Epic Games recently unveiled a number of new tools and systems for Unreal Engine 3 at the 2009 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif.
Unreal Lightmass, a new global illumination solver, produces high-quality static lighting with next-generation effects. Lightmass leverages Epics new Unreal Swarm distributed computing framework, which enables lighting to be generated up to 10 times faster than before. The new Unreal Content Browser enables designers to quickly locate game assets with thumbnail previews, tag content with metadata, and easily manage asset collections.
In addition, the Unreal Master Control Program (MCP) is a scalable statistics and data management back end that supports announcements, settings management, online population tracking, and data collection for hardware, profile, and game stats. Unreal MCP includes a set of tools for visualizing gameplay, and can be used for online and offline game components during development and after shipping a game.
All of the new engine features are bundled with Unreal Engine 3 at no additional cost to licensees.