What is Unreal Engine ?

By: Bimo Prakoso on 8:50 AM

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Video game is an industry where not only aim to have fun but also a market that can not be understimated. With many advantages, slowly but surely, the video game industry is starting to grow and become bid compared to other industries. Each side of the developers ensures the video game they produce can be sold a lot among gamers. Although some of them went bankrupt because they could not compete with other developers. There are factors that make a video game can be sold a lot, visual, story plot, gameplay, until the price offered whether in accordance with the contents of the game.

For visual affairs, you must have heard a lot of different engines used on some game developers. Examples of famous engines today are CryEngine, Unreal Engine, Unity Engine, Frostbite Engine, Source Engine, and many more. But practically Unreal Engine is the most widely used by some game developers today. Not only displaying visual quality that almost like the real world, the owner's Epic Games decision to make Unreal Engine free to use by anyone is the factor why this engine is widely used. 

Tim Sweeney (CEO Epic Games)

What is Unreal Engine ? Unreal Engine is itself was created by Tim Sweeney (CEO of Epic Games) for use in the first game Epic Mega Games titled ZZT. Then with this friends, Unreal Engine is used to create meorable games like Wolfesntein 3D, DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. The idea to give freedom to other developers to use Unreal Engine was first sanctioned in 1998. Because at that time other developers like Konami, Capcom, and even Valve already permitted their engine to use by anyone. 

Killing Floor using
Unreal Engine 2

Then in 2002 came Unreal Engine 2 that was implemented in the game America's Ary and Killing Floor. Unreal Engine 2 is also starting to be used for some consoles such as Playstation 2, Xbox, ad Gamecube. After a few years, Unreal Engine 2 can also be enjoyed on PC. Then an update called Unreal Engine 2.5 was released to improve the rendering performance and add vehicle physics properties, a particle system editor added for UnrealED, and 64-bit support for the Unreal Tournament 2004 game.

Bioshock Infinite menggunakan
Unreal Engine 3

Unreal Engine 3 began to be used in 2004 and became popular and used in some giant games like Bioshock Infinite, Batman : Arkham City and one of the disappointing games Aliens : Colonial Marines. Unreal Engine 3 only supports Windows, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360. Later in 2010, iOS and Android can support Unreal Engine 3. 

In 2005, Mark Vein (Vice President of Epic Games) said that Unreal Engine 4 has been developed since 2003. Then in 2008, Unreal Engine 4 was completed. The new Unreal Engine 4 is shown with limited participants in 2012 at the Game Developers Conference event and the demo itself uses a PC with 3 GeForce GTX 560 (SLI) and Geforce GTX 680 and broadcast via GameTrailers TV.  

One feature that was planned for Unreal Engine 4 is Real TIme Global Lighting. But this featured has been replaced with similar algorithms but is slightly cheaper and released on all platforms including PCs. This feature is discarded because the Epic Games party has a concern that this feature is too heavy for next generation consoles. Unreal Engine 4 also provides new features such as reduction of recurrence time and allows to change the C++ code when the engine is being used.

Unreal Engine 4 

On March 19,2014, at Game Developers Conference, Epic Games released Unreal Engine 4 along with all the tools, features and complete C++ code. Then on March 2, 2015 Unreal Engine 4 is available free for everyone along with free updates in the future. Unreal Engine 4 itself supports several platforms such as Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Linux, SteamOS, HTML5, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Virtual Reality (VR)