The history of Unreal Engine

Before explaining what this amazingly powerful game engine can do and how it works, let us take a short trip back into the past to see how UE came about and how it has evolved into what we have today.

For gamers, you are probably familiar with the Unreal game series. Do you know how the first Unreal game was made? The engineers at Epic Games built an engine to help them create the very first Unreal game. Over the years, with the development of each generation the Unreal game series, more and more functionalities were added to the engine to aid in the development of the game. This, in turn, increased UE's capabilities and improved the game engine very quickly over the years.

In 1998, the first version of UE made the modding of a first player shooting game possible. You could replace Unreal content using your own and tweak the behavior of the non-player characters (NPCs), also known as bots (players that are controlled by the computer through artificial intelligence) using UnrealScript. Then multiplayer online features were added into UE through the development of Unreal Tournament, which is an online game. This game also added PlayStation 2 to the list of compatible platforms in addition to the PC and Mac.

By 2002, UE had improved by leaps and bounds, bringing it into the next generation with the development of a particle system (a system to generate effects such as fog and smoke), static mesh tools (tools to manipulate objects), a physics engine (allows interaction between objects such as collisions) and a Matinee (a tool to create cut scenes, which is a brief, non interactive movie). This improvement saw to the development of the Unreal Championship and Unreal Tournament 2003. The release of Unreal Championship also added the Xbox game console to the list, with multiplayer capabilities in Xbox Live.

The development of Epic's next game Unreal II: The Awakening edged UE forward with an animation system and overall improvement with their existing engine. The development of faster Internet speeds in the early 2000s also increased the demand of multiplayer online gaming. Unreal Tournament 2004 allowed players to engage in online battles with one another. This saw the creation of vehicles and large battlefields, plus improvements in online network capabilities. In 2005, the release of Unreal Champion 2 on the Xbox game console reinforced UE capabilities on the Xbox console. It also saw the creation of a very important feature of a new third-person camera. This opened up greater possibilities in the types of games that could be created using the engine.

Gears of War, one of the most well-known franchises in the video games industry, pushed Epic Games to create and release the third version of its game engine, Unreal Engine 3, in 2006.

The improvement of the graphics engine used DirectX 9/10 to allow more realistic characters and objects to be made. The introduction of Kismet, which is a visual scripting system, allowed game and level designers to create game play logic for more engaging combat play without having to delve into writing codes. Platform capabilities of UE3 include Xbox360 and PlayStation 3 was added. There was a revamp in the light control and materials. UE3 also had a new physics engine. Gears of War 2 released in 2008 saw the progressive improvements to UE3. In 2013, the Gears of War Judgment was released.

PC online gaming was also under the radar of Epic Game's developers. In 2009, Atlas Technology was released to be used in conjunction with UE to allow massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) to be created.

The increasing demand of mobile gaming also led to UE3 being pushed in the direction of increasing its supportability for various mobile platforms. All these advancements and technological capabilities have made UE3 the most popular version of Unreal Engine and it is still very widely used today.

UE3 dominated the market for 8 years until UE4 came along. UE4 was launched in 2014 and introduced the biggest change by replacing Kismet with the new concept of Blueprint. We will discuss more about the features of UE4 later in the chapter.