Opinion: John Gillooly's had a chance to see Unreal's iPhone engine running, and he's been blown away...
When somebody thrusts an iPhone 4 into my hands and implores, 'check this out man, it is awesome', I shudder a little and prepare myself for the latest and greatest advances in fart replication app development. But for the first time ever such a thing just happened and it was well worth the interruption. What was running did end up as the source of embarrassing office noise, but in this case it was an involuntary 'holy crap' emanating from this writer's mouth. For on that iPhone was the newly minted Unreal Engine 3 tech demo, and while it is obvious that the old adage about 3D involving 'cheating without getting caught' was in full effect, it is as big a leap forward in 3D as seeing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Half-Life 2 for the first time.
Smartphone gaming has always been a pipe dream, where technology has lagged well behind the ambitions of manufacturers. When smartphone gaming is mentioned I always end up thinking of E3 2003, back when I was covering the event for Atomic. I managed to slip into the highly exclusive Nokia NGage press conference, where it dragged out John Romero and made him demonstrate one of the worst games I have ever played, Red Faction for NGage.
This was a pixilated attempt at a first person shooter that looked like it was running on the Rise of the Triad engine. But worse than the looks were the controls - awkwardly toggling between moving and looking/shooting was more akin to spasm gaming than twitch gaming. It was trying to be so much more than the hardware was capable of, while simultaneously bearing the scars of some fundamentally horrible game design.
With these sorts of games as pioneers it is no wonder that the whole smartphone gaming genre pulled back from trying to replicate PC/console gaming. Not only was hardware insufficient for 3D, but the focus on Java meant that the vast majority of system resources were unavailable to game developers who had to make something that fit into a Java Virtual Machine.
However in recent months it has become clear that Smartphone hardware has reached a point where it can deliver serious 3D graphics. As John Carmack put it on twitter the other day 'Smartphone and game console hardware engineering are converging faster than you might think.'
Last month at Quakecon Carmack showed off Rage running on iOS. It was a bit framey but the megatexture technology inherent in id tech 5 look freaking amazing. Unfortunately there is no id tech 5 title that iOS device owners can download and try out, so shaky-cam video was the best look we were able to get at the game in action.
However as part of Apple's annual launch of new iPods and the like this week it brought Epic Games' Mike Capps to the stage and announced 'Project Sword', an action RPG that uses a version of Unreal Engine 3 and will be shipping for iOS devices later this year. But just like the Xbox 360 exclusivity of Gears of War, Project Sword is more about licensing the engine to developers than Epic making games themselves.
To this end it released the tech demo as an app for iOS owners to download, called Epic Citadel, which returns us to this morning's sweary faux pas. It is hard to describe just how impressive this engine is, with reflections and high resolution textures throughout. It lacks any kind of particle system and uses some pretty old school lens flare techniques but the end result is something that looks wonderful and runs smooth as silk. Even the control system isn't completely pants, I was happily circle strafing within seconds of taking charge of the phone.
If you can get access to an iPhone then have a look for 'Epic Citadel' on the iTunes App store. While this is purely a tech demo, one can't help but wonder whether it is a window into the future of gaming. What is even more exciting is that it seems John Carmack has started playing around with Android, and considering that today Samsung announced a 7in Android 2.2 tablet with a 1GHz Cortex A8 CPU and PowerVR SGX540 GPU (which is roughly twice as powerful as the graphics chip in the iPhone 4) this writer is expecting to see some similarly impressive stuff on Android in the coming months.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012