Easy peasy games creation
Moving on and wiping my drool off his mouse, Mark then took us into the physics playrooms. First up was a room full of cables hanging from the ceiling. He pulled each one of these down in turn, piling them up on the floor and pointing out how the damn things kept rolling all over the place, just as a load of thick circular cables would do if you tried to pile them up on one another. Of course, heaving cables about in a room full of hanging cables sets some of the hanging ones swinging and it soon felt like I was in a frantic bell ringers session until Mark had all the cables on the floor.. then he pulled one out of the bottom causing his neatly made heap to collapse on the floor, cables spewing all the place again.
Having had enough of that, Mark took us through to the gravity room where objects from balls to barrels lay in neat piles, just waiting to be messed up. By clicking on the floor, walls or ceiling, Mark changed the direction of the gravity in the room, rolling the balls and barrels all over the place, causing them to bang into each other and fall about in one of the most realistic recreations of gravity and it’s effects on different sized and weighted objects I’ve seen yet.
We then went into another room, this one full of levers and pulleys. By picking up different balls, barrels, chairs and tables, Mark was soon using these random object to manipulate the levers, first trying to balance out a simple scales before getting bored and dropping stuff onto it from varying heights to catapult more stuff across the room. Whilst being fun, this also showed off the UE3’s ability to simulate objects accelerating under gravity and the conservation of momentum built into the engine… cracking stuff.
So what was the point of all of this? Well, the Unreal Engine 3 has been designed to be as easy to use as possible for developers at the same time as being immensely powerful. Epic have certainly achieved this with an engine that can render highly detailed textures using Shader Model 3 to give very realistic effects for minimal GPU usage. The built in tools make animating those textures an absolute doddle, meaning we should be seeing some mightily impressive looking games coming out in the future.
Not only that, but UE3 incorporates the Ageia PhysX engine to the full, again with a set of tools to easily create objects and give them properties to produce as realistic effect as possible. Mark showed us how to make a cascade of barrels, so it looked like a never-ending stream of barrels falling off a ledge and within literally five minutes he’d set a creation point for the barrels to appear and had them pouring onto the screen, then a quick tweak of a slider and the barrels were bouncing on the floor, gradually coming to rest. Another tweak in the options panel and the barrels were now bouncing off the floor and one another too. Another tweak and the barrels were now lit from a single source and casting real time, soft edged shadows on the floor and each other... months and months of coding condensed into five minutes work and a few mouse clicks.
Switching to yet another demo, we watched as SM3’d boulders bounced down a mountain. Nothing much impressive there you might think, but back in Unreal Tournament 3 days, the engine could manage maybe 10-15 boulders realistically. UT2k4 could manage perhaps 25-30… Unreal Engine 3 can handle more than 600 with ease… and slap in a PhysX card and Mark reckons that could easily be as many as 6000… all rendered, all lit in real time with real time shadows, perhaps a touch of moving volumetric dust being swirled around by the boulders and they thunder by… the possibilities are nearly endless.
Mark then showed another tech demo from Ageia, showing off the power of the engine by smashing open a huge container of water in a warehouse and watching the water flood the warehouse, sweeping boxes and debris before it, all of which looked easily more realistic than anything we’ve seen before.
Another feature of the Unreal Engine 3 is its ability to background load levels. This means that after the initial load to boot up the game and the first level, the player will never have to look at another loading screen. So if a developer wanted, the gamer could finish a level and slip seamlessly into a cut scene, or the game could be coded to feel and play like one massive, continuous level right from start to finish.
Now, all of these tools are at the developer’ disposal to make a game, but they don’t guarantee a good game. The sole intention of Epic with the UE3 is to allow developers to enhance their games. Whilst full and easy implementation of the Ageia PhysX engine is all well and nice, it’s not intended to effect gameplay in a major way. The idea is to create a more believable, immersive world for the gamer play in. For example, some have said that Half Life 2 became too physics dependant for its gameplay and Mark is keen to stress that as powerful as the UE3 is, it’s is just a tool for making a more believable game world, giving developers more time and freedom to concentrate on the gameplay rather worry about how to make a barrel roll down a slope or how to make the water look and act like water…
