The Irish video game developer Brendan Greene, better known as PlayerUnknown, left active development on PUBG: Battlegrounds back at the end of the last decade to set up PUBG Special Projects and PlayerUnknown Productions. And now we're getting a glimpse of what he's been working on.
PlayerUnknown Productions has released Preface: Undiscovered World, a free tech demo of the Melba engine's power to create new planets. This comes after Unreal Engine could have been bettered for realism by the new Dagor Engine by Gaijin Entertainment, designed for first-person shooters.
Preface: Undiscovered World started as an experiment in Unity and then moved to Unreal Engine. It's now a showcase for Melba, PLAYERUNKNOWN Productions' in-house engine, which looks set to provide a groundbreaking platform for the generation of unique new worlds.
The studio describes Melba as a dynamic machine-learning tool for environmental design technology. It says users will be able to explore an 200-million square mile space with eight unique biomes, including forests, deserts and plains. Lighting, water, clouds, terrain variety and more will be added in the future.
There are several things that look impressive, notably the scale and that this is real-time local simulation, all conducted on the user's GPU with no use of cloud services.
Users can create and revisit saved points of interest and can capture and document views within the simulation, labelling and rating images to provide feedback for content quality improvements.
"We essentially reinvented how you create these worlds, using machine learning technology using natural Earth data to generate these worlds from latent space, Greene says. "And that's what our breakthrough was – we discovered terrain and the uprising of terrain within latent space."
The process was divided into three stages: the first is building the terrain, the second is filling that terrain interaction when scaling up and the third is adding players to the world.
"We see this tech demo not just as a showcase but as a collaborative platform where users can engage, learn, and contribute directly to the development process. Your exploration and feedback are integral to refining our technology and tackling challenges together," the studio says.
Meanwhile, PLAYERUNKNOWN is preparing to release Prologue: Go Wayback! An open-world survival game coming in 2025. The game is based on Unreal Engine, but uses part of PLAYERUNKNOWN's tech to generate the world. Eventually all of this work will go towards PLAYERUNKNOWN's end goal: Project Artemis a be massive multiplayer sandbox experience.
Preface: Undiscovered World is available on Steam now. Prologue: Go Wayback! will follow early in 2025. Get started by reading our guide to the best laptops for game development.
