Unreal Engine 4

The Unreal Engine 4 is the fourth generation of the Unreal Engine game engine family.

Overview

On August 17, 2005, Mark Rein, the vice-president of Epic Games, revealed that Unreal Engine 4 had been in development since 2003. Until mid-2008, development was exclusively done by Tim Sweeney, CEO and founder of Epic Games. The engine targets the eight generation of consoles, PCs and Tegra K1-based devices running Android announced in January 2014 at CES. The only person to work on the Unreal Engine 4 core system design on its beginning was Tim Sweeney, technical director and founder of Epic Games. However, at the 2006 GDC, Sweeney stated that development on it would not begin until 2008.

In February 2012, Mark Rein said "people are going to be shocked later this year when they see Unreal Engine 4". Unreal Engine 4 was unveiled to limited attendees at the 2012 Game Developers Conference, and video of the engine being demonstrated by technical artist Alan "Talisman" Willard was released to the public on June 7, 2012 via GameTrailers TV. This demo was created on a PC with triple GeForce GTX 580 (tri SLI) and can be run on a PC with a GeForce GTX 680.

One of the major features planned for UE4 was real-time global illumination using voxel cone tracing, eliminating pre-computed lighting. However, this feature has been replaced with a similar but less computationally-expensive algorithm prior to release for all platforms including the PC because of performance concerns on next-generation consoles. UE4 also includes new developer features to reduce iteration time, and allows updating of C++ code while the engine is running. The new "Blueprint" visual scripting system (a successor to UE3's "Kismet") allows for rapid development of game logic without using C++, and includes live debugging. The result is reduced iteration time, and less of a divide between technical artists, designers, and programmers.

As of March 2, 2015, Unreal Engine 4 is available to everyone for free, along with all future updates, with a selective royalty schedule. Oculus VR announced in October 2016 that it will cover royalty fees for all Unreal Engine titles shipping on the Oculus Store for up to the first $5 million of gross revenue per game. The same month, Unreal Engine 4 support was confirmed for Nintendo's hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch.