Unreal Engine demos not from Gears 2

By Tom Bramwell Published 22 February, 2008

But Gears 2 is likely to use those features.

Epic Games vice president Mark Rein has said that the Unreal Engine tech demos shown off during Wednesday's Microsoft keynote speech at GDC were not from Gears of War 2.

"You're not seeing any Gears of War 2 material," he told a group of journalists cobbled together for a UE press demo. Apparently they were based on leftover bits of Gears of War 1. The demos, not the journalists.

However, that doesn't mean Gears 2 won't have things like fancy water, destructible environments, hundreds of Locust on-screen and soft-body physics. "We generally don't put features in our engine that we don't use in-game," he said.

Gears 2 wouldn't necessarily be the first game to feature any of that, either - as licensees are free to use things whenever they like.

In the Unreal Engine demo, Rein first demonstrated the new water, which uses normal mapping to help with the surface effect, with little waves lapping around dynamic objects and bigger ones reacting to things like objects splashing down.

We also saw the destruction technology courtesy of Marcus Fenix's Torque Bow, and this is apparently built on clever programming that doesn't render the internal meshes of blown-apart objects (e.g. the steel framework inside a steel-reinforced concrete pillar) until it needs to be displayed to the player.

Then there was the many-Locust demo, where 600 or so were on-screen at once. This tops out at 1000 apparently, and each can navigate the Gears world and around each other already.

Finally there was the "soft-body physics", with the meat cube and the mercury "ooze ball" (thanks Mark). These things will be adhesive, able to be flung at a wall and then slide down gradually. Take this idea and apply it to lumps of flesh. Yuck!

Gears 2 may also benefit from impressive new facial motion-capture technology, which is set to join the partners programme of software that works with Unreal Engine soon. Judging by the demo video we were shown, Marcus might even get to crack a smile.

Watch out for more on Gears of War 2 and Unreal Engine 3 soon. Good timing, too, since today also sees the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament III launch across Europe.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Iain815 #1 4 years ago

    Oh, right.

  • Triggerhappytel #2 4 years ago

    What a load of misleading bullshit. They do a tech demo with stuff like destructible environments, snazzy physics and advanced lighting featuring Marcus Fenix, then come out a day later and say it wasn't actually taken from Gears 2?! If the game doesn't include these things this will be a load of crap.
    Edited by 1 at 22/02/08 @ 01:10

  • Calgon #3 4 years ago

    There was mention of 360 right at the end of that demo though, so if thats what these additions have been optimised for and they "dont put features in the engine" they dont intend to use in-game, Im gonna go with them being in the game already(maybe with more we dont know about depending on how you interpret that quote... it could be a "that wasnt GOW2 wait till you see what we've done since then";).
    Edited by 2 at 22/02/08 @ 01:45

  • BadBoyBonner #4 4 years ago

    TriggerHappyTel

    Perhaps the point Rein is making is that the assets used are of a lower quality than what you can expect in GOW 2 and/or should not be taken as any indication of what may or may not be in GOW2.

    Personally I'd like them to crack Anti-aliasing and get rid of that horrid dithered shading they use.

    That said - it's very nice to see more than about 8 characters on screen - seems like the tech is finally catching up with the promises Epic made - shame they put a time frame for delivery of those features in all their contracts.

    I enjoyed GOW - even if it was a bit of a guilty pleasure as a working tech demo - the graphics were well ahead of their time - still looks pretty good to this day. Unsure how we'll all take to the inaccurate aiming after slogging away on CoD4 MP for hours.

  • Freek #5 4 years ago

    Why the surprise? It all looked exactly the same as Gears 1. It's assasts they already had. A logical use to demo something without showing the new stufft.
    Plus, it was about the new tech, wich they are going to use. They just arent's showing you how they are going to use it just yet.
    Since they only just announced Greas 2.

  • asphaltcowboy #6 4 years ago

    Of course that stuff will be in-game... I dont think there will be a section that features a massive Meat Cube™, but the features will be in there, hence: I can't wait!

  • zuljin #7 4 years ago

    @Triggerhappytel
    At what point did they say it was taken from GOW2? The website titled it as such, but when you see the presentation it is all about Unreal Engine.

    Considering some of the environments were taken straight from 1, how could anyone be confused that this was exclusive GOW 2 footage?

  • cw- #8 4 years ago

    I thought it was obvious that tech demo wasn't GoW2?

  • Darren #9 4 years ago

    Pah, tech demos are meaningless anyway as things invariably get sacrificed in order to fit the games onto consoles, which have limited resources compared with the ever evolving PC for example. And apart from the part which showed dozens of enemies on screen at once, most of the other stuff shown were minor graphical improvements that would not have any affect on how the game plays. In fact, you probably wouldn't even notice most of the visual improvements anyway unless someone pointed them out.

  • Yaz #10 4 years ago

    Darren wrote: "Pah, tech demos are meaningless anyway....In fact, you probably wouldn't even notice most of the visual improvements anyway unless someone pointed them out."

    I wouldn't go that far, the effect of numerous improvements is often accumulative. Anyway, the improvements are there to be seen, whether they are subtle (like some of the lighting techniques) or 'in your face' (number of characters on screen, destructable environments etc), and I'm sure there are others which haven't been shown yet, as well as processes which may appear the same but now perform much better on the 360, enabling the devs to do much more in the sequel (which we've yet to see).

    It's a far cry from the claims of all those armchair experts who kept saying GeOW maxes out the 360 already because it's so easy to program and therefore we will not see any improvements over GeOW graphically on the console. Hmmm. :)

    I look forward to the first real footage of GeOW2.

  • loopy #11 4 years ago

    "I enjoyed GOW - even if it was a bit of a guilty pleasure as a working tech demo - the graphics were well ahead of their time - still looks pretty good to this day".

    I didn't realise it had been out so many years already, how time flies....

  • Yaz #12 4 years ago

    "I didn't know there were 2 GPUs in the Xbox360"

    Eh???

  • BadBoyBonner #13 4 years ago

    Loopy

    "I didn't realise it had been out so many years already, how time flies...."

    Yeah - it launched in November 2006 - we are now near the back end of February 2008.