Tech Focus: LucasArts moves to Unreal Engine
Digital Foundry compares UE3 to the studio's existing technology
Combine the excellent tech work on The Force Unleashed II with Lucas's intriguing experimental work on 60Hz frame-rate upscaling, and it's clear that there's some serious talent at the studio. The question now is whether we will see any of this advanced work appear in future LucasArts titles, while many must be wondering why the studio would opt for UE3 if its existing tech can produce such visually accomplished, unique results.
Undoubtedly, business plays a major part in the decision. Unreal Engine allows for relatively painless cross-platform development on PC, Xbox and 360, with the option there to develop for just about any platform at all that supports programmable pixel shaders (iOS, Android, Project Cafe etc). Its development tools are considered to be user-friendly, and the tech has powered some of the most commercially successful games of this generation. Obviously, fewer staff would be required if much of the technology side of things is being taken care of by the middleware, and the engine has proven its worth across a range of game genres - quite how the TFUII tech would scale across to other game styles will probably never be known.
Not only that, but LucasArts clearly has its eye on the future in inking a long term deal. As we begin to approach the arrival of the next generation of consoles, so another wave of R&D needs to kick off in order to transition across to the new hardware. A deal with Epic effectively insulates LucasArts from the costs of having to develop a brand new engine technology from the ground up. The recent GDC Samaritan demo wasn't just a vision of the future, it comes across almost like a pledge to the industry that buying into Unreal Engine makes you next-gen ready. It's no mistake that similar claims are being made by Crytek with its own CryEngine 3.
In the here and now, the market remains very much geared towards the current generation. PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 won't be superseded any time soon, and while it might be logical to expect Project Cafe to outstrip current gen performance, it would take a significant leap in GPU power to consider it a true next gen console; gut feeling suggests that Nintendo wouldn't be able to afford this if the make-up of its innovative new touchscreen controller is to be factored into a $350 product. And since when has Nintendo been concerned about beating the competition on specs any way?
As the current console generation matures, some seriously impressive technical work is being carried out – not just on bespoke engine tech, but with Unreal Engine 3 as well. While deferred rendering doesn't come with UE3 out of the box, that hasn't stopped its implementation being factored into selected games. For example, to the best of our knowledge, Danger Close's Medal of Honor is the first game using Unreal Engine 3 that shipped with light pre-pass deferred lighting, on top of a whole host of additional technologies that are not a part of Epic's standard package. Environmental destruction, particle effects and god-rays are using bespoke code as opposed to the existing middleware's components and the overall impression is of a game clearly divorced from the signature UE3 look and feel.
Epic's tech is also being used in new and different applications. The recent release of Mortal Kombat on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 demonstrates the engine managing to run at full 720p resolution while maintaining a 60Hz update, plus there's support for stereoscopic 3D on the PS3 too.
Going forward, exciting work is taking place with UE3 over at Irrational Games, where the core tech is being radically re-engineered. Deferred lighting is being introduced to the engine in addition to, as technical director Chris Kline puts it, "a proprietary per-pixel dynamic relighting scheme that allows characters and dynamic objects to receive global illumination."
On top of that the entire job processing pipeline is being changed in order to eke out more power from the multi-core set-up of modern PCs and consoles – and will hopefully serve to level the performance differences we've seen between Xbox 360 and PS3 Unreal Engine 3 titles. AI and animation also receive a radical refresh, while audio systems are beefed up with a 5.1 surround system with adjustable dynamic range and mixing on top of many other enhancements.
The whole topic of how UE3 has been adapted by enterprising developers is a topic worthy of a feature in its own right, but in the here and now the point is that although a shift from LucasArts across to the Epic tech may seem puzzling, the impressive efforts in technological innovation we've seen from the studio could be re-focused on making its UE3 titles truly remarkable...