Epic Games Inc. is ready to show off some major updates for Unreal Engine 3 to the development community, including Content Browser, Lightmass, and Master Control Program (MCP). These upgrades will be shown at their booth in Moscone Center’s West Hall, location ES-144. And free, advanced training will be provided for existing users of Unreal Engine. The feature set of each UE3 update is as follows:
- Content Browser: Works in tandem with the built-in search engine to instantaneously find game assets on a developer’s database. Thumbnail previews, content tagging, and asset collection management allow artists to select the proper game assets without having to manually open the respective files.
- Lightmass: A global illumination solver that produces high-quality, static lighting. The effects included in this update are color bleeding, diffuse interreflection, specular interreflection, and soft shadows with accurate penumbrae. Epic’s Swarm distributed computational framework allows lighting to be generated up to ten times faster. Lightmass is available to future and current licensees at no additional cost.
- MCP: An online service architecture that supports settings management, announcements, data collection, and online population tracking of both player and game statistics. MCP also includes tools, such as heat maps, to visualize player activity over a set period of time.
Stay tuned for more info regarding Epic Games and Unreal Engine 3 at GDC 09!
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