TeamXbox caught up with Mark Rein this week to ask a few questions regarding the operation of Unreal Engine 3 on the Xbox 360 now that Microsoft has announced that games will be required to run without the Hard Drive attachment. Among other things, you'll find the folowing gems:
How does the "virtual" lack of a hard drive affect the Unreal Engine 3? Would that force Epic Games to cater the UE3 to the lowest spec SKU, in this case the Xbox 360 Core System, or would you allow the developers to take advantage of the hard drive when present?
Mark Rein: We’ve designed the streaming system in Unreal Engine 3 with the expectation that we wouldn’t have a hard drive at our disposal so there’s nothing that needs to change at this point. Developers can take advantage of the availability of a hard drive in numerous ways. That’s not really an engine issue but more about what a particular developer decides the functionality of their particular game should be. I would certainly expect many games to be able to take advantage of the hard drive.
Then, regarding UT2007:
You revealed at E3 2005 that in the case of Unreal Tournament 2007 the game will continuously stream content not only to allow big worlds such as those featured in the Conquest mode, but to also have matches starting right after the previous one ended. Hypothetically, could all this still be possible on the Xbox 360 without a hard drive?
Mark Rein: Hypothetically this should be possible on Xbox 360 but thus far the majority of the effort on UT2007 has been aimed at the PC where we would naturally expect systems to have more available system memory. Also I should clarify that the idea is to load the next map while you’re watching the scoreboard which appears when a match is completed.
You can read the rest of the article here.
How does the "virtual" lack of a hard drive affect the Unreal Engine 3? Would that force Epic Games to cater the UE3 to the lowest spec SKU, in this case the Xbox 360 Core System, or would you allow the developers to take advantage of the hard drive when present?
Mark Rein: We’ve designed the streaming system in Unreal Engine 3 with the expectation that we wouldn’t have a hard drive at our disposal so there’s nothing that needs to change at this point. Developers can take advantage of the availability of a hard drive in numerous ways. That’s not really an engine issue but more about what a particular developer decides the functionality of their particular game should be. I would certainly expect many games to be able to take advantage of the hard drive.
Then, regarding UT2007:
You revealed at E3 2005 that in the case of Unreal Tournament 2007 the game will continuously stream content not only to allow big worlds such as those featured in the Conquest mode, but to also have matches starting right after the previous one ended. Hypothetically, could all this still be possible on the Xbox 360 without a hard drive?
Mark Rein: Hypothetically this should be possible on Xbox 360 but thus far the majority of the effort on UT2007 has been aimed at the PC where we would naturally expect systems to have more available system memory. Also I should clarify that the idea is to load the next map while you’re watching the scoreboard which appears when a match is completed.
You can read the rest of the article here.
