unrealengine
Latest
Fortnite Chapter 2's next season will start on February 20th
Epic Games has at last set a start date for Fortnite's next season. It's scheduled for February 20th, more than four months after Chapter 2 started, which makes the current season by far the longest in the battle royale's history.
Epic Games will receive a BAFTA Special Award next month
Epic Games will add another award to its trophy cabinet next month, when it picks up a BAFTA Special Award for its contribution to game development. Not only has the company created several hits of its own, including the all-conquering Fortnite, but it's helped other studios build games using Unreal Engine and distributed them through the Epic Games Store.
Snapchat will let you play as your Bitmoji in games
You'll soon be able to play as your Snapchat Bitmoji avatar in a wide variety of video games. Snapchat on Thursday launched a Bitmoji for Games SDK that will let video game developers replace their characters with the app's iconic Bitmoji. Players will be able to scan an on-screen Snapcode to unlock their avatar on any supported games.
Epic Games' Unreal Engine will support HoloLens
You can't call HoloLens 2 a gaming platform, but Microsoft is at least laying the groundwork. Epic Games has announced that it's adding HoloLens support to Unreal Engine 4, the technology that powers a wide range of games and 3D productivity apps. It's "up and running" now, Epic's Tim Sweeney said, and should be available to all developers in May. You're not about to play an augmented-reality version of Fortnite. It should allow for "photorealistic" 3D in AR apps, though, and it's really just the start of Epic's plans.
NVIDIA may have unwittingly leaked Unity ray-tracing support
NVIDIA launched the era of ray tracing about 5 months ago with the release of the RTX 2080 Ti GPU, but so far, it hasn't gone over well -- there's just one game that supports it. Sales of the pricey cards have been slower than it expected, and the cryptocurrency collapse hasn't helped. So, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was eager to mention that ray tracing support was available on both Unity and Unreal, the most popular gaming engines. The problem is, Unity has yet to reveal anything like that, so NVIDIA may have inadvertently stolen its thunder.
Unity, Improbable and Epic Games are squabbling in public
What a day. Unity, Improbable and Epic Games have been wrapped up in a bizarre and unnecessarily public dispute about terms of service, and the future of games that run on a much-hyped platform called Spatial OS. The quarrel started this morning with an Improbable blog post titled: "Unity's block of SpatialOS."
The Epic Games Store is the best thing that could happen to Steam
By the time The Game Awards cameras switched off on December 6th, after three hours of sternum-pounding concerts, raucous celebration and heartfelt speeches, the video game landscape had changed in a massive way. In the show's first hour, the studio behind Fortnite and the Unreal Engine launched its new digital marketplace, The Epic Games Store, and its simple gray-and-white logo became a consistent theme throughout the night. It seemed that every time a trailer for a new game faded to black, the Epic Games Store emblem was there.
Fox Sports’ new virtual studio runs on Unreal Engine
It's no secret that Epic Games has enabled a number of gaming studios to create more-realistic visuals with its Unreal game engine. Since its debut in 1998, powering the first-person shooter Unreal, the technology has evolved to power hundreds of games, from Fortnite to Street Fighter V, and with that process, the virtual has become increasingly more realistic. Now in its fourth iteration, Unreal Engine is no longer exclusively being used for gaming, as other industries have taken notice of the possibilities. Unreal Engine 4 has become a key element for film and television in recent years, and Fox Sports is using it to power its new, completely virtual studio set. "Virtual sets have been around for quite some time, and we've done our fair share of using them," Zac Fields said. "But it's always been a struggle to give that sense of photo realism." Fields oversees Fox Sports' Graphic Technology and Integration department, which includes the addition of new gear during a studio build. He said the team started thinking about the idea of a virtual set about two years ago. Around 15 months ago, the network started getting staff familiar with the software and began tests. Then last winter, the broadcaster did a virtual show. Fields described this as a "full run-through" of a show on the virtual set that was built in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Nickelodeon's new animated show will be made with game engine
Nickelodeon's new TV show Meet the Voxels will be created with a video game engine, Variety reports. The studio's R&D unit, Nickelodeon Entertainment Lab, worked on the techniques and methods that will be applied to the show. Meet the Voxels's premise is centered around video games, as each member of the titular family is a star in a video game franchise (or is hoping to become one).
Epic gives Unreal Engine creators a larger cut of product sales
Epic Games announced today that it will be taking a smaller cut of sales made through its Unreal Engine Marketplace, where creators like digital artists, sound designers and programmers can sell products that game developers can use in their own projects. Going forward, creators will now get to keep 88 percent of their product sales as opposed to the 70 percent they were taking previously. Not only that, Epic Games will be applying this new split retroactively, so any sale made on the platform since it launched in 2014 will be subject to the new rate.
The Weather Channel's mixed reality broadcasts debut tomorrow
In April, the Weather Channel announced that it would be incorporating immersive, mixed reality content into its broadcasts that will give viewers a realistic look at weather events. Well it's ready to debut that content and tomorrow morning, you'll be able to watch meteorologist Jim Cantore follow the development of a hyper-realistic tornado from its early stages all the way up to it becoming a destructive EF5 behemoth. Cantore will also share ways you can keep safe if faced with severe weather events.
The Weather Channel will bring mixed-reality disasters to broadcasts
It looks like The Weather Channel's broadcasts are about to get a lot more immersive. The channel's parent, The Weather Group, is teaming up with The Future Group, powered by the Unreal Engine, to present broadcasts in mixed reality. And, quite frankly, it looks pretty cool, judging from the pictures included with the blog post.
With 'Siren,' Unreal Engine blurs the line between CGI and reality
Epic Games has been obsessed with real-time motion capture for years, but the company is now trying to take its experiments with the technology one step further. Enter "Siren," a digital personality that it created alongside a few prominent firms in the gaming industry: Vicon, Cubic Motion, 3Lateral and Tencent (which just became a major investor in Ubisoft). The crazy thing about Siren is that she comes to life using live mocap tech, powered by software from Vicon, that can make her body and finger movements be captured and live-streamed into an Unreal Engine project.
Tim Sweeney wants Unreal to power the cross-platform revolution
It's 2018 and developers are finally taking mobile games seriously -- or it's the other way around, depending on whom you ask. "I think what we are seeing is now these AAA games from traditional PC and console developers going mobile, and they are among the most popular mobile games that exist," Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney says. Epic CTO Kim Liberi jumps in and adds, "I think it's almost the other way, I think it's that mobile developers are taking games more seriously."
Intel is funding the future of large-scale VR environments
If you've donned a VR headset and immersed yourself in a proper virtual reality 'experience,' you might have seen chills, thrills, and...not too many people at once. Today, Intel released a demo showcasing a software solution to the crowd problem the company created with The Glimpse Group. The demo part of the Intel Arena Project, as it's named, situates the viewer in the middle of a big basketball stadium with 2,500 fans in the seats, most of which are individually rendered. Functionally it's a proof-of-concept to show such a population can be rendered in a VR experience, but the collaboration is also publicly releasing the software and process documentation to help creators build their own large-scale virtual reality scenes.
DHS to release an active shooter training simulator for teachers
Last June, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a virtual training program for first responders aimed at preparing them for an active shooter incident. Now, there's a program specifically for teachers. "With teachers, they did not self-select into a role where they expect to have bullets flying near them. Unfortunately, it's becoming a reality," Tamara Griffith, one of the chief engineers of the program, told Gizmodo. "And so we want to give them that chance to understand what options are available to them and what might work well for them."
Epic Games gives developers a taste of ARKit ahead of iOS 11
ARKit on iOS may blow up perhaps sooner than expected. That's because Epic Games have added experimental support for it to the latest version of Unreal Engine. The idea is to give developers an early look at the features before iOS 11 goes live later this fall.
The real-time motion capture behind ‘Hellblade’
In a makeshift changing room filled with Disney Infinity figures, I strip down to my boxers and pull on a two-part Lycra suit. It feels tight, and the top half shimmies up toward my waistline as soon as I stretch or stand up straight. How anyone is able to act in this thing is a mystery to me. Sheepishly, I gather my belongings and trot back to the motion capture studio that sits at the end of Ninja Theory's offices in Cambridge, England. Inside, a couple of engineers scurry about, prepping cameras and cables. For years, movie and video game studios have used mocap to bring digital characters to life. From detective Cole Phelps in L.A. Noire to the powerful Caesar in Planet of the Apes, the technology has delivered some truly moving, actor-driven performances. Normally, however, motion capture scenes are processed by an animator hours, days or weeks after they've been captured on set. It's a time-consuming process, and one that involves some guesswork. In a sparse, lifeless room, directors are forced to imagine how a take will look in the final sequence. Not so with Ninja Theory. The video game developer has a unique setup that allows Chief Creative Director Tameem Antoniades and his team to preview scenes in real time. Pre-visualisation, or pre-vis, has existed before in the industry, but it's typically limited to body tracking. Full-character modelling is rare, especially at the kind of fidelity Ninja Theory is shooting for with its next game, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.
DHS has a video game-like trainer for active shooter incidents
Today, the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate announced the release of a virtual training platform for active shooter incidents. The Enhanced Dynamic Geo-Social Environment, or EDGE, is a program that creates a virtual active shooter scenario through which first responders can train themselves. EDGE launches today and is free for all first responders.
Inside The Mill’s mind-bending alternate reality art showcase
I stepped inside a small, dark room in a large, airy loft space in New York's Soho district early Wednesday morning. Our host fitted me with an HTC Vive and told to explore the world around me. Within moments, I was trapped in a glass box, surrounded by other people, also wearing VR headsets, also trapped in glass boxes, one of whom continued to claw at the glass until both of our headsets were consumed by our own flesh. We were one with the machines. Over the next two hours I watched semi-autonomous robots run in circles, randomly scribbling on large sheets of butcher paper; pulled the virtual puppet strings of a CGI llama that lip synced to Mariah Carey; watched as Reeps One, a world-famous dubstep beatboxer, created unique digital sculptures with the incredibly nuanced tones of his voice; and floated through a VR dreamscape using my breathing and brain waves to propel me upward.
