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Making VR Games Just Got Easier With The Unreal Engine

This article is more than 8 years old.

That dream you had, to create worlds with a touch of button and a wave of your hand? Well that's happening right now thanks to Epic Games. The Unreal Engine, from independent studios to triple AAA titles, is one of the most popular game engines to make video games today. So, to have it be completely usable in virtual space is an industry first and a major breakthrough for VR games being made for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. The benefit of having an engine you can completely use in virtual reality is speed and creativity. That could mean not only a lot more games for VR, but higher quality ones. I spoke with Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and Technical Director Mike Fricker about this new leap forward.

"It's one to one, the thing that makes the iPhone feel magical, you can just touch things, your brain already know how it works," Sweeney says of the game-making interface.

This is a great improvement over how VR games are now made, Fricker points out. "VR developers are constantly popping the headset on and off to inspect the scene to make sure the metrics are correct, to make sure things look right, that scale is correct," he says.

With the Unreal Engine, "the editor works completely in VR," says Sweeney. "What you see is what you get, you are there, you are seeing the game as you develop it exactly as users are going to be seeing it as they play it."

Game developers can change the time of day by grabbing the sky and twisting it around or make the world incredibly small and quickly rise up mountain ranges and skyscrapers, or dive back into the world to the size of an ant and sculpt minute details into the smallest part of a game.

"With this you can not only play in VR, you can pop in and tweak your scene, manipulate objects, place objects and use features in the actual editor," says Sweeney. "This IS the actual editor, this isn't a separate type of tool."

"When you look down and see your hand in VR or your motion controls in VR and you are grabbing something right on it and moving it one to one," says Fricker. "If you think about it, this is really the first time that it has been possible to move it from point A to point B in 3D space directly. There just has never been a way to do that. We think it's really fun."

Developers are able to capture realistic body movements and make more natural trajectories for say flying dragons or crashing spaceships. If you need to see code or anything else on your computer screen. The engine has one built inside the engine that rests on your virtual arm like a iPad.

The Unreal Engine already has a massive user base on PC, Mac and Linux. Handing developers the tools to create VR games more efficiently should be a game changer.

And developers are already taking advantage of the tool. "Since we released the Unreal Engine for free less than a year ago, about 1.5 million people have downloaded it," says Sweeney. " here are certainly a lot more users than professional game developers working at big studios, so there is a very large hobbyist contingent of students, hobbyists, tinkerers who are building 3D environments, experimenting with game design as well as using the engine for fields outside of game development, there are architects and industrial designers all using the engine so it really reaches a wide audience."

This has always been the dream and its being realized much sooner than expected. The benefit of creating games by drawing, painting them, sculpting them, placing them into the world can't be understated. It makes game creation far more organic, and that means, much, much faster and natural feeling.

"To me, this is the biggest leap we have seen in content creation in 20 years," says Sweeney. "To go from an abstract monitor and keyboard based way of manipulating worlds, to being there, to being immersed in it, being able to reach out grab everything, build a scene directly in the way your mind actually works is going to be super productive and powerful."

Developers can experiment on the fly with changing shapes and structures and immediately getting a sense of how that alters the mood of a game. It is almost one to one creativity but it isn't without it challenges.

"It's pretty intuitive to pick up, because a lot of the interactions," says Sweeney. "We try to make natural human interactions - it is challenging because we only have a certain amount of buttons and two hands and a head but we are learning how to make it work and fun and efficient."

The Unreal Engine is free with no cost of entry. Developers are charged a 5% royalty on the revenue on game's produced on the Unreal Engine which makes very appealing to a wide spectrum of developers.

The Unreal Engine may one day becomes so easy to use that it could become a stepping stone to virtually any gamer becoming a game developer.

The future "is something we think about all of the time," says Fricker. "We realized there really is a continuum of world building features that start with Minecraft, where 25 million users are creating Minecraft worlds, and there is a continuum of possibilities between that and the Unreal Editor which is professional tool for game developers."

Avid about the ability to build in-game, "I'm a big fan of Dreams and Little Big Planet as well," says Sweeney. "I think there is something very compelling about being able to on-board and learn and create and be free in something that is very free and not too complicated. But then as you progress having ultimately no upper bound on where you can go with it, when you create in Mario Maker you will eventually not be able to do what you want, but in the Unreal Engine there is no upper limit to what you can do - you can do anything you want, if you are willing to do it, that's really exciting, the possibility of doing something small and having no limit to how far you can go."

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