest challenge and opportunity facing graphics engines in the near future is dealing with multiple CPUs.
“Once you have 20 cores, you can’t easily say this one is going to be for animation and this one is going to be for details on the face of the character, because all these parameters change dynamically as different things come on screen and load as you shift from scene to scene,” he explained.
“The big challenge will be redesigning our engine and our workload so that we scale more of these different computer tasks between CPU cores seamlessly in real-time and dynamically so that you’re always getting the maximum computing power out with the engine, regardless of what sort of work you’re doing.”
The Unreal Engine has proven as a staple in the gaming industry and I am excited to see what they have in store to get closer then they are now to complete realism and lets hope 2012 doesn’t happen.
