Unreal Engine 2

原文链接http://www.unrealtechnology.com/html/technology/ue2.shtml

Unreal Engine 2

Overview

Unreal Engine 2 is a complete game development framework targeted at today's mainstream PC's, Microsoft's Xbox game console, and Sony's PlayStation 2.

Its production-proven tools and feature-rich code base enable a game development team to begin authoring all aspects of a product from day one: art, models, levels, gameplay code, user interface, and new features.

Unreal Tournament 2004, Epic Games	Splinter Cell, Ubi Soft

 

Americas Army, U.S. Department of Defense	XIII, Ubi Soft

 

Lineage II, NCSoft	Unreal 2, Legend Entertainment

Powering such hit games as Unreal Tournament 2004 (Epic Games), Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six 3 (Ubi Soft) and Lineage II (NCSoft), Unreal Engine 2 is suitable for many genres of 3D games targeting today's popular platforms.

Rendering

High-performance support for five basic rendering primitives:

• BSP geometry.  Built using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) primitives, BSP is the primary tool for shaping interior environments.
• Static meshes.  High polygon-count objects built and textured in an external modeling program such as 3D Studio Max and Maya, suitable for using as building blocks for constructing levels.
• Animated skeletal meshes.   Characters, weapons, and other meshes use skeletal animations imported from external animation tools like 3D Studio Max and Maya.
• Vertex meshes.  The engine also supports keyframed vertex-animated objects when needed.
• Height-Mapped Terrain.  Terrain is stored as a height field, which can be manipulated easily as an image in external tools, or manipulated in real time in the Unreal editor.

Unreal Engine 2's advanced portal rendering system supports:

• Mirror surfaces and semi-reflective materials such as marble.
• Non-Euclidean, redirectable "warp" portal effects for seeing into non-contiguous regions of space.
• Skies and backgrounds with independent coordinate systems for independent translation and rotation.

• Visible Surface Determination system supports high-performance, seamlessly-interconnected indoor and outdoor scenes, providing designers with tools such as portals and occluder volumes to optimize rendering performance.
• Full support for DirectX8 class video cards (including ATI® RADEON™- and NVIDIA® GeForce™-class cards).
• Fallback rendering support for DirectX6 video cards as far back as the NVidia TNT.
• Rendering subsystems include Direct3D, OpenGL, and RAD Game Tools' Pixomatic software renderer for Windows PCs – bundled with Unreal Engine 2 at no additional cost. The inclusion of software rendering guarantees that any PC with a reasonable CPU will be able to run Unreal Engine 2, regardless of 3D card support.
• Unreal Tournament 2004 (and 2003) are used by numerous industry publications and websites as benchmarks for PC system capabilities.

Animation

• Supports up to 4 bone influences per vertex, with no hard-coded limits on polygon counts and bone counts.
• Hierarchical skeletal animated, smooth-skinned geometry support for animated characters and complex animated geometry in game environments.
• Multiple channels of animation, each with a variable blending factor and starting bone, allows for multiple animations to be played simultaneously.
• Skeletal Keyframe interpolation support for perfectly fluid animation independent of frame rate.
• Tweening support allows smooth flow between disjoint animation sequences.
• Artist-controlled compression reduces memory usage.

Lighting

• Supports dynamic lighting on all geometry types with vertex lighting and projective texturing. Any object in the world can act as a static or dynamic light.
• High-quality pre-computed lighting via RGB colored light maps and an optional vertex lighting channel.
• Supports directional lights, point lights and spot lights.
• Projected textures allow the simulation of complex dynamic lighting and shadowing effects on all surfaces, including player shadows and flashlights.
• Numerous light effects for dynamic lights including blinking and wavering.

Effects

• Comprehensive particle system allows for countless diverse configurations, supporting particles composed of sprites, meshes, lines, and beams.  Particles support a multitude of lifetime, texture, and movement options, including collision where needed.  All particle features can be manipulated in realtime in the editor.

• Fluid surfaces support dynamic water simulation, with ambient ripples, targeted oscillations (for footsteps, explosions, or other disturbances), clamping for realistic wave boundaries, and surface vertex alpha blending for texture effects.

• Distance fog provides a sense of depth indoors and out, while improving rendering performance in large outdoor areas via far-clipping.

Terrain

Height Map terrain system allows for fast, complex terrain rendering supporting multiple, seamlessly-blended layers of:

• Alpha-blended textures.
• Decoration layers for flora detail and other procedurally-placed meshes.

• Comprehensive suite of terrain manipulation tools allows you to raise, lower, raze and flower the heightmap in real time.

• Supports artist-controlled terrain cell removal, for smoothly transitioning from height-mapped terrain to indoor areas such as caves and buildings.

Textures

• Material system allows for alpha-blending and modulation of multiple layers of textures with artist-controlled blending and panning operations.
• Easy-to-use mechanism for scrolling, rotating, and scaling textures via artist settings. This feature can be used in a static or dynamic fashion for elaborate animated effects.
• Detail textures add extremely close-up details to surfaces, such as fine wood grain, pock marks on brick surfaces, or scoring to metal.
• Hardware accelerated, compressed, high resolution texture support allows for individual 32-bit textures of up to 2048x2048 pixels in size, while consuming significantly less video and system memory than traditional RGBA or 8-bit texture formats.
• All textures support up to twelve levels of mip-mapping, including mipping down to a solid color.
• Texture animation sequences with variable playback rate.

Sound

• Standards-compliant OpenAL based audio subsystem on Windows, Linux and Macintosh; support for native console sound.
• Supports 3D spatialization, attenuation, pitch and Doppler shifting.
• Supports EAX 3.0 effects on compatible cards, exposed to both level designers via UnrealEd and programmers via UnrealScript.
• Ogg Vorbis streaming sound and music support on Windows, Linux and Macintosh, offering higher quality audio with smaller file sizes than MP3, without royalties; Windows Media Audio on Xbox.
• Includes OpenAL wrapper with 100% software fallback path for utmost compatibility on Windows, Linux and Macintosh.
• Dolby DigitalTM Surround Sound certifiable.
• Offers a unified solution for hardware sound acceleration; it natively supports Creative Lab's EAX 3.0, and falls back cleanly to EAX 2.0 if the user's system does not support EAX 3.0 features.
• Integrated music playback, including support for user-provided tracks.
• MP3 support with the Miles library (licensed separately).

Voice Support

Unreal Engine 2 offers complete voice support, including:

• Voice-over-IP.  Players can communicate with other players using natural voice, with support for multiple channels and encoding options.
• Text-to-speech support.  For players without a microphone headset, the Unreal engine offers an excellent voice synthesizing system.
• AI speech recognition.  Bots in Unreal Tournament 2004 can recognize simple voice commands for changing battlefield tactics.

Vehicles

Unreal Engine 2 offers greatly improved and optimized vehicle support, with improved networking and support for Artificially Intelligent drivers, passengers, and gunners.

Movie Recording

• Unreal Engine 2 supports recording of in-game footage as replayable ‘demo' files, which can be shared between game players in your community to show off play techniques.  It's also an extremely useful feature for distributed product testing. 
• Includes support for processing those demo files into DivX movies.  (The DivX integration code is freely available to licensees, but use of the DivX libraries must be licensed separately.)

UnrealEd Content Creation Tool

• The Unreal Editor (UnrealEd) is a pure “What You See Is What You Get” content creation tool filling the void between 3D Studio Max and Maya, and shippable game content.
• Real-time level design tool based on constructive solid geometry, optimized through its use in multiple released games for building real-time 3D environments.

• UnrealEd is fully integrated into the Unreal engine: the in-editor camera views are identical to the in-game views. All texture placement, geometry, and lighting operations (except shadowing) take place immediately, providing extremely fast feedback while building levels.
• Visual, hierarchical object property editor for customizing actors placed in levels; easily extensible by programmers via script.
• You are always one mouse click away from play-testing your level on both PC and Xbox.
• Tabbed "browser" windows allow fast and easy selection and manipulation of geometry and content.
• Realtime “Matinee” cinematic editor for comprehensive camera, actor, and effects direction – for in-game cinematics and pure machinima-style movies.

• Max/Maya Export Tools. We provide plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and Maya to bring models into the Unreal engine with mesh topology, mapping coordinates, smoothing groups, material names, skeleton structure, and skeletal animation data.

Physics

Integrated Karma rigid body physics engine bundled with Unreal Engine 2 at no extra cost, supporting:

• Ragdoll skeletal character animation.
• Vehicle physics, including Internet multiplayer support.
• Physically interactive game objects.

• Integrated physics-driven animation eases network programming and animation replication.
• Supports a variety of collision primitives allowing designers to make fine tradeoffs between performance and accuracy.

AI

• Built-in state-based AI support for game actors, ranging from cannon-fodder creatures to NPC's and teammates.
• Pathnode-based AI navigation system supports complex route evaluation, alarm points, and more.
• Navigation framework enables NPC's to select optimal paths through levels based on flexible criteria.
• Navigation framework is aware of obstructions and gameplay features; NPC's know how to use switches, ladders, lifts, and doors as necessary while following paths.
• Animation system ties into AI via notification system, with animation playing, blending, tweening, looping, and other triggers, such as footstep sounds.
• AI properties are exposed to level designers for setting up patrol routes, individual creature moods and more.
• Extensible framework for making NPC's aware of all player movement options, weapons, and inventory.
• Includes Unreal Tournament 2004's high-level team-based and individual AI framework for objective-based first person shooters.

Networking

Internet and LAN play has been a hallmark of Epic's past competitive games such as Unreal Tournament 2004. The Unreal Engine has long provided a flexible and high-level network architecture suitable to many genres of games.

• Supported on all PC and console platforms.
• Unreal Engine gameplay network programming is high-level and data-driven, allowing UnrealScript game code to specify variables and functions to be replicated between client and server to maintain a consistent approximation of game state.
• The low-level game networking transport is UDP-based and combines reliable and unreliable transmission schemes to optimize gameplay, even in low-bandwidth and high-latency scenarios.
• Client-server model supporting up to 64 players as provided. Also supports non-dedicated server (peer-to-peer mode) with up to 16 players.
• Supports network play between different platforms (i.e. dedicated PC serving console clients; Windows, MacOS and Linux clients playing together.)
• All gameplay features are supported in networking, enabling vehicle-based multiplayer games, competitive team games with NPC's or bots, cooperative play in a single player focused game, etc.
• Support for auto-downloading and caching content, including cross-platform compatible UnrealScript code. This feature enables everything from user-created maps, to bonus packs, to complete game mods to be downloaded on the fly. .
• In-game server browser GUI for finding and querying servers, keeping track of favorites, in-game chat, etc.

• A “master server” component is provided for tracking worldwide servers, providing filtered server lists to players, etc.
• Worldwide game stats tracking system.

http://ut2004stats.epicgames.com/

Please note that we don't provide a MMORPG server or networking framework suitable for massive multiplayer games. Though such a task is a multi man-year engineering effort, several teams using the Unreal Engine have done so (including NCSoft for Lineage II and Electronic Arts for Ultima X), demonstrating the feasibility of using the Unreal Engine as a MMORPG game client and tools pipeline, integrated with a proprietary server component.

Platforms

• Unreal Engine 2 offers broadened hardware and software compatibility; it runs at acceptable frame rates on graphics cards shipped in 1999, and even runs on fast machines with integrated graphics through optimized software rendering libraries.
• While Windows XP is the primary development and deployment platform for Unreal Engine 2, the Unreal Tournament product family has long been known for support for other operating systems.
• Unreal Tournament 2004 is no exception, with full server and client support for both Linux and Macintosh's OS X.
• Unreal Engine 2 is also already compatible with next-generation operating systems such as 64-bit Windows and 64-bit Linux.

Console Support & Portability

• Fully optimized for and supported on Windows and Xbox.
• Optimized seek-free DVD-based loading support for Xbox.
• Fully functioning source code available for PlayStation2.
• Fully functioning source code available for 64-bit Windows, MacOS X, Linux 32-bit and 64-bit.
• Highly modular, object-oriented foundation with few hard coded limits maintains portability and allows the Unreal engine to evolve through many generations of technological advances.

General Programming

• Unreal Engine 2 includes example content and 100% of the source code for the engine, editor, Max/Maya exporters, and the game-specific code for our internally-developed games.
• Extensible, object-oriented C++ engine with software framework for persistence, dynamic loading of code and content, portability, debugging.
• UnrealScript gameplay scripting language provides automatic support for metadata; garbage collection; profiling; persistence with very flexible file format backwards-compatibility; support for exposing script properties to level designers in UnrealEd; a GUI-based script debugger; and native language support for many concepts important in gameplay programming, such as dynamically scoped state machines and time-based (latent) execution of code.

• Localization. Unreal Engine 2 is based on the Unicode character set, and has full support for 16-bit Unicode fonts and text input, including importing TrueType fonts into renderable bitmap fonts. The programming and content environments are localization-aware, with a simple framework for externalizing all game text. Our past games have shipped in 9 languages including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Typical Content Specifications

Here are the guidelines we used in building content for Unreal Tournament 2004, one of the most recently shipped Unreal Engine 2 games. Different genres of games will have widely varying expectations of player counts, scene size, and performance – and PC capabilities increase over time, so these specifications should be regarded as one data point for one project rather than as mandatory specifications.

• Characters: Our typical characters contain 2000-3000 triangles, and are mapped with one texture in compressed DXT1 or DXT4 format at a typical resolution of 512x512 or 1024x1024.
• Bones: Typical characters have 30-60 bones.
• Typical static meshes typically contain 300-3000 triangles, and are mapped with one texture of resolution 512x512 or 1024x1024.
• Environments: Typical environments have 150-300 objects in view, for a total count of 50,000 to 150,000 triangles in view.
• Terrain: Height maps are typically 128x128 to 256x256 in resolution; typical terrain has 4-10 alpha layers.