Talking To The Developers Of The Unigine Engine

Michael: Recently some screenshots of a forthcoming Unigine project were shared. Are you able to share any more details on this project?

Denis: The project will have great visuals, I can say it for sure. At the moment we are working on gameplay, which is the most challenging part for us since we have little experience in making fun games (we are all about the technology mainly). As we claimed before, the project will support both MS Windows and Linux. More information will be available in our development log and on the official website of the project (when we'll launch it). Release is planned for this year, we consider digital distribution to be the main channel.

Michael: What do you anticipate the hardware requirements to be for this next project with all of the advancements made to Unigine?

Denis: At the moment it runs smoothly on ATI HD4850 / NVIDIA 8800GT hardware, however we are still optimizing. Minimal supported hardware will be NVIDIA GeForce 6xxx series (NV4x) and ATI Radeon X1xxx series (R5xx). We plan to add several profiles for different levels of hardware to make the project runnable on not so powerful systems.

Michael: Where do you hope the Unigine engine and company will be in the next 18 months?

Alexander: DirectX 11 support, somewhat like a heap of micro-threads in the engine, consoles support, more artist-friendly tools, AI system, high-level game framework, being even closer to photo-realism :)

Denis: Unigine will be even more high-level middleware, so it will empower developers to make their projects faster. Plus we'll make our best to keep Unigine on the bleeding edge of modern graphics technologies. Support of game consoles is also a big topic for us at the moment, there will be more announcements later this year.

We'll definitely start another content project in the end of this year also. I hope that we'll find more talented people to enforce our team, which is the most important part of the company. Another changes to be introduced are more intensive marketing efforts because Unigine is ready for major projects. Up and forward, we have no other way.

Michael: Thanks for answering these questions, is there anything else you would like to share?

Denis: Thank you for the interview, Michael! Let's keep moving 3D technologies on Linux forward :)

For more on this Linux-friendly company or to check out their work, visit Unigine.com. Those interested Linux users can also check out both of their tech demos through the Phoronix Test Suite by simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark unigine.

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