Unreal Engine

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There is more information available on this subject at Unreal Engine on the English Wikipedia.
Unreal Engine
Logo of the Unreal Engine

Developed by:

Epic Games

Entered development:

1995[1]

First use:

Unreal (1998)

 

The Unreal Engine is a game engine maintained by Epic Games. It was initially developed for Unreal, a 1998 PC first-person shooter. It has remained Epic Games' engine of choice since its inception, with games such as Gears of War and more recently Fortnite being built in the engine, but the engine is most notable for its role as a third-party engine available to any game developer, in exchange for a royalty fee, with thousands of games having been built using it, to date.

In 2019, alongside the launch of Halo: Reach's port to the game, Unreal Engine 4 (the then-latest version of Unreal Engine) was introduced to Halo: The Master Chief Collection to handle the unified UI elements, as the original implementation of the UI was built in a framework that was no longer supported.[2]

According to video game journalist Jason Schreier, during Halo Infinite's troubled development, 343 Industries spent months evaluating a potential migration to Unreal Engine instead of Halo's traditional engine, the Blam engine. This was due to the fact that the two decade-old engine, and in particular a constituent toolset entitled Faber, was incredibly hard to work with and had become fraught with technical debt, making it difficult to update and improve.[3][4] Ultimately, 343 chose not to migrate to Unreal, and instead persevered with the Blam engine, creating a significantly overhauled version for Halo Infinite, which they dubbed the Slipspace Engine.

Games using the Unreal Engine

The following Halo games utilise the Unreal Engine:

Sources

  1. ^ Game Developer, Classic Tools Retrospective: Tim Sweeney on the first version of the Unreal Editor (Retrieved on Jan 22, 2022) [archive]
  2. ^ Halo Waypoint, MCC Development Update - May 2019 (Retrieved on Jan 21, 2021) [local archive] [external archive]
  3. ^ Bloomberg, How Microsoft’s Halo Infinite Went From Disaster to Triumph (Retrieved on Jan 21, 2022) [archive]
  4. ^ Twitter, Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier): "343's tool set, Faber, was so difficult to use that they spent months considering a switch to Unreal. (They didn't)" (Retrieved on Jan 21, 2022) [archive]