Ultra Software has created a new version of its Ultra game engine, Version 0.9.6. In December 2023, the company began offering an early access version of the Ultra Engine, followed by an update in January 2024. Ultra touts the engine, which takes advantage of the user’s GPU, as being easy to use, feature-rich, fast, and inexpensive, with no royalty fees or other additional charges. It is available through Steam or in stand-alone form. A Pro and Standard version is offered.
Game engines are powerful things and have gained in stature with the continual rise of real time. Due to their features and capabilities, some game engines are used strictly for gaming, while others, like Epic’s Unreal Engine and Unity’s engine, extend into other types of real-time applications as well. As is often the case, the more powerful and extensive the engine’s tool set, the more complex and higher the learning curve (and the cost) associated with the engine. Enter Ultra Software, whose Ultra Engine is affordable, easy to use, and checks a lot of boxes in terms of users’ needs.
Ultra Software also offers the cross-platform game engine Leadwerks, which, for years, has provided developers with an easy-to-learn platform for making 3D games and VR experiences. However, for a while now, the company has been focused on upping its game with the Ultra Engine, which the company just released in Version 0.9.6. The engine was in early access at the end of last year, followed by a 0.9.3 release, with new AI-powered features such as text-to-image support and seamless texture stitching, in late January 2024.
While using game engines might feel like rocket science at times, it doesn’t have to be. In fact, creators of Ultra Engine say it was created to solve problems they saw while working on VR projects at NASA and are developing game engine tools to provide “order of magnitude faster performance for 3D and VR applications in entertainment, defense, and aerospace.”
According to Ultra Software, the Ultra Engine is a big leap in technology, with a future-proof foundation, while maintaining the strengths developed in Leadwerks, resulting in what the company calls a better development platform for users’ games.
In games, slow speed and performance can be frustrating; in VR, it can also cause motion sickness due to the slow frame rates. Ultra Engine’s Vulkan-based architecture taps into the full power of the user’s GPU, which, the company says, enables it to deliver up to 10× faster performance than achieved with the Unity engine. The company’s 10× claim is bold, if nothing else, providing the following eye-popping numbers in the graphic below. (A link to Ultra’s performance tests, which were done using the early access version of the software, is available on GitHub.)
The updated Ultra Engine has a new, improved foliage system that replaces the one in Leadwerks. With the inclusion of imposters—which can be used with or without the foliage system—high-poly meshes can be reduced to a single quad when viewed from a distance. The first DLC for Ultra Engine is the free Nature Starter Kit, which provides trees, plants, and rocks for outdoor environments.
The engine also has improved shading; whereas Leadwerks uses a geometry shader, Ultra uses a compute shader, offering more power and better performance, says the company. Another big change is the inclusion of sublayers in Version 0.9.6, so a mesh layer can use multiple variations to populate a scene with a variety of different objects, while spacing them out for a more natural look.
Among the other additions are new animation tools and capabilities.
| Leadwerks | Ultra | Benefit |
| Editor written in BlitzMax | Editor written in C++ | Better compatibility, extensions system |
| x86 | x64 | More addressable memory |
| Win32/GTK/Cocoa | Custom UI | Consistent UI across platforms |
| Raw pointers | Shared pointers | No invalid pointer errors |
| ToLua C++/Lua binding | Sol | Support for shared pointers |
| Blinn-Phong lighting | PBR lighting | Better graphical quality |
| FBX asset pipeline | glTF asset pipeline | PBR materials |
| Single-threaded | Multi-threaded | Faster performance |
| OpenGL | Vulkan | Future-proofing |
Comparison of Leadwerks and the Ultra engine. (Source: Ultra Software)
Ultra Engine’s easy-to-learn API can be used with Lua scripting. It comes with extensive documentation and hundreds of code examples demonstrating how to use graphics, physics, ray casting, path finding, and so forth. And unlike many other game engines, Ultra does not charge royalties or installation fees for applications made with the engine. Additionally, because free, open-source middleware libraries are used, customers do not have to purchase third-party licenses.
Like Leadwerks, which has been offered on Steam for years, Ultra Engine is available there or can be purchased directly from Ultra. Ultra Engine comes in the Standard Edition (Lua-only) version for $59 and the more robust Professional Edition (supporting Lua and C++) for $99. They can be purchased as stand-alone offerings or from the user’s Steam account. The Leadwerks engine is still available for $49 (Steam Key).