Perfect Unreal Engine Impossible

Tim Sweeney is a legend in the videogame world. He is one of the co-founders of Epic Games and currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer and technical director of the company.

People like Cliff Blezisnki and Mark Rein might get more exposure but when it comes to the tech of Epic videogames, Sweeney is the genius. And he says that while videogames have progressed immensely, getting ever closer to realism, there will be no perfect, ultimate version of the Unreal engine.

Talking to Gamasutra as part of a wide-ranging interview, Sweeney said that “we're only about a factor of a thousand” away from getting a look for games that could be indistinguishable from reality.

Unfortunately, even if computing power continues to progress, respecting Moore's Law, he also believes that intense effort and 10 to 15 years might be needed to get over those minuscule differences.

Sweeney also names Crysis as being the biggest competitor to the Unreal Engine, even acknowledging that “Crysis is doing some things on high-end PCs that we're not doing ourselves.” Instead of focusing on the high end videocard market, Epic is concentrating on bigger markets, like the console one and even the PC mainstream one.

Currently, one of the big problems is how to design a game engine that can create impressive results on high-end machines and then, by dropping resolution and some texture quality, scale back the impressive look so that it becomes a decent one on less powerful systems.

Sweeney points out that even with infinite computational power, videogame creators would not be able to develop simulations of human interactions that approach movie quality, because, at the moment, people just don't have the models required to simulate the complexity of the human body.