Tag Archives: Tim Sweeney

Epic tech legend Tim Sweeney’s told Gama that absolute graphical realism is games is a mere decade away. Well, a decade and a bit.

“There are two parts to the graphical problem,” he said when asked if games would ever achieve a “100%” movie-like quality.

“Number one, there are all those problems that are just a matter of brute force computing power: so completely realistic lighting with real-time radiosity, perfectly anti-aliased graphics, and movie-quality static scenes and motion.

“We’re only about a factor of a thousand off from achieving all that in real-time without sacrifices. So we’ll certainly see that happen in our lifetimes; it’s just a result of Moore’s Law. Probably 10-15 years for that stuff, which isn’t far at all. Which is scary — we’ll be able to saturate our visual systems with realistic graphics at that point.”

The second issue, however, isn’t so easy to fix.

“But there’s another problem in graphics that’s not as easily solvable,” Sweeney added.

“It’s anything that requires simulating human intelligence or behavior: animation, character movement, interaction with characters, and conversations with characters. They’re really cheesy in games now.

“A state-of-the-art game like the latest Half-Life expansion from Valve, Gears of War, or Bungie’s stuff is extraordinarily unrealistic compared to a human actor in a human movie, just because of the really fine nuances of human behavior.”

More through there.

Speaking to GameDaily, Epic tech warrior Tim Sweeney has revealed that the Gears of War team has grown significantly to accommodate its impending sequel.

“With Gears of War 1 and 2 we started out with a relatively small team of about 35 people,” he said. “In the last six months we ramped up to almost the entire company focusing on and improving the game.

“We had 60 people the first time around and we’ll have over 80 for Gears 2 because we’ve grown quite a bit and have a lot more resources to apply to the game.”

More through there, including the fact that Unreal Engine 3 includes 2 million lines of C++. A lot of lines.

Epic’s founder, Todd Sweeney, has been talking to Next-Gen about Gears of War 2, issuing the shocking revelation that the game will have improved lighting and physics.

“The next Gears of War game will have improved physics features and new lighting and rendering features,” he said, confirming what we saw in the tech-demo movies published earlier.

“Work on the engine will continue through the whole engine cycle,” he added. “There will be major new features we’ll be adding two years from now that games just haven’t done yet.”

The full interview will be published tomorrow.

By Mike Bowden

Can’t be bothered to watch the Epic GDC tech demo and Gears 2 reveal movies on your 360? Then don’t.

Check them out after the link. They’re direct feeds and rather excellent.

By Mike Bowden

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Epic really needs to sort its message out. Tim Sweeney, the developer’s tech boss, has gone on the record to say that PC gaming has been outpaced by consoles.

“Consoles have definitely left PC games behind,” he said, adding, “PCs are good for anything, just not games.”

His comments echo Gears of War designer CliffyB’s assertion that PC gaming is in disarray, an outburst that VP Mark Rein was quick to
smack down.

Take a look at the rest of that interview. We somehow doubt Rein will be calling Sweeny an “idiot” any time soon.

Here. Mark Rein, Tim Sweeney and Cliff Bleszinski all being interviewed after last night’s demo of the Unreal Engine and the Gears of War 2 announcement. The picture quality’s very jumpy but you can hear what’s going on well enough.

It really does. And it’s very red.

Right there! We’re not even lying!

Here! There it is!

Here! Right there!

Gears of War 2 has been announced during Microsoft’s GDC keynote.

It’s set for a November 2008 release, said Cliffy B, and will, obviously, be exclusive to Xbox 360.

In addition, Epic bosses Tim Sweeney and Mike Capps made a lengthy demo of the constantly updated Unreal Engine, including “over 100″ Locust enemies running around a typical Gears of War environment. Advanced character lighting was shown , as were new water effects and soft-body physics.

“There’s much greater contrast in the shadows, much greater specular lighting,” said tech chief Sweeney. “Much more detail on the character overall.”

Destructible environments were also shown off, again in Gears of War environments.

The demo and announcement were made during the GDC keynote from Microsoft’s John Schappert, which has just finished.