Bioshock Infinite and Unreal

Irrational Games' Chris Kline has made a post on the official Irrational Games message board, that deals with the decision to switch to the Unreal Engine 3.0 for Bioshock Infinite, and the enhancements the team needed to do in order to fulfil the vision of Bioshock Infinite.

"We started out by taking a look at the original BioShock engine, and very quickly realized that the tools in that engine were too underpowered and unwieldy for the depth and complexity of the gameplay and narrative we had planned -- our very patient but long-suffering designers and artists were due for a total toolset overhaul. That alone was one of the most compelling factors behind our decision to abandon that engine and start over with UE3 as a base. "

The team built a new A.I. system to deal with the large number of A.I.'s the game needs to handle and they also constructed a new animation system on top off Natural Motion's 'Morpheme' to make it the A.I. character move more intelligently (or look as if they were behaving more intelligently).

They also built a new rendered that uses deferred lighting and a host of other things. Read the full post for all the goodies on the techs behind the visuals of Bioshock Infinite (or at least the ones Irrational are prepared to talk about at this moment).