Earlier this year at GDC Epic Games began demonstrating their Unreal Engine 3 running on an iPhone but we haven’t seen or heard much about the project since then—until last week, that is. Today hardware analysis site AnandTech published a story about a visit they had with Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games showing of the engine running on a latest-gen iPod Touch and discussed the project.
The demonstration consisted of a small first person shooter level with no score, health or ammo and a single respawning enemy to shoot. The level could be played or flown through and the controls, one of several control schemes Epic is testing, look pretty standard for iPhone FPS games. The engine certainly looks impressive with its nice lighting and great looking blood and gore splattering around—and this is just a tech demo showing off how the project is coming along.
While it is exciting to see progress on the Unreal Engine 3 being developed for the iPhone, 3D shooters are not necessarily where it’s at: it has the potential to make game development for the iPhone much more standardized and could make it much easier for game developers to create iPhone versions of a game right along with PC and console versions, since it would be based on the same engine. It’s worth noting though that the engine will only run on the latest generation of iPod Touch and the iPhone 3GS because of its dependence of the OpenGL ES 2.0. We can expect the engine to continue to push the platform as new generations with better hardware appear.
The article doesn’t discuss too many specifics about release date or licensing beyond saying that the engine will be available for licensing sometime in the near future. It was also noted that the iPhone edition of the engine will not be available in the the full Unreal Development Kit that Epic Games recently released for free, though they apparently left the option open for adding it in the future.
This is a big step forward for the legitimacy of not only the iPhone for gaming but for non-gaming specific mobile devices as a whole. Hopefully once they’ve got an iPhone version nailed down and we see the growing popularity of Android based devices Epic Games will expand the mobile platforms the Unreal Engine 3 will run on even further.
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