Unreal Engine 3 Profiled

Develop Magazine finishes off their engine profile series by taking a closer look at Unreal Engine 3, which you may recall is the engine powering the entire Mass Effect trilogy, Alpha Protocol, Guild Wars 2, and a few recent JRPGs.
One of the emerging usage groups is for MMO development. In order to give the engine a better standing against dedicated MMO solutions like HeroEngine and BigWorld, and emerging threats like CryENGINE, Epic has tasked its China office with the development of Atlas, its persistent world server technology and MMO creation and management toolset.

Another new feature is Unreal Lightmass, a new global illumination solver that can produce lightmaps with smooth bounced lighting without the need to use any third-party technology. Generation of the lightmaps can also be farmed out by the new Swarm distributed processing solution to use idle CPUs locally and across networks.

The new Unreal Master Control Program is a new service-orientated architecture based on the Gears of War 2 persistent stat tracking system. It allows developers to track online populations and even domain-specific data mining such as level-based heat maps to quickly identify chokepoints and problem areas in multiplayer maps.