NextGeneration Game Development

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Next-Generation Game Development

• Michael Capps, Ph.D.
• President, Epic Games Inc.

2
Overview

• Introduce Epic
• Introduce the Unreal Engine
• Show the rising bar for next-gen games
• Epics coping strategy
• work with tools vendors
• license middleware
• Make better tools

3
Epic Games

• Founded 14 years ago by Tim Sweeney
• Early success with Jill of the Jungle and Epic
  Pinball
• Multiple hits in the Unreal and Unreal Tournament
  series
• Currently two titles in production

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In production at Epic
Unreal Tournament 2007 PC, PS3, ...?
Gears of War Xbox 360 exclusive
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Unreal Engine History

• In active development for 10 years
• Licensed to external developers since 1997
• More than 50 games
• Unreal Engine 1 (1997-2000)
• PC First-Person Shooters
• Deus Ex, Rune, Undying, Harry Potter
• Unreal Engine 2 (2000-2004)
• PC, Xbox, PS2, Mac, Linux mostly First-Person
  Shooters
• Splinter Cell, Americas Army, Lineage II,
  Rainbow 6

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Unreal Engine 3

• Unreal Engine 3 (2005-??)
• next-generation consoles and PCs
• 100 shader-driven rendering pipeline
• Per-pixel lighting shadowing everywhere
• No legacy rendering paths
• supports any game type, even massive multiplayer
  and fighting games
• work began almost 3 years ago
• about 35 man-years of development effort

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UE3 Games in Development

• Several studio-wide deals
• Midway, Microsoft, Vivendi, Silicon Knights...
• Very few games announced this early
• Mistwalker (Sakaguchi-san) Lost Odyssey
• Namco Frame City Killers
• NC Soft Exteel another project
• WebZen Huxley
• Many unannounced massive-multiplayer and next-gen
  console games
• including one from Bioware that weve never seen!

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Unreal Engine on Xbox 360

• Microsoft Games Studios has licensed UE3 for
  their Xbox 360 games
• Epics game, Gears of War
• To be published by Microsoft in 2006
• Xbox 360 exclusive
• E3 2005 awards for Best Xbox 360 Game
• UE3 used as regression testing content for Xbox
  Development Kit and VC

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Unreal Engine on PS3

• In May, UE3 was the first live demo ever on
  Playstation 3
• In July, Sony announced sublicensing rights of
  UE3
• In September, UE3 will be part of the PS3
  Software Development Kit
• Unreal Tournament 2007 targeted at PS3 in 2006

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Consumer expectations rising
Unreal Tournament 2007 PC, PS3, ...?
Gears of War Xbox 360 exclusive
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Consumer expectations rising
Max v3 560 polygons 4x 256 textures
Max v5 2,500 polygons 2x 1024 textures
Max v7 2,000,000 polys 12,000 base 2x 2048
textures
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Next-Gen is Expensive

• What is the actual impact of this detail?
• Cannot go from 100k to 100m scenes for free
• Epic saw 3-4x increase in modeling time
• Currently at about 2.5x increase
• Programming challenges as well
• Consoles, and even PCs, are multiprocessor
• Thread-safe programming is often considered a 3x
  increase in complexity

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Next-Gen is Expensive

• We cant afford a 3X increase in costs!
• Epic is a small studio, and we like it just the
  way it is
• Our answer better tools!
• push tools vendors (like Autodesk!)
• license middleware where appropriate
• build the tools you cant buy

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Improve your tools

• We collaborate on XDK, Visual C, etc.
• Work with Autodesk!
• Weve used Max since v1 on DOS
• Max 8 is a huge help
• UVW templates, Blend Weights, Bridge Tool
• Working to improve normal mapping tools
• So we can stop making our own tool
• Support for COLLADA standard
• Soon we will need just one import pipeline

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Improve your tools

• Work with Autodesk!
• Pelt Mapping came from our design mockups

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Find better tools

• Licensing middleware can be a great help
• Focus on what you do best, buy the rest
• We use the Novodex physics library
• 100 free, with source code access
• Compares with or beats other libraries
• Multi-threaded for console performance
• Support for Ageia Physics Processors
• We use OC3s FaceFX for facial animation
• Phoneme extraction
• Works seamlessly inside Unreal Editor

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Make better tools

• The benefit of Unreal Engine 3 is the suite of
  tools that empowers content artists
• Importing models
• Constructing levels
• Authoring shaders
• Creating particle systems
• Authoring physics data
• Directing in-game cinematics
• Designing gameplay with visual scripting

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UE3 Importing models

• We build geometry outside the engine
• Then import into engine for placement in levels
• UE3 easily imports data from 3DS Max, Maya, XSI
• Soon, well just have COLLADA!

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UE3 Constructing levels

• Levels start as bare BSP geometry
• We then add imported geometry, and apply
  textures, for detail

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UE3 Authoring physics data

• Built-in physics modeling tool
• Creation of optimized collision primitives
• Constraint editing
• Interactive physics simulation and tweaking, in
  editor

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UE3 Authoring shaders

• Built-in Material editor
• Based on visual node-editing paradigm
• Visually connect color, alpha, and coordinate
  outputs
• Can create extremely complex materials using
  programmer-defined components
• Allows artists to create unique materials without
  programmer help

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UE3 Creating particle systems

• Cascade is the UE3 particle editor
• Everything is WYSIWYG
• Uses a curve-editing paradigm for changing
  behavior over time

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UE3 In-Game Cinematics

• Matinee is the UE3 camera / keyframe editing
  system
• Any object property can be keyframed over time
  using editable curves
• Track-based system with traditional non-linear
  editor interface
• Tracks for animation, sound, cameras, dialogue,
  post-processing, and more
• Everything can be previewed in real time

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UE3 Visual Scripting

• Kismet is the UE3 visual scripting tool
• Single biggest impact on productivity
• Power in the hands of the designer
• Rapid prototyping of game features
• Level event scripting
• No programmer help needed
• Can control all other systems (Cinematics,
  Particles, etc.)

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Conclusion

• Expectations of next-gen games are high
• Higher detail means higher costs
• Must find ways to increase efficiency
• Improve the tools you already buy
• License middleware when appropriate
• Build the tools that you cant buy
• May we humbly suggest Unreal Engine 3?

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licensing_at_epicgames.com

• http//www.unrealtechnology.com