Epic showcasing Updated Unreal Engine at E3

Epic is inviting developers and publishers to peruse the newest version of the Unreal Engine during the upcoming E3 conference.

The company will be hosting a new set of features for the game engine in closed-door demonstrations at its LA Convention Center meeting suite.

In March during the 2009 Game Developers Conference, Epic was at San Francisco’s Moscone Centre to showcase three key additions to the widely-used tool.

Unreal Lightmass adds to the engine high-quality static lighting with next-generation effects. Epic says that Lightmass “leverages Epic’s new Unreal Swarm distributed computing framework” and claims that this allows lighting to be generated up to ten times faster than before.

The group also showcased the Unreal Content Browser, a tool which enables designers to more simplistically locate assets with thumbnail previews, as well as tag content with metadata.

Epic also unveiled its new Master Control Program (MCP), a scalable statistics and data management back-end that supports announcements, settings management, online population tracking, and data collection.

The company has pledged that these new tools won’t affect the price to license the engine.

Aside from these additions, the company did not explicitly suggest that it would be presenting any further features.

Epic’s opening hours for demonstrations are the same as expo hours, so; June 2 12pm – 6pm, June 3 10am – 6pm, June 4 10am – 6pm.

Those who want to meet with Epic individually should email Mark Rein, specify three possible meeting times and state the number of people expected to attend the meet.

Availability is likely to be limited.