Got a press release announcing the release of the Unreal Performance Test. Described as "The Ultimate Game Benchmark" and is meant to be a performance test for future games. Though the PR mentions the "release" of the Performance Test, it doesn't say where it is available or when it will be but perhaps we'll hear more about it soon.

Aiming to stress-test the functionality and power of today's graphics performance, the benchmark is a barometer of how current hardware technology measures up against next generation gaming applications. The Unreal Performance Test is the first game benchmark to utilize a widely used game engine, Epic's award-winning Unreal Engine. Licensed by many of the recognized leaders in PC gaming such as Electronic Arts (Undying, Adventure Pinball), Infogrames (Epic's own Unreal Tournament), and Eidos (Deus Ex, Deus Ex 2, Thief 3), the Unreal Engine is viewed as the game industry's most advanced and widely used complete 3D game engine.

"It is well recognized throughout the industry that games drive hardware innovation," said Mark Rein, vice president at Epic Games. "At Epic, we are striving to influence and educate the card manufacturers and consumers to improve the overall quality of the gaming experience. We created the Unreal Performance Test to be the first true indicator of how gaming hardware will respond to the ever-increasing demands of tomorrow's games." [...]

HomeLAN Fed received word that Epic Games will be incorporating a new physics engine into the Unreal engine. According to Epic's Mark Rein "The integration of Karma's real physics adds an extra dimension to the Unreal Engine and we believe that the combined engine can be used to create games of almost any type. You want to build a basketball game? Unreal Engine gives you the court and Karma gives you the ball."

The Digital Extremes site has a developer update describing progress on the Unreal Championship game that they are working on. This will be the Xbox followup to Unreal Tournament.

You might've seen this because the URL was mentioned in one of the Thief 3 stories yesterday but the Epic Games site has an Unreal Warfare engine update, showing the general public what kind of updates are available to licensees of the Unreal engine. They got some neato stuff in there.

GameSurge concludes their series of interviews with level designers by talking with Warren Marshall of Epic Games currently working on Unreal Warfare. The "worst kept secret" by Epic.

Here's a quick snapshot from Alan Willard of Epic Games and some of his current work on Unreal Warfare. It's just a bunch of textures though. :( Here's the screenshots of the new tech if that's what you're looking for.

Voodoo Extreme has posted another desktop shot. This time from Epic's Warren Marshall, who's working on Unreal Warfare.

Something for the late-night readers to chew on. I'm not sure this has been said or not publically before but the next-gen rendering engine is a totally new set of code contrary to a lot of the earlier beliefs that it was just a juiced up version of the current Unreal tech. Check out the interview with Tim Sweeney of Epic at Gamasutra and some screenshots of the new tech just because:

...we've pretty much redone all of the rendering. We have an all-new polygon pipeline for rendering extremely high detail, high polygon environments. So, we've been focusing a lot on, and taking advantage of the new hardware TnL (Transform and Lighting) cards, and the NV20 [GeForce3], and all the new pixel shader and vertex shader effects that are possible. So, from a rendering point of view it's going to look all new and improved, but a lot of the tools are just incremental improvements [more screenshots]

Gamespot has two more Unreal Tech movies shot at the GDC of last week. They are available in Windows Media, MPG or streaming format.

There are even more Unreal Warfare technology demo impressions over at PC.IGN as those guys also are attending the big GDC show. It's some pretty good reading.

The original info showing off this stuff came out last night, but now there is a video of Unreal Warfare engine technology that you can see in action. Its basically a ship flying through some pretty good looking terrain and rock structures throwing a surprising number of polys around. I'll just go ahead and re-quote from last night:

One pre-scripted demo featured a futuristic dropship sailing down through the atmosphere, and then flying down a long canyon populated by dinosaur-like creatures. The ship's metallic surfaces and the realistic-looking canyon made this sequence impressive-especially considering the number of peripheral objects such as shrubs in the environment. Though this sequence was completely scripted, allegedly a version of the canyon level will appear in Epic's next Unreal game after Unreal II.

I also snagged a couple of more images the other day and put them into the Unreal2 screenshots section.

Reports from GDC are starting to file in late this evening, I'll have a wrap-up of the coverage in the morning but for tonight here's a bit from GameSpot who saw the Epic demonstration of Unreal Warfare tech which is said to be impressing quite a few people. (Just like CliffyB's outfits!)

One pre-scripted demo featured a futuristic dropship sailing down through the atmosphere, and then flying down a long canyon populated by dinosaur-like creatures. The ship's metallic surfaces and the realistic-looking canyon made this sequence impressive-especially considering the number of peripheral objects such as shrubs in the environment. Though this sequence was completely scripted, allegedly a version of the canyon level will appear in Epic's next Unreal game after Unreal II.

I also snagged a couple of more images the other day and put them into the Unreal2 screenshots section.

EvilAvatar has an interesting couple of Q&A's with Tim Sweeney of Epic. Discussion focuses on the next-generation technology that he's working on and more specifically editing for it. Here's TimmyS on curvy stuff in the editor:

Evil Avatar: Does the Unreal Warfare engine support Curved Surfaces?
Tim: Long-term, curved surfaces proved to be a counterproductive feature. They are useful as an abstract modelling tool, but when you get down to the metal, your real data is triangles, and you can usually create much better looking objects -- at a given polygon count -- by dealing with the real data rather than the curved surface abstraction. I'm pretty sure nobody's next-gen stuff is using curved surfaces

The guys at Planet Unreal received a little update from the "Source" (someone at Epic that is) about Unreal Warfare, the next Epic project. Thanks Locotus.

While I'm not allowed to even acknowledge that Unreal Warfare exists, I can say it's going to be a much more significant leap over Unreal Tournament than UT was over Unreal 1. On the tech side, we are rendering scenes with 50 to 100 times more polygons (literally) than Unreal Tournament, and the new engine can handle very large outdoor areas well -- so draw your own gameplay conclusions. :-)

If you missed the original news, here are the two stories that contained most of the info released so far on this new engine/game.

Epic has released the Unreal Engine 633 notes, now known as Warfare. It's an excerpt from the full notes but you can see what the Epic programmers have been working on besides increasing the amount of polygons that can be displayed. There's even a terrain tutorial that shows how to use the terrain technology. Thanks Blues News. Mark Rein from Epic also sent out a press release, with some mentions of an award for the Unreal Engine, XFest and a seminar for Unreal licensees along with the top 10 enhancements which you could already read about in the FGN story we mentioned this morning.

FGNOnline has an interview and screenshots of the latest incarnation of the Unreal engine which will assumedly be utilized in the upcoming Unreal Warfare game that Epic is currently working on. One of the big knocks on Unreal and UT was the relatively low poly count of world geometry. Take a look at those screenshots though, looks like Sweeney hasnt been slouching.

... really taking advantage of the kind of graphics power that Xbox will offer and high-end PCs currently offer. The screen shots I sent out to licensees today illustrate levels that 150 to 200 times more detailed than what we did in games like Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

So we all know that the id folks are working on DOOM, and the Valve guys are working on TF2 and assumedly HL2, but what about Epic? Unreal2 is being worked on by the folks at Legend.. Unreal Tournament2 then? Almost, Unreal Warfare according to PCUK (Thanks Mike)

In an e-mailed release schedule that PC GAMER UK received today, Infogrames perhaps inadvertently revealed that a sequel to Unreal Tournament is indeed on the way. [...] Unreal Warfare sits in the rather vague release column - TBD - To Be Decided.

So what do we know about Unreal Warfare? Uh.. the name? Judging from that though it's probably a safe bet to say its along the lines of multiplayer, possibly massive multiplayer? CliifyB come out from the bushes!

update: FGN Online got in contact with Epic's Mark Rein, who said

Unreal Warfare is the title of our next game and one of our worst kept secrets. Aside from the title, we're not ready to say anything else about the project at this point

The FGN story also mentions that Unreal 2 will be playable behind closed doors at this year's E3.