The
award winning piece of back-end code that powers games like
Unreal,
Nerf: Arena Blast,
Dr. Brain,
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - The Fallen, and
Wheel of Time.
The Unreal Engine seems to have been developed primarily for
Glide users, and always supports the
lowest common denominator so far as
hardware acceleration is concerned. One of the side effects of this is that
texture maps can only be 256 colors, and cannot measure more than 256 pixels up or across. I think it's
justified because I just happen to have been too cheap with my
box, and bought a
Voodoo3 3000 PCI card, which happens to work very nicely with Unreal Engine based games. Unfortunately, the card doesn't perform quite so well with games such as
Quake 3 Arena, because the
OpenGL support for
Voodoo boards seems as though it were
an afterthought, which it was.
The engine is responsible for opening and rendering
packages used in playing the game. The packages are all saved with the same
format, but different
extensions. The boys at Epic offer this
advice to those who would like to
comprehend the package format ( http://unreal.epicgames.com/Packages.htm ): "
Abandon all hope ye who try to parse this file format." I conclude that the format of
Unreal Packages is quite
complex.
The only
real difference between the packages is said to be the extension, which changes the way Unreal handles the package. The package extensions are:
- .u for system files; these are generally binary packages that describe actors in the game. .u files are responsible for handling the bots, drawing your weapon onscreen, and actually even being the weapon you hold in your hand.
- .unr is probably the most common extension used; it refers to actual game levels, where you and any number of human opponents or bots can fight it out to the death.
- .umx is for packages containing Music selections. Ambient music can sometimes make or break a level. Everyone likes to see attention to the details, right?
- .uax is like music, but generally contains sound clips no more than 2 or 3 seconds. Don't ever try to substitute SFX for Music in your level. It sounds repetitive.
- .utx is the extension for a file containing texture data. Textures are mapped onto the surface of polys in the game world, and they're what make a rock face look like a rock face as opposed to a grey sheet. Everybody loves eye candy.
There might even be some that I'm
missing. But I've just described all the
popular ones. Packages are not
compressed, and can contain any number of
objects. A texture package could
theoretically contain over 100,000 textures, but this would be a
bad idea because the package would be
gargantuan and require lots and lots of
memory to open in under a few weeks. Most packages don't have more than 50 or 60 objects in them, with the exception of the .u packages. .u packages can (and often do) have over 300 objects.
I like the Unreal Engine because it
plays nicely with my Voodoo
accelerator, but I'll soon be buying a nice
GeForce 2 card to replace it. Then the
Quake Engine will perform nicely as well.
See
game engine and
gaming engine.