Development Unreal Engine 4 and technology for the next-generation of consoles now takes up the majority of Epic CEO Tim Sweeney's day.

"I spend about 60 percent of my time every day doing research work that's aimed at our next generation engine and the next generation of consoles," said Sweeney, who estimates we might see the fruits of this work in around 2014.

"This is technology that won't see the light of day until probably around 2014, but focusing on that horizon enables me to do some really cool things that just aren't practical today, but soon will be," he added.

"Some of our most productive work in the industry was on the first Unreal engine back in 1996, when I wrote a software vendor with a bunch of new features that hadn't been seen before. I feel like that's what I'm doing now on Unreal Engine 4 in exploring areas of the technology nobody else is really yet contemplating because they're still a few years away from practicality. But I see a huge amount of potential there and so it's very, very fun work."

Sweeney goes on to predict the two major innovations in gaming over the next 10 years. "Number one is achieving movie quality graphics and movie quality pixels on the screen, which mean no flicker in the visuals, no popping artifacts, no bulky character outlines on the screen at all.

"I expect I'll be actively programming at the time we've achieved full movie-quality graphics because that's really just a matter of brute force computing power and clever algorithm."

The other is all about AI. "The other area is simulation of human aspects of the game experience, simulation of gameplay characters, artificial intelligence, character dialogue and all of these other things which aren't really problems of brute force computing. They require increasingly sophisticated algorithms and simulation of human intelligence. I have no idea when those problems will be solved. I'm quite sure they won't be solved in the next ten years," Sweeney told IGN.

Epic's latest game, Gears of War 3, has enjoyed phenomenal launch-week success that's made it UK's biggest launch of 2011 so far.

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