Graphics Engine

Everyone's got a new engine

Well, almost everybody at least. Luckily, if there's one player in the FPS community that can get by on existing technology, it's Epic. In fact, the Unreal engine was so ahead of its time that even without major modification, it's still absolutely beautiful.

Even without extensive reworking, the amount of detail capable from the Unreal engine is exquisite. Capable of intricately detailed, high-polygon levels and models, at time of release, the Unreal engine was criticized for being too slow and heavy on eye-candy for the machines of the day. Nowadays, gaming rigs are being equipped with high-speed Athlons, Pentium IIIs, and Celerons, as well as blistering 3D accelerators based on Voodoo3, TNT2, and G400 technology.

Visual Splendor

One of Quake 3 Arena's biggest technological innovations is the addition of dynamic, animated curved surfaces to the world geometry. While it doesn't bring about any revolutionary gameplay enhancements, we've known for a long time that improved graphics can breathe new life into a saturated genre.

While Unreal Tournament doesn't claim to support curvy surfaces, it does offer plenty of eye candy to keep our 3D cards aching on fill-rate. Along with Unreal's detail textures, fire engine, and fractal animations, Unreal Tournament adds more adjustable detail settings, and dynamic level of detail on object models. By automatically removing polygons (tessellating) from models as they recede into the distance, the game uses a lot less of those precious processor T&L cycles we're all waiting to see.

Parallax layers of snow

Special weapons effects

In fact, one of the most important lessons Epic has learned is that at some point, your engine really does have to go into code-freeze, especially if you plan on releasing it to the public at some point or another. In fact, thanks partly to a recycled graphics engine, UT looks like it's got a good chance at soundly beating Q3A to release, something Epic really should target in order to gain a foothold and established player base!