Epic almost done with iPhone OS port Unreal engine

Game manufacturer Epic has almost finished porting the Unreal Engine 3 to the iPhone. With the port of the Unreal engine, Epic creates the possibility to release games like Mass Effect, BioShock and Gears of War for iPhone OS.

At the Game Developers Conference, Epic showed an iPhone demo of Unreal Tournament, reaching speeds of 24 to 30 fps, so reports cnet. Epic previously announced that it was working on a port of the engine. However, the company has still not given a date when the first iPhone games with the Unreal engine will be released.

Epic doesn’t just want to make it possible to run existing games from large development studios on the iPhone: there will also be a development kit, with which smaller developers can make games with the Unreal engine.

To get the Unreal engine to work on iPhone OS, Epic had to work around some issues. For example, the PC version of the engine is multithreaded, and the iPhone processor can’t handle this. Also, the iPhone’s OpenGL ES 2 software can only render objects that are in view. For the iPhone, therefore, levels must be broken down into smaller parts, which must always be loaded in their entirety, rather than the streaming technique that the PC and console versions of the Unreal engine use.