"Epic Games China was using Unreal Engine 3 for the development of internal online projects, and so began the process of creating a technology solution that provided robust backend functionality, tools, and integration with the client," said Paul Meegan, CEO, Epic Games China. "At the same time, we understood that many of our licensees were seeking a similar solution. Knowing that, it was natural for us to architect a broadly functional backend that would serve the needs of our company and our partners."

Atlas Technology extends Unreal Engine 3's functionality to support persistent online games. In addition to be being used for Epic Games China's unannounced projects, Atlas Technology has undergone a private evaluation process for the past year, and has been licensed by game developers in North America, Asia and Europe.

"Atlas Technology currently has multiple licensees on three continents in production using the tools," said Meegan. "The team is adding new features and functionality for upcoming releases, but the 'roll-out' is really more of a move toward broad public awareness of the tech. Epic Games China in Shanghai and our subsidiary Titan Studios in Seattle are already hard at work supporting licensees to help them bring great titles to the marketplace."

Meegan said Atlas Technology allows content creators to begin producing UE3 assets, creating server-side persistent design content, and jumping onto live clusters to test game content immediately. The tools are built for large teams, and allow maximum access for each team member by providing a high granularity built in revision control system for server content.

"In addition to the production streamlining, Atlas also gives a huge boost to the overall development time-line by taking care of the heavy lifting of building a scalable dynamically balancing server solution for massive online games," said Meegan. "It gives you tools that allow non-technical staff to operate, tune and manage large scale MMO titles."

From a technology standpoint, Meegan said the first component of Atlas Technology is a set of persistent world applications that run on server hardware with a dynamic load balancing architecture that allows hot-swapping of server hardware. All of these applications are managed by a single tool that provides simple controls for monitoring server data and status, managing updates, transitioning machines in and out of service, and controlling the full suite of server applications.

Second, Atlas includes a full set of tools for creating, viewing, balancing and tuning server-side persistent game content (i.e. players, NPCs, quests, items, skills, etc. definitions and properties), including powerful filtering tools, balancing and tuning with intuitive visual graphing and adjustment of properties, mass content creation and editing, and simple navigation of the web of content connections. All of this is integrated with a full internal version control system, which allows visibility and control over data and user roles, and allows large teams to work on the persistent content in the same areas and levels without stepping on each other's toes.Finally, Atlas is compatible and integrated with Unreal Engine 3 editor, allowing Level Designers and Artists to efficiently and easily build and place content immediately.

"We have gotten a lot of feedback that MMO developers love the content creation tools and pipelines in UE3," said Meegan. "It's unquestionably powerful, and reduces the engineering side development load, allowing the team to focus on the implementation of game specific features and creative development. The biggest challenges developers have faced is in integrating 3rd party tech solutions that were not designed to work with Unreal Engine 3, or alternatively the huge undertaking of creating their own. Atlas Technology does this for you."

Even before Atlas Technology was being tested, games like Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online and The Agency, Real Time Worlds Asia's MStar, Acony Games' Parabellum, NHN USA's Huxley and Real Time Worlds' APB have all been using UE3 for MMO games. Jerry Heneghan, CEO of Virtual Heroes, said his company will use Atlas Technology for its new NASA MMO game, Astronaut: Moon, Mars and Beyond.

"We hope a lot more developers use UE3 to make MMOs," said Meegan. "They have a greater chance of making a competitive game - they can focus their time and resources on the creative aspects of development that make games great. And, we're here to help them succeed." As it does with all of its UE3 technology, Epic Games China will continue to expand the offerings of Atlas Technology. Meegan said future plans include enhancing integration with the Unreal Engine 3 editor interface, and adding more standard game features as templates.