GDC 2018: State of Unreal

March 21, 2018 (San Francisco: Game Developers Conference; Moscone South Booth 423 and 801) —At this year’s “State of Unreal” opening session, Epic Games showcased new advancements to support the Unreal Engine community of over 5 million developers.

New Features and Content for Unreal Engine Developers

• Live Record & Replay in UE4: Content creators will be able to use footage of recorded gameplay sessions to create incredible replay videos that can be shared with friends. With Fortnite generating over 130 million video views daily, Epic recognizes that games are taking over consumer entertainment, and Epic is helping UE4 developers take their content straight to YouTube, Twitch and social media. YouTube phenom Ali-A introduced new replay features live on-stage, revealing a Fortnite video that he created using tools that will be coming to Unreal developers in the 4.20 release this summer.
• Improved Mobile Support: Fortnite has served as a development sandbox for UE4, and by bringing the game to mobile devices, new Unreal Engine features and improvements will make bringing the full experience of PC and console to mobile games easier than ever before.

• Paragon Assets: Over $12 million worth of characters and environments from Paragon have been released free of charge for use in any UE4 project. The initial release is available now in the Unreal Engine Marketplace, and Epic will release millions of dollars worth of even more content from Paragon this spring and summer.
• Magic Leap: Unreal developers can now create experiences for Magic Leap One™: Creator Edition. A custom Unreal Editor, documentation and a sample UE4 project are now available for creating content using the Magic Leap SDK. 

News from Unreal Engine Licensees

• Studio Wildcard: Studio Wildcard Art and Technical Art Director Jesse Rapczak and Lead Designer and Lead Programmer Jeremy Stieglitz revealed that ARK: Survival Evolved is coming to Nintendo Switch by debuting gameplay on Switch for the first time, plus showed footage of ARK: Survival Evolved for mobile, which is playable in the Unreal Engine booth at 801 South.
• Pixelopus: Pixelopus Creative Director Dominic Robilliard showed how small teams are doing big things with Unreal by highlighting his team’s work on the upcoming PS4 game Concrete Genie.
• Undead Labs: Undead Labs Studio Head Jeff Strain discussed State of Decay 2 to showcase how his team has made the jump from indie to AAA production on Xbox with Unreal Engine.

• Riot Games: Riot Games Art Director Jerry O’Flaherty and Lead Development Manager Kevin Scharff explained why they tapped Unreal Engine and technology from Zero Density to place a larger-than-life mixed reality dragon into the center of the arena at the 2017 League of Legends World Championship.
• ILMxLAB: ILMxLAB Director of Content and Platform Strategy Mohen Leo detailed how the studio continues to deliver top Unreal-powered VR/AR/MR experiences such as “Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire” with The VOID, and director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning Carne y Arena.
• Jobs. Beer.: The Unreal development community are front and center at GDC, with teams coming from around the world to share their brilliant creations across mobile, VR, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. Epic’s traditional location on the GDC expo floor at South 423 will host technology, tool demos, and business meetings, and this year Epic is also hosting a dedicated booth at South 801 just for games and recruitment. Visitors can play the latest and most anticipated Unreal Engine games, talk with the developers behind them, pick up free swag and connect with recruiters looking to hire Unreal Engine talent.

Looking to the Future

• Real-Time Ray Tracing: Peek into the future of real-time graphics with a live demonstration of real-time raytracing in Unreal Engine 4 using Microsoft’s new DXR framework and NVIDIA RTX technology for Volta GPUs running on an NVIDIA DGX Station. This Reflections demo, where lighting is moved around a scene interactively as ray-traced effects including shadows and photorealistic reflections render in real time, is a collaboration between Epic’s ray tracing experts, NVIDIA GPU engineers and the creative artistry of ILMxLAB.

• Crossing the Uncanny Valley in Real Time: Epic Games teamed with 3Lateral, Cubic Motion, Tencent and Vicon to take live-captured digital humans to the next level. Come meet “Siren,” a high-fidelity, real-time digital character based on the likeness of Chinese actress Bingjie Jiang in Vicon’s booth at South 241.
• Next-Gen Digital Humans with Andy Serkis: 3Lateral and Epic revealed a stunning development in real-time human-driven digital characters featuring acclaimed actor Andy Serkis today at GDC. Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering combined with 3Lateral’s Meta Human Framework© volumetric capture, reconstruction and compression technology brought this breakthrough digital performance to life. 

About Unreal Engine

Developed by Epic Games, Unreal Engine is a complete suite of tools that empowers creators to bring real-time, high-fidelity experiences to PC, console, mobile, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) platforms. Used by many of the world’s leading entertainment software developers and publishers, Unreal Engine is also an integral part of many enterprise sectors, such as automotive, architecture, film, science, aerospace, marketing and education. Download Unreal for free at unrealengine.com and follow @UnrealEngine for updates.