Vorderman, UE3 just uses the same technology everyone else has access to, so it's not like there is some magic they have that no one else can access. The materials system I wrote is open-ended, so you can add your own shaders. It's pretty simple to do parallax mapping and other effects.
For me, the big change was the lighting system. Once I moved to a unified shadowmap system, everything became much easier. It simplifies the renderer so much that hardware testing and adding new features is ten times easier than before, when I was using four different kinds of lighting. In fact, the source code for LE 2.0 is less than half the size of the source code of the previous version.
I don't have the same art resources, but there's nothing magic about their renderer, no matter how much money they spend trying to convince you otherwise. It is admirable that it runs on so many platforms, and they present their product well, but don't let Epic trick you into thinking they have some special shaders that no one else can write.
For me, the big change was the lighting system. Once I moved to a unified shadowmap system, everything became much easier. It simplifies the renderer so much that hardware testing and adding new features is ten times easier than before, when I was using four different kinds of lighting. In fact, the source code for LE 2.0 is less than half the size of the source code of the previous version.
I don't have the same art resources, but there's nothing magic about their renderer, no matter how much money they spend trying to convince you otherwise. It is admirable that it runs on so many platforms, and they present their product well, but don't let Epic trick you into thinking they have some special shaders that no one else can write.