Epic Games Update
March 14, 2002
by Mark Rein

First let me explain that nobody is using the "Unreal Warfare" engine because it technically doesn't exist until AFTER Unreal Warfare ships and that game is still a long way away- even then it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to use that exact version of the engine to ship a game. Nobody, except Legend of course, is using the Unreal II Engine and likewise nobody, except DE of course, is using the "Unreal Tournament 2" engine. The technology that our licensees use is called the "Unreal Engine". In the case of Westka they're using the current version of the Unreal Engine. I've noticed people saying that Mobile Forces, whose cool demo was just released, used the "Unreal Warfare" engine and not only is that wrong for the reasons I've listed above but they're not even using the current Unreal Engine. They've basically retrofit some of the functionality from the current engine (such as terrain), along with their own really cool vehicle physics, into the version of the engine that shipped with Unreal Tournament.

The way I see the Unreal Engine is similar to the Chevrolet Corvette and Porsche 911. Both of them have been around for a long time and have great history and great success. Both have gone through various improvements over the years. They get better and better with each new model. Sometimes they get minor tweaks, bug fixes and improvements (like when we went from Unreal to Unreal Tournament) and sometimes they go through a nearly complete redesigns (like where the current engine is today compared to the UT version) that result in a much more powerful, better-handling more reliable model than their predecessor.

Both cars also have a thriving third party market if you want to add-on to them which we also have with our engine which leads me to talk about the latest add-on to our engine...

The folks from Lipsinc (www.lipsinc.com) have a really cool facial animation tool fully integrated into Unreal available for licensing to developers using the Unreal Engine. Their software handles virtually any language - English, Japanese, German, French, Korean, etc. The file size (apart from the .wav file) is just a couple of kilobytes. Basically you open our animation tool and there's a tab that says "Lipsinc". Under that tab you can import .WAV files of voice data and the Lipsinc system analyzes the speech and produces very realistic facial animation data that includes not only the mouth, jaw and lip movements but also eye blinks, eyebrow raises, and head nods. You can then preview it, right there in the animation browser, combined with whatever other character animation you want to play. For example you can have a guy talking while doing a ladder-climbing animation and it looks very realistic. This could be a huge time saver for Unreal Engine licensees who have dialogue in their games - especially if they're localizing them for multiple countries. I suspect many of people who license the Unreal Engine will also license Lipsinc's facial animation tools. Legend has been using Lipsinc for quite a while in the development of Unreal2 but this new integrated tool makes the process easy and seamless.

We will be demoing this tool as part of our demos at GDC this year. We've posted details about how to come visit us at http://www.epicgames.com/unrealenginenews.html