Also on FiringSquad this morning is this Q&A with Mark Rein. The Epic VP is asked what the company is showing at GDC, PS3 development, Sony's online plans, UT2007, and the state of PC hardware.

Beyond Unreal has posted a transcript of a Tim Sweeney video interview. In the interview the Epic programmer talks about various things related to Unreal Engine 3. You can find the actual video here.

Beyond Unreal has a news post about the next generation Unreal Tournament game, offering details found in the May issue of Computer Gaming World. The next UT will be powered by the Unreal Engine 3 (and thus we won't see it this year), features voice controlled AI, includes a global ratings system and features a new game mode in Conquest. Here's the skinny on that

* Features eight teams, each with unique armor.
* Conquest maps are "potentially as large as three onslaught maps with assault-like objectives and even a form of limited resource management planned"
* "there may be the option to treat a conquest match like a long term war, so you can play, take a break, and then go back and play more later"
* "you can use your stats to find similarly abled opponents"
* "conquest will take advantage of the UE3 engines ability to seamlessly stream maps by putting you in a battlefield the size of several maps stitched together"

More here.

Unreal Engine 3.0 demo wows GDC is a GameSpot story about Epic's demonstration of their next generation technology. Part of the demonstration was similar to last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo showing, but Epic also showed a few new sequences which sound very impressive. IGN also has impressions saying If we were this pretty, we'd get all the chicks. 1UP has a few videos although the quality is only so-so. According to Epic's Mark Rein, their PC game using the new engine will ship early next year.

The second demo showed off one of the newly-announced features of Unreal Engine 3--seamless level loading. Basically, the engine is capable of loading several levels simultaneously, so the game will analyze where a player is going and load the next level ahead of time. By the time you reach the new level, it will already be in memory. This means that, after the initial load to start a game, players will not experience any level loading at all. To demonstrate this, Epic showed a futuristic dune buggy driving through the streets of what looks like a gritty European city. (If anything, it looked very much like a far more detailed version of Half-Life 2's City 17.) The buggy careened through the empty streets and then cut across a park, and it did so seamlessly. This means that in addition to no level loads, the game will be capable of creating huge, Grand Theft Auto-like worlds to explore. To finish the buggy demo, the camera pulled back to reveal a glimpse of a stunning and crowded cityscape along with the glistening waters of a huge bay.

Computer Games Magazine has a brief Q&A with Mark Rein of Epic, who talks about the latest version of the Unreal Engine. New Unreal Engine 3 features are being shown at this week's Game Developers Conference. Update: another Mark Rein interview can be found at GamesIndustry.biz.

We received a press release from Epic Games announcing their plans for this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (March 9-11). The company is headlining three speaker sessions, and will also show some new Unreal Engine 3 technology features which sound pretty nice

Seamless World Support allows the creation of virtually unending environments through background management of game levels and assets. Even titles not requiring open world support will benefit from these memory management techniques on next-generation console platforms. Second, the new UnrealKismet visual scripting system empowers designers to build and iterate detailed game scenarios and AI behaviors with limited, or even zero, programmer involvement -- thus providing a massive productivity gain over previous generations. Epic will also demonstrate significant improvements in physics, terrain editing, lighting, material editing, animation, cinematic creation and particles.

HomeLAN Fed also has a Make Something Unreal contest Q&A this morning. Steve Polge and Mark Rein of Epic talks about the high quality of the work submitted to the million dollar contest, the reason they picked Red Orchestra as best mod, lessons learned for future mod support and a couple of other things.

Gaming Groove talks with the founder of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, about its upcoming Unreal Engine 3 and the technology around it.

Midway has issued this press release, announcing that the company has acquired the publishing rights to three Unreal franchise games. Unreal Championship 2 (the Xbox game) will now be published by the company, as will two future Unreal Tournament games on PC and consoles. Thanks HomeLAN. Atari/Infogrames previously published Unreal titles.

"Midway gets it. They hit right at the heart of gamers. Not only did they create many classics including Defender, NFL Blitz and Mortal Kombat, but they're making great new games such as Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, The Suffering, NBA Ballers, NARC and Area 51. They make awesome games and don't apologize for it, so we think games like Unreal Tournament will fit in perfectly here," said Mark Rein, vice president and co-founder, Epic Games. "In our opinion Midway is doing the industry's best marketing and promotional campaigns and they will contribute strongly to the ongoing success of the Unreal franchise."

The second part of EuroGamer's Unreal Engine 3 interview is now online. The guys at Epic answer questions about the engine's platforms, money made from licensing tech vs selling games, the ability to create large environments, multiplayer player limits and use of the Unreal Engine for MMORPGs.

EuroGamer and Games Domain have new Unreal Engine 3 Q&As posted, asking Tim Sweeney and other Epic employees about the new technology. Mark Rein mentions in the EuroGamer Q&A that Epic's first game with the engine will be a single-player focused non-Unreal one, though new Unreal games will be made with it eventually.

New on Beyond Unreal today is this Unreal Engine 3 interview, asking Epic's Tim Sweeney about this impressive new technology.

We received an email from Epic Games, announcing that they have plugged a new phsyics and simulation engine into the Unreal engine, created by Switzerland based NovodeX AG. Epic had previously used the Karma physics engine. You can check out a few examples of what the NovodeX physics engine can do by downloading this personal SDK.

There is a Q&A with Epic's Tim Sweeney on HomeLAN Fed today, offering information on the next generation UnrealEngine 3 which Epic will demo at GDC next week. The engine features an all-new "rendering engine and physics system" and was designed with videocards that are 18 months away in mind.

The guys at Beyond3D have posted a Q&A with Tim Sweeney, asking Epic's lead programmer about graphics technology and the latest iteration of the Unreal engine.

The History of Unreal Technology - The Early Years is the first part of a new article on Unreal Ops, taking a look at how the Unreal Engine came to be. The article offers quotes from Tim Sweeney, James Schmalz and CliffyB. Thanks HomeLAN.

This post on the BeyondUnreal forums has a quick Q&A (from a recent Australian gaming mag) with Epic's Tim Sweeney about the next Unreal engine. According to Tim we can expect "Massive improvement in the realism and quality of scenes with realistic fuzzy shadowing. Incredibly detailed characters - like characters that, if you at and compare them side by side to our existing characters in detail, you might say they're a hundred times more detailed. A lot more use of physics in environments - not to create contrived puzzles but just in a natural way with all objects interacting physically...". Thanks HLF.

The USArmy has decided that they want to goof off and play games. They have licensed the Unreal engine technology to power something they are calling "America's Army".   We'll probably get a glimpse of what it's about at E3.

Also on Gamespy is a really brief Q&A with Tim Sweeney. He answers a few questions about the latest and greatest Unreal technology.

Gamespot Hardware has posted some impressions of the latest Unreal Tech that Epic is showing at GDC. The focus of the article is on the physics engine that has been integrated, with a description of some of the scripted game events showing off the Unreal engine working together with this Karma physics system.