The Unreal Engine is a game engine which is developed by Epic Games , first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. primarily developed for first-person shooters, it has been successfully used in lots of difference of other genres, including stealth, MMORPGs, and other RPGs. With its code written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today.
The first generation of Unreal Engine.1 comes with rendering, collision detection, AI, visibility, networking, scripting, and file system management into one complete engine. Unreal Engine 1. Gives an advanced software rasterizer and a hardware accelerated rendering path using the Glide API, specifically developed for 3dfx GPUs, and was updated for OpenGL and Direct3D. The release of Unreal Tournament marked in both network performance and Direct3D and OpenGL support.
The Unreal engine became popular because of the modular engine architecture and inclusion of a scripting language called Unreal-Script, which made it easy , including total conversions like Tactical Ops.
From the start, the engine was designed in a way to be extensible and improved over multiple generations of games, as founder of Epic Games Tim Sweeney stated in a 1998 interview with magazine