Sony gets Unreal 3 engine for PlayStation 3

SONY HAS been rather excited to tell us all that they've licensed the technology for the Unreal 3 engine from developers Epic Games. Through this agreement Sony Computer Entertainment Inc (SCEI) gets full sublicensing rights for the game engine and its development tools effective from 20th July 2005.

This means that we'll be seeing the PlayStation 3 hardware pushed to the max, as the engine is one of the most advanced currently on the market, featuring a programmable shaders tool, physics engine, and GUI based physics attribution tool, along with various other tools, such as scenario development, movie scene development, animation and particle animation tools.

The most significant among these engines and tools are the programmable shaders. By effectively using this technology, developers will be able to reproduce photo-realistic images without going through a complicated calculation process.

A wealth of tools contained in the Unreal Engine 3 framework will enable developers to create content to a certain level without requiring specialist programming skills. An evaluation version of the Unreal Engine 3 will now become available for the PS3 developer community together with the Software Development Kit for the PS3. Frontline support will be provided by SCEI as opposed to Epic.

Vive la very cool graphics! µ