3D Vision, Mercury Cubes Making Their Way To UE3

[hal]

Kotaku summarizes Mark Rein's presentation of the new Unreal Engine 3 features at the GDC. Among the surprises are Mercury Cubes and a city-building on-the-fly exercise. Kotaku rightly points out that Unreal Engine demonstrations are often indications of things that will soon make their way into new Epic Games.

Another demo showed a floating blob of liquid medal that warbled fluidly. "Remember last year we had the meat cube?" Epic Games vice president Mark Rein asked his audience here. He was referring to a GDC demonstration of Unreal from two years ago when a bloody cube of flesh was shown, getting shot up and chopped away, a precursor to some of the gore in Gears of War 2."This is the mercury cube."

In another demonstration, an Epic engineer zipped through a city scene, showing off how quickly he could drop in new buildings and construct a vast and detailed city.

Rein pointed out this was just programmer art, even though it already looked passable. "One day we'll show you what we're doing with this. When you see what we're doing with this, it's going to blow your mind."

In related news Gamespot points out the announcement Epic Games made today regarding the integration of NVIDIA's 3D Vision into Unreal Engine 3.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

Gears of War 3 with a built in map editor. And to snub us again, it will come out on Mac.

 

[N1ghtmare]

Gamespot link goes to BU mainpage.

 

[Sk.7]

Giant city building tools...? Is Gears Of War 3 becoming an MMO? Worst nightmare

 

[ambershee]

They could be taking Gears into large scale urban environments, potentially populated. Should be interesting. It is also likely related to their new 'open world' project.

 

[Jackal]

what is liquid medal?

 

[Sjosz]

what is liquid medal?

A reward fluid for intense and competitive activities.

 

[Jackal]

oh lol

 

[StreetPreacher]

I'm not sure I understand the 3D thing. Doesn't that technology work with just about every major engine anyways? I had one of the old Elsa 3D glasses way back in the old days, and it worked with most engines right out of the box as it used hooks in D3D to cull depth info and render offset images. So why does the Unreal engine need to be specifically coded to use these new glasses?

 

[Sir_Brizz]

It uses a rendering technique which produces a 3D image, which is better because the engine knows what the objects look like, whereas the driver has to guess.

 

[Sk.7]

I only hope that this 3D thing will last longer than PhysX does

 

[ambershee]

What are you talking about? PhysX is in common use all over the place...

 

[BoneofFear]

[joke]Epic's other upcoming attractions...

1.Bloodball (With special guest,Caleb from Blood)
2.Pimp Cube (Starring,Hank Hill)
3.AI Interactivity Test (With Valve's Alyx and Epic's COLE TRAIN BABY! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO)[/joke]