Unreal Engine 2

'' was built in Unreal Engine 2. In October 1998, IGN reported, based on an interview with its affiliate Voodoo Extreme, that Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, was researching his next-generation engine. With development starting a year later, the second version made its debut in 2002 with ''America's Army'', a free multiplayer shooter developed by the U.S. Army as a recruitment device. Soon after, Epic released Unreal Championship on the Xbox, one of the first games to use Microsoft's Xbox Live. UE2 saw success through its licensing partnerships, a trend that would continue with later versions. In March 2011, Ubisoft Montreal revealed that UE2 was successfully running on the Nintendo 3DS via ''Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell 3D''. "The 3DS is powerful, and we are able to run the Unreal Engine on this console, which is pretty impressive for a handheld machine, and the 3D doesn't affect the performance (thanks to my amazing programmers)," said Ubisoft. ==Features==

GPU acceleration The rendering code for UE2 was completely reworked from UE1 and made use of new hardware and graphics APIs such the GeForce 3 series. While UE1 was released before the development of mainstream GPU hardware and only employed software rendering in its initial version, UE2 was designed with GPU acceleration in mind from the beginning. Unreal Engine 2 was the first version to make multi-platform support an important focus. UE2 supported the PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube. In addition, the user interface for UnrealEd was rewritten in C++ using the wxWidgets toolkit, which Sweeney said was the "best thing available" at the time. Epic used the Karma physics engine, a third-party software from UK-based studio Math Engine, to drive the physical simulations such as ragdoll player collisions and arbitrary rigid body dynamics. With Unreal Tournament 2004, it included improved optimization, improved physics, editor updates, and more particle effects. Vehicle-based gameplay was successfully implemented, enabling large-scale combat. While Unreal Tournament 2003 had support for vehicle physics through the Karma engine, as demonstrated by a testmap with a "hastily-constructed vehicle", it was not until Psyonix created a modification out of Epic's base code that the game received fully coded vehicles. Impressed by their efforts, Epic decided to include it in its successor as an official game mode under the name Onslaught by hiring Psyonix as a contractor. Psyonix would later develop Rocket League before being acquired by Epic in 2019. ==See also==