Nouvelle interview de Tim Sweeney: Unreal Engine 3

Homelanfed nous propose une nouvelle interview de Tim Sweeney, programmeur en chef du moteur de jeux des Unreal. Alors que la celle de Beryond3D se consacrait à plusieurs sujets différents, il est ici plus particulièrement question du Unreal Engine 3, c'est à dire le moteur 3D qui commencera à équiper des jeux en 2006.

HomeLAN - What can you tell us about the new features for the next generation Unreal Engine?

Tim Sweeney - There is a new 100% dynamic, 64-bit-per-pixel high definition rendering engine focus on per-pixel lighting and dynamic shadowing. This includes all of the logical features you would expect in an HDR rendering pipeline, such as lenticular halos and light blooms, dynamically shadowed lights and projectors, normal mapping, displacement mapping, and raytracing effects such as volumetric lighting and refraction. But it goes further than that with entirely new things that haven't been done in real-time before, such as holographic texture mapping, spherical harmonic lighting, and dynamic soft shadows.


Beyond rendering, there are many other core engine improvements, such as an entirely new physics system designed to support significantly more complex interactions between objects than has been possible in the past; a new framework for dynamic streaming loading of content aimed at both next-generation consoles and PC's; and a completely new skeletal animation system that dynamically combines motion-captured animation with physics feedback and procedural controllers.

On the content creation side, we have a new bump-map and spherical harmonic lighting preprocessing tool enabling our characters to light with the visual fidelity of their several-million-triangle source art and a new visual shader editing interface enabling artists to create real-time shaders with the same level of complexity of what was previously only possible with offline renderers. At Epic, we've always put a lot of effort into tools creation, but the third-generation Unreal engine brings this to an entirely new level.

• Consulter l'interview