By Patrick Shaw | 06-8-2012 | 2:00PM
While Epic Games revealed the next iteration of its groundbreaking graphics technology, the Unreal Engine 4, at the Game Developers Conference last March during a behind-closed-doors meeting, the company has officially announced the existence of its new engine as the Electronic Entertainment Expo wrapped up this week in Los Angeles, California.
Along with Unreal Engine 4's announcement, the company released its impressive "Elemental" tech demo from GDC, which illustrates the caliber of visuals the technology is capable of delivering. One of the new engine's key features is Kismet 2, a visual scripting editor that allows game designers to code -- and see what that code produces -- in real-time. This could potentially change the way in which games powered by Unreal 4 are designed, making the process much more streamlined.
The tech features a number of other notable enhancements over Epic's previous engine including dynamic lighting, advanced particle effects (capable of rendering over one million particles at once), and various ways of realistically reflecting light in real time.
While everything shown in the Elemental video demonstration isn't from an actual game, we can expect to see developers announcing that their games are powered by Unreal Engine 4 soon. The tech is expected to be taken advantage of by PC games as well as games planned for the next-generation console successors to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. You can watch the tech demo in its entirety above.
