Unreal Engine Introduction for 3D System Development

Here we will be learning simulation development in a 3D system with Unreal Engine. We will be learning the essentials to have the right approach to developing our product designs in 3D environments.

The latest generation, Unreal Engine 5, was launched in April 2022. Its source code is available on GitHub, and commercial use is granted based on a royalty model, with Epic charging 5% of revenues over US$1 million, which is waived for games published on the Epic Games Store. Epic has incorporated features in the engine from acquired companies such as Quixel, which is seen as helped by Fortnite's revenue.

In 2014, Unreal Engine was named the world's "most successful videogame engine" by Guinness World Records.

The first-generation Unreal Engine was developed by Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games. Having created editing tools for his shareware games ZZT (1991) and Jill of the Jungle (1992), Sweeney began writing the engine in 1995 for the production of a game that would later become a first-person shooter known as Unreal. After years in development, it debuted with the game's release in 1998, although MicroProse and Legend Entertainment had access to the technology much earlier, licensing it in 1996. According to an interview, Sweeney wrote 90 percent of the code in the engine, including the graphics, tools, and networking system.

At first, the engine relied completely on software rendering, meaning the graphics calculations were handled by the central processing unit (CPU). However, over time, it was able to take advantage of the capabilities provided by dedicated graphics cards, focusing on the Glide API, specially designed for 3dfx accelerators. While OpenGL and Direct3D were supported, they reported a slower performance compared to Glide due to their deficiency in texture management at the time. Sweeney particularly criticized the quality of OpenGL drivers for consumer hardware, describing them as "extremely problematic, buggy, and untested", and labeled the code in the implementation as "scary" as opposed to the simpler and cleaner support for Direct3D