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Unreal Engine
Summary
Unreal Engine (UE) is a series of 3D computer graphics game engines developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter video game Unreal. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of genres of games and has seen adoption by other industries, most notably the film and television industry. Unreal Engine is written in C++ and features a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of desktop, mobile, console, and virtual reality platforms.
The latest generation, Unreal Engine 5, was launched in April 2022. Its source code is available on GitHub, and commercial use is granted based on a royalty model. Epic waives their royalties margin for games until developers have earned in revenue and the fee is waived if developers publish on the Epic Games Store. Epic has included features from acquired companies like Quixel in the engine, which is seen as helped by Fortnite's revenue.
In 2014, Unreal Engine was named the world's "most successful videogame engine" by Guinness World Records.
The first-generation Unreal Engine was developed by Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games. Having created editing tools for his shareware games ZZT (1991) and Jill of the Jungle (1992), Sweeney began writing the engine in 1995 for the production of a game that would later become a first-person shooter known as Unreal. After years in development, it debuted with the game's release in 1998, although MicroProse and Legend Entertainment had access to the technology much earlier, licensing it in 1996. According to an interview, Sweeney wrote 90 percent of the code in the engine, including the graphics, tools, and networking system.
At first, the engine relied completely on software rendering, meaning the graphics calculations were handled by the central processing unit (CPU). However, over time, it was able to take advantage of the capabilities provided by dedicated graphics cards, focusing on the Glide API, specially designed for 3dfx accelerators.
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