Hasta La Gadget!

Epic Games isn’t just offering up its ubiquitous current-gen game creation tool Unreal Engine 3 to Oculus Rift developers, but also its next-gen tool, Unreal Engine 4. Epic Games VP Mark Rein told Engadget as much during an interview at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, repeatedly stating he’s “super bullish” on the Rift, all the while rocking an Oculus pin on his exhibitor lanyard. “Oh, for sure,” he said when we asked about UE4 support for the Rift. “We’re working on that now.” The Rift dev kit was demoed at CES 2013 running Unreal Engine 3’s “Epic Citadel” demo, and Epic’s offered support to the Oculus folks since early on, making the UE4 news not a huge surprise, but welcome nonetheless.

The next-gen game engine was being shown off at GDC 2013 with a flashy new demo (seen below the break), as well as a version of its “Elemental” demo running on a PlayStation 4 dev kit (shrouded behind a curtain, of course). Rein was visibly excited about that as well, unable to contain random vocal outbursts during the presentation. “It’s a war out there, and we sell bullets and bandaids,” he jokingly told us in an interview the following day. The quote comes from coworker and Epic VP of business development Jay Wilbur, and it’s fitting — Epic only makes a handful of games, and the company’s real money comes from game engine licensees. In so many words, the more platforms that Unreal Engine variants can go, the better for Epic (as well as for engine licensees, of course). “It’s a good place to be — we try to support everything we can. We have to place some timed bets on things that we feel are gonna be the most important to licensees, and also to us where we’re taking games. But because the engine is portable — it’s written in C++ — a licensee can take and do whatever they want,” he said.

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A Holy Grail of Linux gaming has been an Unreal Engine 3 port. Getting one for the OS would unlock a world of games that has been the province of, well, just about any other mainstream platform. Thanks to Google preserving Flash on Linux through Chrome, that dream is alive in at least a rudimentary form. Experimenters at the Phoronix forums have found that Chrome 21 has support for the Stage 3D hardware acceleration needed to drive Epic Games’ Flash conversion of UE3. Tell Chrome to enable support as well as ignore a graphics chip blacklist, and suddenly you’re running Epic Citadel from your Linux install. When we say “running,” however, we’re taking a slight amount of poetic license. Performance isn’t that hot, and certain configurations might not show the medieval architecture in all its glory. We’ve confirmed with Epic that it works, but it’s still firm on the stance that there’s no plans for official UE3 support on Linux “at this time.” It’s still promising enough that maybe, just maybe, gamers can embrace an open-source platform without having to give up the games they love.

Filed under: Gaming, Software

Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 now working on Linux through Google Chrome, more or less originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 25 Aug 2012 01:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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