Unreal Engine coming to iPhone

The Unreal engine was created in 1998 by Epic Games. If you are unclear on what a game engine is click here. The first engine ‘Unreal engine 1’ was used to power Unreal Tournament which was also developed by Epic Games. The engine was very advanced for it’s time and proved to be a great engine to run FPS’s on. The second engine came out in 2001 and supported all major consoles like the Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. Unreal Engine 2 is still being used to this day.

Unreal Engine 3 is this generations engine. It was designed around Open GL 32/64 bit for Mac OS X, Linux and the PlayStation 3. The engine is built around OpenGL 2.0 ES which the PS3, OS X and the latest updates to Linux run on (if your hardware supports it). Games like Bioshock, Borderlands, Mass Effect and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six are all running on this engine. The engine isn’t on the Wii due to lack of power. So the Unreal Engine 3 is a very advanced high end engine which needs high end hardware to power it. 

So it comes at a great shock that Unreal Games are making the engine run on the iPhone and iPod Touch. I know that the iPhone and iPod Touch haven’t shown their full potential in graphical abilities yet as Apps constantly come out proving that the devices can do more and more. When the iPhone 3Gs came out this year Apple touted the ability of it being able to run OpenGL 2.0 ES. When I first heard this I did think ‘hang on isn’t that the same version of OpenGL the PS3 runs’ but quickly assumed otherwise. The engine will only be able to run on the iPhone 3Gs and iPod Touch 3rd generation. Does this mean we might see BioShock on the Iphone or Borderlands this is serious news for iPhone and iPod Touch. No word on when the engine should be ready for developers but I reckon it will be ready around March when Apple holds the iPhone event to introduce OS 4.0.

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