Regular Train2Game blog readers may remember Epic’s extremely impressive Unreal Engine 3 tech demo from earlier this year.

Now Epic Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney has spoken about ‘The Samaritan’ and the work behind it may be of interest to Train2Game students.

“Samaritan is the result of three months’ work by a small team of artists and programmers within Epic, as well as NVIDIA engineers who contributed to the advanced DirectX 11 and physics features we demonstrated.” Sweeney told Games TM.

“This was a pioneering effort, simultaneously figuring out what our development pipeline should be, creating content within that pipeline, and optimizing the visual quality and performance of the end product. We aimed very high, seeking a true movie quality of character lighting (via subsurface scattering and advanced shadowing techniques), reflections, filmic camera effects, cloth, and particle effects.”

“Enabling these features to run with full quality in real time on DirectX 11 hardware required substantial original research by the development team, as well as major code and content optimization efforts.”

The impressive tech shown in the demo is certainly something Train2Game students would love an opportunity to work with in future.

And as previously reported by the Train2Game blog, while Art & Animation is one way of creating realistic characters, Sweeny believes Game Designers need to more to create a truly realistic experience.

“[They] have much further to go in delivering truly dramatic interpersonal experiences,” he said. “Alyx in Half-Life 2 offered a glimpse into this possibility; I think increasingly lifelike characters are key to further progress.”

While the Samaritan tech demo offers a glimpse at the future of triple-A titles, the Epic CEO he also told Games TM what he thinks is to come from indie and social games.

“The game industry has stratified amazingly well in recent years, enabling great games to be developed across two orders of magnitude of budgets. Fifteen-person teams are shipping great Xbox Live Arcade titles, and two-person teams are doing great things on iOS and Android. Web games and social games are doing well with modest budgets. We at Epic expect this trend to continue.”

So Train2Game, what are your thoughts on the work behind the Samaritan? Can you see yourself working on that sort of tech in future?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or here on the Train2Game forum.

[Source: Games TM]