Epic Games announced a significantly updated version of Unreal Engine 3 at GDC, and the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) will be available on their site later today (March 9th).
This news has implications for both developers and gamers, with the former getting a more versatile and modern platform to develop on, and the latter getting the opportunity to play better designed games based on the engine.
Check out the Samaritan technical demo below, showcasing many of the new features. We’ve compiled some of the biggest feature additions to the Unreal Engine 3 UDK, further below:
- DirectX 11 support: The Unreal Engine 3 finally supports DirectX 11 and its associated utilities and frameworks.
- Subsurface Scattering (SSS): A new feature that “simulates the light that scatters inside semi-translucent materials (this makes character skin come alive).”
- Deferred Rendering with MSAA support: Unreal Engine 3 now supports Deferred Rendering, allowing developers to use higher quality textures, geometry and lighting, all with Multi-Sampling Anti-Aliasing support.
- Improved anti-aliasing: Epic has worked hard to incorporate a more efficient and less GPU-intensive method of anti-aliasing using super sampling, while maintaining quality.
- [RELATED_ARTICLE]Improved image-based reflections: Allow for a variety of surfaces to reflect an “approximate version of scenes, with varying glossiness across surfaces, anisotropic HDR highlights and anti-aliasing.”
- Bokeh Depth-of-Field quality enhanced: Bokeh, the blur applied to objects outside the depth of field, is now controllable by the developer, and enhancements can provide “film-quality DOF.”
- Improved dynamic shadows: Unreal Engine 3 now supports the dynamic generation of shadows as objects move across light sources, all “on-the-fly.”
- Tessellation: Along with DirectX 11, Epic has worked on integrating tessellation geometry into their engine, making it easier for developers to use it efficiently.
Other changes include improvements to the editor, Steam integration, Bink Video, and more. Go to www.udk.com to download the latest UDK.
Update: It’s available now as the March 2011 Beta UDK at www.udk.com/download. You can check out Epic’s upgrade release notes here.