Edav Nomad

From The Official Xbox 360 Magazine UK:

As VP of Epic Games, Mark Rein is a big player in the future of Xbox 360.

From the Gears of War series through to Unreal and even touching on Xbox Live Arcade thanks to Shadow Complex, Epic Games has touched every cornerstone of Xbox 360. Will that include Project Natal?

Popping down to the Develop conference in Brighton, we had a chance to Rein about the Unreal Engine's part in Microsoft's stunning Natal demonstration at E3 and where he sees it going in the future.

Obviously the Natal demos at E3 were powered by Unreal. Did you guys knock up those prototypes for Microsoft?
No, those were Microsoft's. So obviously Microsoft has a new studio that is making games for Natal, and it's using Unreal Engine 3. The great part of all this is that it has extended the engine to do the mapping of Avatars, the animation system - all the good stuff that's there.

So the nice thing is, we are going to work with Microsoft to make that available to Unreal Engine licensees who want to make Natal games. So, if you want to make a game on Natal, you want to get a big headstart and use the same tech as Microsoft, come talk to me. We are the unofficial engine of Natal, or maybe the official, I don't know. In other words, we consider ourselves the "economic engine of Natal". You want to make money with Natal, come talk to us, we'll help you.

Was it particularly easy to modify Unreal to accept Natal?
Making games is never easy. I always hesitate to say something is easy, because I'm not the one who's doing the work. But they did it in a very short period of time, the results are spectacular, they are very happy with the tech, and they are very happy working with us to find other developers who could make really great experiences with Natal.

If you asked for games that show off what variation the engine can do, I think that Ricochet and the Paint Party game that were previewed at E3 are the perfect examples. The former is kind of breakout-puzzle-type-active-exercise-type thing. It's fantastic. It's very addictive, and if you're like me, you manage to work up quite a sweat. Whereas the latter, Paint Party, is brilliant, if a little more passive.

I know Microsoft is going to do a lot more with that than what they showed on stage at E3, but I think that shows the kind of breadth you are able to achieve when using the technology.

The only thing stopping you making a particular type of game with Unreal, apart from a few exceptions, is your own imagination. There's not a technological limitation, it's not a tools limitation as we have the best tools, it's just, "What can I dream up?" And that's why I'm excited by the million dollar Intel "Make Something Unreal" contest, because if you see what some of the consumers, the mod-makers have done, it's really impressive.

Do you think mods have a place on consoles at all?
Yeah, I hope so. We're always banging on Microsoft's door to get it to do something. We're going to take another run at it in the next year or two. I mean, Microsoft has the community channel and XNA, where you can create stuff, so we'd love to get some Unreal stuff on there too. I think we will - I think we'll break down that barrier over time. But of course it's difficult, because the real problem is finding the great mods and the great talent.

I think the people that are capable of doing the really great mods, can also very quickly become professional developers. At one point in time, half the people in our company came from the mod scene, so there's a lot of talent there. Those people do get swept up in the professional game business.

With Natal, one benefit of having your full body in a game is how it interacts with other physical objects. Is that something that is catered for by default in the Unreal Engine?
Well sure. One of the most important things a game engine does is handle physics and collisions. We used Nvidia's PhysX system as our physics component.

It's very good, you can do quite a lot with it. Our engine does a lot for physics. One of the tools we have in our editor is something we call PHAT. This is basically a tool that lets you put the physical properties into skeletons. It doesn't have to be a human skeleton, just a series of "bones" of an object. Say you are creating a humanoid, that's an easy example, you can put in a cone that shows the range of motion for a shoulder, where's the limit to how far it can move, things like that.

That's actually really simple for people to set up themselves. So you can easily set up, say, wind-chimes, that react the way you expect, and ragdoll and collide with things the way you expect them to.

Being able to map a realistic range of motion on a skeleton is going to be really important. However, there was a moment at the E3 presentation where the Avatar seemed to almost fall over when showing the bottom of its shoe...
now that wasn't in Unreal! Microsoft was just showing an Avatar demo, and yeah, that's why you put those movement limits in. That's always going to be the challenge with a real-time motion system, to track the motion and keep the animation on the body believable. That was actually one of the technologies that Microsoft built, this idea of mapping the physical motion that you are doing to the actual motion you want the Avatar to display.

It doesn't always look how you expect. In other words, when you see someone throw a baseball, you've seen it hundreds of times before on TV, so you know how it should really look. Well, we aren't all professional baseball players. How many times have you heard someone say, "Oh, he throws like a girl!" Because there's some really weird, very simple motion or something. Now you don't want to see your character doing that, instead you want to see your character being the best pitcher in the major leagues. And that's one of things it can do, it can map that.

You can actually have the arm do a realistic motion of what you are doing, while the body goes through an animated, or procedural animation. We have that system in Unreal where you can blend different animations, so you can have a ragdoll effect on a leg, a running animation on an arm, a turning animation on the head. Microsoft has taken that one step further and does the mapping as well. So you can have a part of the body that's mapped, whereas another part is procedural.

It's following an [inverse kinematics] path or motion. What Microsoft has done is very sophisticated - it's very cool. And it's a huge head start for anyone who wants to make a game on Natal - with Unreal, of course. It's not going to be about making their engine work with Natal, and figuring out how to do all these things. Microsoft is going to give you all these tools if you are using Unreal, that solves all these problems. Well let's not say problems, they address the opportunities that they are finding when making their game, and that is a massive head start. So people can now start thinking, "Well what do I want to do? What kind of game can I make?" So they showed two games that are very much, "Stand in front of the TV and do something."

But, you know, you could translate, you could be standing in front of the TV doing something, and the game you see on the screen could be Frogger, or Shadow Complex, or Gears of War. That's the beauty of it, you could create anything. There are just so many possibilities of what you could do with Natal.

Do you think Natal has applications for traditional hardcore games, such as Gears of War or Halo?
Yeah, I can totally see myself sitting in front of my TV using Natal to play games like Gears of War, Call of Duty, or whatever first-person shooter with my buddies. I want to do a hand signal that tells my friend, "Go over there." Instead of even saying it on Live, I just want to motion, "Go over there." Or if I want to throw a grenade, I just lift my right hand off the controller, throw the grenade, then put my hand back on the controller.

I don't think we're going to change the hardcore experience that so many people love so well. Look at Gears of War, we sold over 11 million games - people clearly like that kind of experience. Call of Duty sells millions every time it ships. People clearly enjoy that experience. You wouldn't change Halo, but you could, if you had Natal, at least to simplify some of the controls.

In other words, you could get away with a simpler control scheme, as it's really easy to remember throwing a grenade when it's really throwing. I can see that working in multiplayer games, then you get your hand right back on the controller and keep playing, stuff like that, maybe a wave, maybe a taunt. I'm sure that when more people have this technology you'll see some of the hardcore games adapt to it.

But I don't think it's necessary, I don't think that's their goal, I don't think you need Natal for that kind of game. The thing I like is selecting your movies by swinging your hand, right and left, that just seems so natural and obvious, and that's kind of what you do with your own DVDs, you go, "Uhh, which do I want?"

And your hand will never run out of batteries either...
Exactly, no need to find your remote. And it has voice activation too, so "TV on", "TV off", "Last.fm", "Twitter", whatever, just tell it commands and it will do each one. That's pretty cool too. And you know, I think they said they were going to ship Natal with every Xbox when they actually launch the thing, so everybody will have one. And then they are going to sell it to everybody who doesn't have one. Or try.

[MORE]

__________________