Unreal Engine 2X

原文链接 http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue2x.shtml

Unreal Engine 2X

Overview

Unreal Engine 2X is the highly optimized engine behind the eye-popping visuals seen in Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict. UE2X pushes 3-4 times the polygons of the original Unreal Championship game, and in fact outperforms most current generation PC games even though they run on much faster CPUs. Couple that polygon throughput with its advanced material shader system and you have an engine that showcases the Xbox's potential.

Graphics Enhancements

Unreal Engine 2X supports both the Direct3D fixed function pipeline and the fully programmable pipeline. It has both vertex shader and pixel shader support. The vertex shader support, which it uses for hardware skinning, enables large numbers of animated meshes on screen at once. Its pixel shader materials push the limits of what can be done on an Xbox, giving you many advanced effects at your disposal.

Full Scene Light Bloom and Emissive Materials

Both emissive materials (materials that appear to emit light) and full screen light blooming are two of the post processing effects that UE2X supports. The full screen light bloom uses the luminance of pixels in the scene to determine whether or not they are “hot.” “Hot” pixels are then manipulated using image space techniques resulting in a soft light blooming effect. Emissive materials are handled in a similar way, except that which portions of an object that give off light are completely under the control of an artist.

Light bloom on sunshine and weapon	Masked emissive character skins and environments

Depth of field

UE2X supports two different modes of depth of field. The first mode is always on, is based upon an absolute depth/blur amount, and enhances z-depth perception. The other mode is used to focus on specific objects in the scene, blur objects outside the focus depth planes, and give the player the feel of looking through a rifle scope.

Always-on depth of field	Sniper zoom depth of field

Image Space Effects

Distortion, controllable filter kernel blurs, radial blurs, and color space manipulation are some of the image space effects supported by the UE2X engine. Distortion can even be applied on arbitrary geometry, for dynamic explosions, character effects, and the like.

Velocity-driven full-screen radial blur	Distortion to emulate water refraction

 

Radial blur and color ramp	Full screen blur from concussion

 

Distortion effects on arbitrary geometry	Color space manipulation

Dynamic Gamma

Dynamic gamma correction is used to keep textures crisp on televisions and is used to calculate the overall luminance of a scene for light blooming (an ocular adjustment effect).

Dynamic gamma adjusts light levels

Advanced Projected Lighting/Textures

UE2X improves projectors by handling them on the GPU to free up precious CPU cycles. Additionally, projector rendering batches multiple projectors into a single pass using specialized vertex and pixel shaders.

Complex lighting affecting character models	Complex projectors affecting character models

Efficient Player Shadows

UE2X uses special texture formats to make higher resolution shadows affordable on the Xbox. These shadows are 1/4 th the memory of the same resolution shadow without this optimization. Also, an optimized render path is used to give nice soft edges without multiple passes.

Highly detailed real-time player shadows

Memory Enhancements

Efficient Geometry Storage

Throughout the development of Unreal Engine 2X, we have paid special attention to the reduced console memory footprint. We've made creative use of vertex shaders to decompress all geometry on the GPU, during run-time. Areas receiving special attention include static mesh (object) geometry, terrain geometry, skeletal mesh (character) geometry, and BSP (world) geometry. We also have enhanced the engine to allow sharing of animation data across differing skeletons and skeletal meshes.

Instanced Content

It also supports instancing of world meshes, animated meshes, and particle systems. Instancing these types of objects lets you place more of them in your environment with less memory and CPU cost than non-instanced methods.

Memory Tracking

Because memory is so critical for console development, UE2X offers a variety of tools for better tracking of memory consumption, including leak detection.

Additional Features

Split-Screen Rendering

Unreal Engine 2X supports 2- and 4-port split-screen rendering, as well as arbitrary viewports for picture-in-picture effects. These split-screen modes work seamlessly across the network, and in fact share rendering and networking tasks for optimal consumption of GPU and network resources. If necessary for your title, UE2X also provides scalable options for increasing frame rate by reduced rendering fidelity on static meshes, particle systems, characters.

Vehicle Support

The vehicle systems from the award-winning Unreal Tournament 2004 Onslaught game, support in Unreal Engine 2.5, are also available in Unreal Engine 2X.

Vehicles from UT2004 Onslaught gametype

GUI System and Editor

UE2X uses an Xbox-optimized version of the GUI library that shipped with Unreal Tournament 2004. This includes support for the editing suite, which allow menu layout in real time. The UE2X GUI system also integrates seamlessly with UIX, Microsoft's skinnable user interface for Xbox Live. The GUI supports most standard widgets, plus numerous complex objects such as streaming videos, but it is also easily extensible by teams with special needs.

Full graphical user interface system	Interactive editing of gui elements

“Prefabricated” Unreal Matinee Sequences

Unreal Engine 2X allows creation and reuse of Unreal Matinee sequences, such as camera movement, depth of field effects, etc. These sequences can be invoked on the fly, during gameplay, and they automatically adjust to work within the constraints of the geometry in that area. Unreal Championship 2 uses this feature for on-the-spot ‘death blow' animations, triggerable in-game cinematics, and the like.

“Killing blow” sequence running during gameplay

Underneath the Hood

It also supports all the Xbox-specific features you would expect:

• Xbox Live networking and voice
• UIX library support for quick Xbox Live integration
• PIX groups support for graphics performance investigation and debugging
• XACT, the Xbox sound library and editing tools
• XMV movie support, including using movies for arbitrary materials on any surface

Throughout the engine, we've made optimal use of proprietary NVIDIA and Xbox hardware that we can't discuss on this public website. Licensed Xbox developers should feel free to contact us for more details.