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Unreal Engine 2
Unreal Engine 2 (UE2) is the second version of Unreal Engine developed by Epic Games. Unreal Engine 2 transitioned the engine from software rendering to hardware rendering and brought support for multiple platforms such as video game consoles. The first game using UE2 was released in 2002 and its last update was shipped in 2005. It was succeeded by Unreal Engine 3.
In October 1998, IGN reported, based on an interview with its affiliate Voodoo Extreme, that Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, was researching his next-generation engine. With development starting a year later, the second version made its debut in 2002 with America's Army, a free multiplayer shooter developed by the U.S. Army as a recruitment device. Soon after, Epic released Unreal Championship on the Xbox, one of the first games to use Microsoft's Xbox Live.
UE2 saw success through its licensing partnerships, a trend that would continue with later versions. Notable games using the engine included Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Deus Ex: Invisible War, EA's Harry Potter games, Red Steel, and BioShock. UE2 could also support varied game genres and styles, with IGN contrasting its use in America's Army with Domestic, an artistic modification of Unreal Tournament 2003 that combined "poetry, cinema, and nostalgia into an interactive first person exploration".
A specialized version of UE2 called UE2X was designed for Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict on the original Xbox platform, featuring optimizations specific to that console. In March 2011, Ubisoft Montreal revealed that UE2 was successfully running on the Nintendo 3DS via Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 3D. "The 3DS is powerful, and we are able to run the Unreal Engine on this console, which is pretty impressive for a handheld machine, and the 3D doesn't affect the performance (thanks to my amazing programmers)," said Ubisoft.
Unreal Tournament 2004 introduced a patch of Unreal Engine 2, commonly referred to as Unreal Engine 2.5. UE2 was last updated in 2005 before being replaced by Unreal Engine 3.
The rendering code for UE2 was completely reworked from UE1 and made use of new hardware and graphics APIs such the GeForce 3 series. While UE1 was released before the development of mainstream GPU hardware and only employed software rendering in its initial version, UE2 was designed with GPU acceleration in mind from the beginning.
Software rendering was important to us in games up to Unreal Tournament. Now, we can start looking at GeForces and NV20s as the 'baseline' hardware for our next game. We're really focusing on taking advantage of the hardware 100%.
— Sweeney, Maximum PC, 2001
Hub AI
Unreal Engine 2 AI simulator
(@Unreal Engine 2_simulator)
Unreal Engine 2
Unreal Engine 2 (UE2) is the second version of Unreal Engine developed by Epic Games. Unreal Engine 2 transitioned the engine from software rendering to hardware rendering and brought support for multiple platforms such as video game consoles. The first game using UE2 was released in 2002 and its last update was shipped in 2005. It was succeeded by Unreal Engine 3.
In October 1998, IGN reported, based on an interview with its affiliate Voodoo Extreme, that Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, was researching his next-generation engine. With development starting a year later, the second version made its debut in 2002 with America's Army, a free multiplayer shooter developed by the U.S. Army as a recruitment device. Soon after, Epic released Unreal Championship on the Xbox, one of the first games to use Microsoft's Xbox Live.
UE2 saw success through its licensing partnerships, a trend that would continue with later versions. Notable games using the engine included Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Deus Ex: Invisible War, EA's Harry Potter games, Red Steel, and BioShock. UE2 could also support varied game genres and styles, with IGN contrasting its use in America's Army with Domestic, an artistic modification of Unreal Tournament 2003 that combined "poetry, cinema, and nostalgia into an interactive first person exploration".
A specialized version of UE2 called UE2X was designed for Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict on the original Xbox platform, featuring optimizations specific to that console. In March 2011, Ubisoft Montreal revealed that UE2 was successfully running on the Nintendo 3DS via Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 3D. "The 3DS is powerful, and we are able to run the Unreal Engine on this console, which is pretty impressive for a handheld machine, and the 3D doesn't affect the performance (thanks to my amazing programmers)," said Ubisoft.
Unreal Tournament 2004 introduced a patch of Unreal Engine 2, commonly referred to as Unreal Engine 2.5. UE2 was last updated in 2005 before being replaced by Unreal Engine 3.
The rendering code for UE2 was completely reworked from UE1 and made use of new hardware and graphics APIs such the GeForce 3 series. While UE1 was released before the development of mainstream GPU hardware and only employed software rendering in its initial version, UE2 was designed with GPU acceleration in mind from the beginning.
Software rendering was important to us in games up to Unreal Tournament. Now, we can start looking at GeForces and NV20s as the 'baseline' hardware for our next game. We're really focusing on taking advantage of the hardware 100%.
— Sweeney, Maximum PC, 2001