Can The Unigine Engine Get Any Better? Yes, And It Has.

While we are still waiting for Unigine Corp (or their partners) to actually release a game based upon the Unigine Engine (Primal Carnage backed out and so their own OilRush game should be the first when it ships this quarter or next), the advanced multi-platform engine continues marching forward. The Unigine Engine already supports OpenGL 3/4 and has amazing graphics as shown by their tech demos like Unigine Heaven and many other features, but they have just made another huge update to this Linux-friendly game engine.

While the Unigine Engine should already have no problems competing with the likes of idTech 4/5 and Unreal Engine 3, the Russian developers continue improving it while getting ready to ship their OilRush real-time strategy game. Unigine's development log is now showing they have a completely new vegetation system with support for tree trunk bending, rotation of billboard leaves, spatial noise for randomized movement of vegetation, and more. There's also a new motion blur post-process, indirect SSDO occlusion for real-time global illumination, complete shader refactoring, a unified LOD system for all objects, an improved stereo 3D model, improvements to transparent systems, unified shadow rendering in a single pass, improved tessellation DIP performance, improved parrallax occlusion mapping quality, and much more. Additionally, the Unigine Engine now has support for OpenCL 1.1! This is just a partial list of all the changes.

On the OilRush web-site are some updated screenshots. Embedded below are also some of Unigine's screenshots showcasing the latest improvements to the engine. Now we just need to hope that OilRush, which will have a first-rate Linux client, is still shipping this quarter. We're awaiting word from our friends at Unigine Corp with any other Linux comments for us.

And last but not least, an image comparison of Unigine Heaven with the older revision of the engine against this latest build that supports the indirect occlusion (SSDO) to simulate real-time global illumination.

Any bets what Unigine Corp's next round of engine optimizations and improvements will bring?