Sunday 12 December 2010

Task 18: Elements of Game Technology, part one: Game Engines

Well yes the group project is coming up in the 2nd semester and we will be using the Unreal Editor UDK which I haven't really touched much, opening the screen is a scary looking area. As Iv mentioned I had used the Quake 3 Engine but from what iv heard and seen from previous years Unreal is more powerful making my previous experience quite primitive in comparison.
With the quake3 engine it was really quite limited in what you could do, while I was using it the most you could do really is draw a box or something, player start and basic lighting. At the time it was scary to look at also but is so much simpler in comparison to what iv seen Unreal do. Quake3 is very obsolete now and I think I pushed it to its limit while using it, it had a very low tolerance to polygons in characters and textures and in terms of animation you had little control over what things did. You also couldn't see or test it in the editor. You have to export the map file each time you wanted to test it, from videos of Unreal it displays in real time which would be very handy and save a heck of a lot of time.
In Unreal it seems to have a friendlier interface for assigning textures to objects, a quick drag lines to the sorts of textures, type in values but seems to have more control over the tiling feature and how its displayed. Also has a key-framing feature like in 3dsmax which Quake3 didn't have, there seems to be a lot more freedom in what you could do with it. There is a lot more support with UDK as it has a proper website dedicated to it providing videos to those who download it. With Quake3 you were pretty much left in the dark about it.

Though I am more comfortable with the quake3 engine as I have used it quite a lot I think the navigation and general feel should be quite similar to each other.

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