If you have a powerful computer and love Star Wars, you would be doing yourself a disservice to not check this Unreal 4 project out.
Jason Lewis and a small team have been modeling the Millennium Falcon as it ports in Mos Eisley, running in Unreal 4, a job which Lewis describes as “the most highly detailed real-time Falcon that anyone has ever seen, … except for maybe the Falcon model from the recent ILM X-Labs VR demo that was at GDC a few months ago.” Lewis has worked in the games industry for 21 years, including on projects like the Matrix games, Battlefield 4, Medal of Honor Warfighter, and SOCOM 4.
Lewis comes from Obsidian Entertainment, which may ring a bell as the team behind Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II, one of the best-received Star Wars games of all time. They’re more recently known for their work on Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and South Park: The Stick of Truth.
The team estimates they’re about 90% done with the project, which includes most of Mos Eisley (up to and including its famous Cantina). “It’s not really a game, more just an interactive fan art piece,” Lewis explains. There’s a blaster and, hidden somewhere, another weapon to run around with, but without character modelers, the other NPCs are droids. They’re looking into VR support.
The project is pretty big. The Millennium Falcon alone has over 700,000 triangles, and on max settings the project takes up about 4.1 GB of ram, hitting roughly 45-60 fps depending on the graphics card. It looks incredible in Unreal 4, not yet at the reality-questioning quality of some basic room models that have been seen in UE4, but not too far off. The above article also lays out how they tackled each part of the process, and included team advice to others working on similar projects.
The project is available for free download in the above article.