There's more.
UnrealEd Content Creation Tool.
The Unreal Editor (UnrealEd) is a pure “What You See Is What You Get” content creation tool filling the void between XSI, 3D Studio Max and Maya, and shippable game content.
A powerful browser framework for finding, viewing, and organizing game assets of all types.
Visual placement and editing of gameplay objects such as players, NPCs, inventory items, AI path nodes, and light sources – with a full realtime view of their appearance, including 100% dynamic shadowing.
Includes a data-driven property editing framework, allowing level designers to easily customize any game object, and programmers to expose new customizable properties to designers via script.
Realtime terrain editing tools allowing artists to elevate terrain, paint alpha layers onto terrain to control layer blending and decoration layers, collision data, and displacement maps.
Visual Material Editor. By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.
Animation tool enables artists to import models, skeletons, and animations, and to tie them to in-game events such as sounds and script notifications.
In-editor “Play Here” button puts gameplay just one mouse click and a fraction of a second away. Here, you can test gameplay in-editor in one window while modifying objects and rearranging geometry in another.
Plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and Maya to bring models into the Unreal engine with mesh topology, mapping coordinates, smoothing groups, material names, skeleton structure, and skeletal animation data.
Suport for COLLADA import path for meshes and animation.
Fully integrated source control, so that artists and level designers can check out content packages, modify, and check in from within the editor.
All the other niceties you'd expect from a modern content editing tool: Multi-level undo/redo, drag-and-drop, copy-and-paste; customizable key and color configuration; viewport management.
Every Unreal Engine license includes the right to redistribute UnrealEd publicly, enabling teams to release the content creation tools along with their game to the mod community. Mod support has been a major factor behind the success of many prominent PC games today, and we anticipate that support for PC-based mod development may be a significant factor in future console games as well.
Game Framework & Artificial Intelligence.
An object-oriented gameplay framework is provided supporting common game objects such as players, NPC's, inventory, weapons, and triggers.
Rich multi-level AI system supporting path-finding, complex level navigation, individual decision making, and team-based AI.
Pathfinding framework with full awareness of common game objects such as triggers, doors and elevators, allowing for complex navigation scenarios where an NPC will press switches, open doors, and navigate around temporary obstructions in order to reach its destination.
Navigation framework with support for short-term tactical combat, cover, and navigation off the path network.
Team-based AI framework suitable for first-person shooters, third-person shooters, and tactical combat games. The team-based AI framework provides support for team coordination, objective management, and long-term goals.
AI paths are viewable and editable by level designers in UnrealEd, allowing customization and hinting.
Here's where it gets nice, and to what we've all been saying...
Proven Technology.
Unreal Engine 3 was used to power games such as Epic’s recently released Gears of War and the upcoming Unreal Tournament 3, as well as many games by licensees that represent some of the best studios in the industry.
Typical Content Specifications.
Here are the guidelines we're using in building content for our next Unreal Engine 3 based game. Different genres of games will have widely varying expectations of player counts, scene size, and performance, so these specifications should be regarded as one data point for one project rather than hard requirements for all.
Characters: For every major character and static mesh asset, we build two versions of the geometry: a renderable mesh with unique UV coordinates, and a detail mesh containing only geometry. We run the two meshes through the Unreal Engine 3 preprocessing tool and generate a high-res normal map for the renderable mesh, based on analyzing all of the geometry in the detail mesh.
Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.
Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution 2048x2048 per character.
Bones: The highest LOD version of our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.
Normal Maps and Texture Maps: We are authoring most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048x2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's in the 2006 timeframe. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC's up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity.
Environments: Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles.
Lights: There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lights affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine's high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radius lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene.
Those are the entire tech specs, capabilities and crowning features of Unreal Engine 3, used to create Gears of War.
So, Newjak, now I suppose we wait to see just what kind of a problem you have with this proof, and why it's "wrong" or why I'm "wrong", or why you didn't get your allowance, or something besides "Yes, you're right.". Or better yet, gives us your proof.
-AC