Unreal Engine 1

Making its debut in 1998

The first generation Unreal Engine integrated rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networking and file system management into one complete engine.

With the level of integration used, some trade-offs were necessary to maintain performance levels with the hardware that was available at the time.

For example, Epic decided to use cylindrical collision detection over the IK collision detection system in an effort to maintain playable framerates on systems that were common at the time of its release. Internally, Epic used this engine for Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

Features

• 32-bit fully colored soft animated dynamic lighting
  • Multicolored lighting
    • with true colored intermixing of fuzzy shadows
  
  
  • Supports raytraced and enveloped lighting
  • Radial, cylindrical, spotlight, searchlight, ambient, spherical, shell, and 20+ special effect lights
  • Caustic effects such as "fire waver", "watery shimmer", and the like can be applied to lights
  • Supports lens flares and coronas


• Extensible BSP and portal technology
  • Mirror surfaces
  • Semireflective materials, such as marble surfaces which partially reflect light
  • Non-euclidean, redirectable "warp" portal effects for seeing through teleporters
  • Seeing through windows into an infinite sky zone in which a sky, planets, mountains, and other objects are constructed
  • Skies and backgrounds with independent coordinate systems for independent translation and rotationz


• Curved-surface rendering support
  • with an adaptive level-of-detail subdivision surface rendering algorithm
  • eliminating polygonization


• 32-bit colored 512x512 size texture support
  • Emboss bump mapping
  • Multi-texturing
  • Dynamic range scaled detail textures
  • Procedurally animated textures


• ClipTexturing
• Multiple channels of vertex animation support
• Skeletal animation support 
  • Smooth-skinned Geometry 


• Facial animation 
  • With lipsync animation


• Hardware brush with static meshes
• Height-mapped filed terrain support
• Decal support
• Light bloom
• Fog volume
• Distance fog
• Volumetric lighting
• S3TC texture compression
• High resolution texture 1024x1024 size support
• Environment mapping support
• Multy-skybox system
• Very improved multi-skybox system
• Complex particles system
• Extensible particles system
• Fully digital audio based module sound system
• Digital music, MP3, CD Audio, module music, s3m, etc support
• Doppler shift
• A3D support
• Software 3D sound
• Surround sound
• Dynamic Music System
• Improved support on A3D, EAX, DS3D
• Newly highly enhancing A.I. algorithms and BOT A.I. and teamwork A.I.
• Newly very improved network code
• Real-time recording of in-engine footage as replayable 'demo' files
• Enhanced demo reconding system
• GUI editor
• Imploved GUI editor
• Native support for localization of text to 8-bit languages, via CODEPAGE 850 and replaceable fonts
  • Built-in UnrealScript and C++ support for externalization of all text, enabling non-programmer translation to all 8-bit languages