The big developers and console makers of E3 have exhausted their supply of surprises for the year, so the gaming community is now left to sort through the endless scraps of indie titles and small publishers for creative surprises. It is also the part of E3 when technical demos begin to appear, showing off how the next generation of computer graphics will look. The trailers for both Square Enix’s Luminous Studio engine and Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 have already been shown off extensively. Now, a GameTrailers interview featuring a walkthrough of all the features included in the updated Unreal Engine has surfaced.

Epic Games Senior Technical Artist Alan Willard shows off the engine’s lighting, reflection, and particle effects the engine can handle. The remarkable part of the presentation is made clear at around the five-minute mark, when Willard reveals that everything is taking place within the editor that game developers will use. The editor interface has gotten a makeover, allowing toolbars to be docked and resized as needed. In addition, the engine allows developers to compile code on-the-fly, making it easy to modify aspects of the game and immediately see their affects. Take a look at the demo yourself, and see what developers will soon be using to create the next generation of games:

Obviously, this is a sales pitch to developers, but it’s a fairly impressive demonstration of Unreal Engine 4’s capabilities, one that is certain to lure plenty of developers into licensing the engine. Hopefully the changes to the engine will lead to shorter development cycles of more impressive games, which is what this software could really mean to gamers.