This year Epic has added four new features to their Unreal Engine arsenal, several of which were shown off at this year’s Microsoft Keynote in concert with the official announcement by CliffyB himself, complete with chainsaw-equipped Lancer, of the impending winter-release of Gears of War 2.  This announcement alone seems to have invoked the release of heavy torrents of fanboy-froth. ..come on guys, we knew Gears 2 was coming – can we stop acting shocked and surprised?

Obvious franchise title announcement aside the lack of accompanying gameplay surely left the aforementioned rabid fans a little disappointed. Well, mope not young ones for you only need look as far as the four new features in this year’s Epic expo-suite tech demo to get a sense of what lies in-store for us when the game releases later this year.

Mova Contour Reality Capture System

Not listed as an official partner just yet on Epic’s site Mova, makers of a slick facial expression capture system called ‘Contour’, allowed Mark Rein to show off a couple videos of their tech during this year’s demo.  Each year we see slight iterations in improvement with this technology but Contour definitely seems to take realistic facial capture to the next level complete with mapped eye movement which serves to accentuate the characters speech. 

Why should you care?  Surely Mova will become part of the Partner Program in time and we can no doubt expect Marcus Fenix to show some more emotion in Gears 2 as a result.  Get ready for a Clinton-style tear-up no doubt

Fracture Tools

Red Faction strikes back once again as destructible environments and terrain take one more leap forward with the inclusion of this feature which allows programmers to empower gamers with the ability to essentially blow holes in everything.  Programmers wrap their fractures around a core mesh – in the case of today’s demo we saw a concrete pillar blown apart revealing it’s underlying rebar mesh – and can  set parameters that define total number of fractures or delve down to individual fractures setting specific element and physics properties per fragment.

Why should you care?  Cooler looking explosions and bits of shredded concrete flying through the air as your Lancer shreds nearby geometry.  Sweet!

Fluid Surfaces

The team showed off some updates to their already quite beautiful water system.  Funny how all these years later one of the biggest features that can still sell a failing game is beautiful water generation. Sigh…but nonetheless the updates to the engine allow for some cool improvements to interaction and reaction with bodies of water in-game. The water itself receives a surface normal-map which can be altered in real-time, aka on-the-fly, providing improved realism as characters or objects interact with the surface. 

Why should you care?  Now when you fire your weapon into a body of water it will actually respond to your bullets sending cool sprays and splashes into the air just like your favorite action-film.  Essentially water can now splash...Ahem.

Crowd Flocking

This portion of the demo was actually shown during Microsoft’s Keynote.  Basically the team has come up with a system for spawning hundreds more enemies onscreen at any given time.  You may not have realized it but in Gears of War you never actually battled more than six Locust at any given time. 

With the Crowd Flocking system in place the team can now render out hundred of enemies onscreen at a time with thousands being tracked by the system successfully.  The creatures as a group will follow existing pathing through the map but contain an additional subset of AI routines that define how they handle collision and interaction with one another.

Why should you care?  Dude, you thought fighting off six Locust at a time was hard?  You know you pissed them off with that whole bomb incident at the end of Gears One right?  Get ready for WAR children – it’s on and Epic’s going to make it look..welll.um…yeah, Epic.

Soft Body Physics

The last of the four new features was the Soft Body Physics system which allows for objects to take on flesh-like properties complete with realistic physics reactions to the world and nearby objects or players.  The surface can take on ‘sticky’ properties actually attaching to the player and will bounce and bend as they are interacted with, pushed, shot or rolled through the environment.  Just thinkg Jell-O and you’ve got the idea.  Gelatinous Cubes upcoming fantasy games will be more realistic than you had previously thought possible.

Why should you care?  Dude, can’t you imagine a game in which you play a little dude made of Jell-O who is vulnerable to different extremes in temperature – increasing in density as the ambient temperature drops or melting as it heats up!  Wouldn’t that be awesome?  Oh…wait…no, that’s already been done by Konami.  Um…on second thought, scratch that. 

Epic?  What the hell are you going to do with this one?