The Unreal Engine embraced iDevices last year with the brilliant Infinity Blade. Those hoping that Epic’s tech would come to Android enabled handsets might want to uncross those fingers for now though; the developer has revealed it won’t be coming for a while.
Co-founder Tim Sweeney told Gizmondo: “When a consumer gets the phone and they wanna play a game that uses our technology, it’s got to be a consistent experience, and we can’t guarantee that [on Android]. That’s what held us off of Android.”
Android is open source, meaning there’s little in the way of quality control. That’s what worries Sweeney. “If you took the underlying NGP hardware and shipped Android on it,” he added, “you’d find far far less performance on Android. Let’s say you took an NGP phone and made four versions of it. Each one would give you a different amount of memory and performance based on the crap [networks] put on their phone.
“Google needs to be a little more evil. They need to be far more controlling.”
However VP Mark Rein has restored some hope for Android fans via Gamasutra. He assures us that despite Sweeney’s claims, Unreal Engine will find its way over eventually: “UDK will come eventually to Android, and Google is going to solve that problem — we know they’re working on it, but we don’t know the release date and we don’t know when it will get into the hands of all the different vendors with all the different phones.”
