Unreal Engine 4 targets ‘next console generation’ in ‘2012 to 2018’

Speaking in a special session examining user experiences of Unreal Engine, Epic Games’ president Mike Capps offered
up a few extra details on the next generation of UE, saying the studio was hard at work on the middleware, targeting the next generation of games consoles.

Capps said Epic’s ‘rough guess’ was that the successors to the likes of the 360 will be released during 2012 to 2018.

"We’ve got UE 4 in production right now," he said, saying it was being designed to support the inevitable huge demands of software renderers and parallel computing, adding that the goal with UE4 is to ‘support hundreds of thousands of threads’ processed by future console CPUs.

His comments echo word from Epic co-founder and colleague Tim Sweeny who revealed at GDC earlier this year that the engine was in the works and was primarily targetting the console market.

A full report on the Unreal Engine session, plus an interview with Mike Capps, will be posted to Developmag.com very soon.