Rendering

High-performance support for five basic rendering primitives:
* BSP geometry. Built using Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) primitives, BSP is the primary tool for shaping interior environments.
* Static meshes. High polygon-count objects built and textured in an external modeling program such as 3D Studio Max, XSI and Maya, suitable for using as building blocks for constructing levels.
* Animated skeletal meshes. Characters, weapons, and other meshes use skeletal animations imported from external animation tools like XSI, 3D Studio Max, and Maya.
* Vertex meshes. The engine also supports keyframed vertex-animated objects when needed.
* Height-Mapped Terrain. Terrain is stored as a height field, which can be manipulated easily as an image in external tools, or manipulated in real time in the Unreal editor.

Unreal Engine 2’s advanced portal rendering system supports:
* Mirror surfaces and semi-reflective materials such as marble.
* Non-Euclidean, redirectable “warp” portal effects for seeing into non-contiguous regions of space.
* Skies and backgrounds with independent coordinate systems for independent translation and rotation.
* Visible Surface Determination system supports high-performance, seamlessly-interconnected indoor and outdoor scenes, providing designers with tools such as portals and occluder volumes to optimize rendering performance.
* Full support for DirectX8 class video cards (including ATI® RADEON™- and NVIDIA® GeForce™-class cards).
* Fallback rendering support for DirectX6 video cards as far back as the NVidia TNT.
* Rendering subsystems include Direct3D, OpenGL, and RAD Game Tools’ Pixomatic software renderer for Windows PCs – bundled with Unreal Engine 2 at no additional cost. The inclusion of software rendering guarantees that any PC with a reasonable CPU will be able to run Unreal Engine 2, regardless of 3D card support.
* Unreal Tournament 2004 (and 2003) are used by numerous industry publications and websites as benchmarks for PC system capabilities.

Animation
* Supports up to 4 bone influences per vertex, with no hard-coded limits on polygon counts and bone counts.
* Hierarchical skeletal animated, smooth-skinned geometry support for animated characters and complex animated geometry in game environments.
* Multiple channels of animation, each with a variable blending factor and starting bone, allows for multiple animations to be played simultaneously.
* Skeletal Keyframe interpolation support for perfectly fluid animation independent of frame rate.
* Tweening support allows smooth flow between disjoint animation sequences.
* Artist-controlled compression reduces memory usage.

Lighting
* Supports dynamic lighting on all geometry types with vertex lighting and projective texturing. Any object in the world can act as a static or dynamic light.
* High-quality pre-computed lighting via RGB colored light maps and an optional vertex lighting channel.
* Supports directional lights, point lights and spot lights.
* Projected textures allow the simulation of complex dynamic lighting and shadowing effects on all surfaces, including player shadows and flashlights.
* Numerous light effects for dynamic lights including blinking and wavering.

Effects
* Comprehensive particle system allows for countless diverse configurations, supporting particles composed of sprites, meshes, lines, and beams. Particles support a multitude of lifetime, texture, and movement options, including collision where needed. All particle features can be manipulated in realtime in the editor
* Fluid surfaces support dynamic water simulation, with ambient ripples, targeted oscillations (for footsteps, explosions, or other disturbances), clamping for realistic wave boundaries, and surface vertex alpha blending for texture effects.
* Distance fog provides a sense of depth indoors and out, while improving rendering performance in large outdoor areas via far-clipping.

Terrain

Height Map terrain system allows for fast, complex terrain rendering supporting multiple, seamlessly-blended layers of:
* Alpha-blended textures.
* Decoration layers for flora detail and other procedurally-placed meshes.
* Comprehensive suite of terrain manipulation tools allows you to raise, lower, raze and flower the heightmap in real time.
* Supports artist-controlled terrain cell removal, for smoothly transitioning from height-mapped terrain to indoor areas such as caves and buildings.

Textures

* Material system allows for alpha-blending and modulation of multiple layers of textures with artist-controlled blending and panning operations.
* Easy-to-use mechanism for scrolling, rotating, and scaling textures via artist settings. This feature can be used in a static or dynamic fashion for elaborate animated effects.
* Detail textures add extremely close-up details to surfaces, such as fine wood grain, pock marks on brick surfaces, or scoring to metal.
* Hardware accelerated, compressed, high resolution texture support allows for individual 32-bit textures of up to 2048×2048 pixels in size, while consuming significantly less video and system memory than traditional RGBA or 8-bit texture formats.
* All textures support up to twelve levels of mip-mapping, including mipping down to a solid color.
* Texture animation sequences with variable playback rate.

Sound

* Standards-compliant OpenAL based audio subsystem on Windows, Linux and Macintosh; support for native console sound.
* Supports 3D spatialization, attenuation, pitch and Doppler shifting.
* Supports EAX 3.0 effects on compatible cards, exposed to both level designers via UnrealEd and programmers via UnrealScript.
* Ogg Vorbis streaming sound and music support on Windows, Linux and Macintosh, offering higher quality audio with smaller file sizes than MP3, without royalties; Windows Media Audio on Xbox.
* Includes OpenAL wrapper with 100% software fallback path for utmost compatibility on Windows, Linux and Macintosh.
* Dolby DigitalTM Surround Sound certifiable.
* Offers a unified solution for hardware sound acceleration; it natively supports Creative Lab’s EAX 3.0, and falls back cleanly to EAX 2.0 if the user’s system does not support EAX 3.0 features.
* Integrated music playback, including support for user-provided tracks.
* MP3 support with the Miles library (licensed separately).

Voice Support

Unreal Engine 2 offers complete voice support, including:
* Voice-over-IP. Players can communicate with other players using natural voice, with support for multiple channels and encoding options.
* Text-to-speech support. For players without a microphone headset, the Unreal engine offers an excellent voice synthesizing system.
* AI speech recognition. Bots in Unreal Tournament 2004 can recognize simple voice commands for changing battlefield tactics.

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