Unreal Engine Plans

A post to the BeyondUnreal Forums (thanks HomeLAN Fed) has word from Epic's Tim Sweeney on where they've been focusing their efforts for the next iteration of their Unreal engine. Here's a bit:
We already have polygon count where it needs to be. We're going to be focusing on per-pixel rendering and getting the quality of each pixel on screen as high as possible. So there's a bunch of different technologies there: dynamic shadowing technology, stencil buffer and shadow z-buffers. But the whole idea is that every object in the scene should cast realistic shadows with respect to every light source in the scene, and every pixel you see should illuminate properly that way. Of course that's easy to say and there are some solutions for that, like stencil buffering. But to do that properly you really want fuzzy shadows everywhere because most light and most environments are quite diffused and if you look around you very seldom see a really sharp shadow edge somewhere. So a huge amount of effort and processing power goes into implementing fuzzy shadows effectively in real-time. That's been a significant part of our R&D right there.
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Read Carefully!
Jan 25, 2004, 18:42
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Read Carefully! Jan 25, 2004, 18:42
Jan 25, 2004, 18:42
 
27 posts about whether or not we need soft shadows in games, and not one of you seems to have picked up on the key word in the comment by Tim.
The key word is "been" as in past tense, they're obviously finished doing that part of the R&D, so you'll be getting soft shadows, end of story!
Now then Tim, how about a screenshot? :-)

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