As reported on Slashdot, the specs for Unreal 2007 are out! Hands down, Unreal Tournament is the game that gets the most play time out of me on a daily basis, so I'm pretty amped obout this -- of course, the most amazing thing about UT2k7 is the new graphics engine, so it's great to see that the white paper finally provides raw, hard, facts:
64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.
Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; custom artist controlled per material lighting models including anisotropic effects; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; directional light maps; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.
Rigid body physics system supporting player interaction with physical game object, ragdoll character animation, complex vehicles, and dismemberable objects.
Skeletal animation system supporting up to 4 bone influences per vertex and very complex skeletons . . . The highest LOD version of our characters typically have 100-200 bones, and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.
We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters . . . Most of our characters are built from two meshes: a realtime mesh with thousands of triangles, and a detail mesh with millions of triangles. We provide a distributed-computing application which raytraces the detail mesh and, from its high-polygon geometry, generates a normal map that is applied to the realtime mesh when rendering. The result is in-game objects with all of the lighting detail of the high poly mesh, but that are still easily rendered in real time.
UT2k7 is slated for release for Christmas 2006, but I guess I'll have to start saving for a new video card now . . . can't wait to see what Epic has up their sleeves :)
