Warner Bros. Announces Long Term Licensing Agreement for Unreal Engine 3
Thursday 17th March 2011, 10:50:00 PM, written by Alex G“We’re very excited that the talented production teams at NetherRealm and Rocksteady will continue to make Unreal Engine 3 their exclusive core technology for the next few years to create the exceptional titles they are so known for,” said Mark Rein, Vice President, Epic Games. “We look forward to seeing how the engine will contribute to the upcoming games from these teams and potentially other Warner teams and external developers who develop or publish with Warner.”
Beyond3D gamers will recall Rocksteady's proficiency with the engine with respect to multiplatform parity - for PlayStation 3 users, Unreal Engine 3 seems to have the ubiquitous reputation of poorly implemented ports, however, Rocksteady proved to be more than capable of maintaining a high degree of parity with the Xbox 360 iteration (sans 2xMSAA on PS3). Although the PC iteration saw higher resolution effects at respectable framerates, often the first complaints from the Master Gaming Race, nothing saw more division amongst Beyond3D PC gamers than the seemingly nVidia-specific features such as GPU-Accelerated PhysX and working MSAA. At least in the latter case, proper support was finally rectified for AMD (then-ATI) GPU users in the Game of the Year Edition. However, where PhysX was concerned, there was a large ruckus regarding the CPU implementation of the physics software package. Our friends at RealWorldTech, went so far as to investigate PhysX, in their article, PhysX87 Software Deficiency.
NetherRealms Studios is no stranger to Unreal Engine 3 as well, having previously worked on MK vs DC, perhaps one of the few, if only, UE3 games to budget 16ms for frame render times on consoles. A publically released GDC 2009 presentation, "Hitting 60Hz with the Unreal Engine", by Jon Greenberg further explains in some detail the trials and tribulations during that particular endeavour. Pixel counters may only recall the 1040x624 (2xMSAA) rendering on both consoles, however, recent evidence from the PS3 demo of the upcoming Mortal Kombat game shows a 1280x720 native backbuffer, albeit with an edge detect blur post-process instead of 2xMSAA.
At any rate, with the recently announced upgrades to Unreal Engine 3 at GDC 2011 (available to UE3 licensees), by nVidia and Epic Games, it will be interesting to see how this will affect future development for or beyond Batman: Arkham City and the upcoming Mortal Kombat game.
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Full press release here.Tagging
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