Attending the DICE gaming summit to promote his company's Unreal Engine technology and celebrate the conclusion of the Make Something Unreal modding contest, Epic Games' Mark Rein said that the next generation of Unreal game-making tech is a ways off.
Rein told Kotaku that work is still underway on Unreal Engine 4, but that the release of the tech is "still a long ways off." How long off? "Unreal Engine 4 is designed for the day we get massively multi-core processors," he said, declining to say how many processors are needed to be defined as "massively-multi." The Xbox 360 and PlayStation three, which each have a few to several cores don't count. And, he said, the next generation of consoles may not qualify either.
Rein believes UE3 has a lot of life yet, pointing to the top entries of the Make Something Unreal contest (more on that later) and the continued advances in the UE3 tech. The last time Epic wanted to show how far Unreal Engine had come along, Epic demonstrated Gears of War 2. Time to show us Gears of War 3? The DICE summit is not where Mark Rein was making announcements.