One of GDC's annual rituals is seeing the latest tech demo from Epic's Unreal Engine. Today the company held one of only two media demos for UE3 to a packed house of journalists. In an unusual move the company decided to start the demo by playing a game they didn't develop, the upcoming PC-Xbox 360 top down action game Monster Madness from developer Artifical Studios. The head of Artifical stated that they developed the PC-Xbox 360 version of the game in less than a year from start to finish (the game is due out in late April). Epic VP Mark Rein said he wanted to show how Unreal Engine 3 doesn't have to be used by a huge game with an expensive budget.

The demo showed two characters playing in co-op mode (the game supports four players in co-op mode) as they battled monsters inside in both a suburban home and a city park. The cartoon art style fits the game perfectly as the teenage characters battle it out with all sorts of creatures like zombies, fire imps and evil clowns. Again, the game was made in less than a year, with about 25 people total for a fraction of the budget of Epic's own Gears of War yet has tons of content (lots of different enemies and weapons).

The next part of the demo showcased the PS3 version of Unreal Tournament. The demo showed a alien ship location with lots of shaders, holographic effects for things like holo-statues and more. We actually got a chance to play the PS3 version of UT3 at Sony's booth and its about what you might expect of the game, but running on Sony's console.

Next came an Unreal Engine 3 editor demo, showing how easy it was to duplicate objects in the editor on the fly as well as getting the lighting of objects set up in the edtior as well. They also showed how the editor could handle theings like depth of field (near objects are clear while far away objects appear blurry). Another part of the editor demo showed off a new UT3 level(a dark and gothic looking locaiton). Using a feature called Kismet, the editor allowed a way for a designer to trigger a lighting effect just by firing up a few actions inside the editor instead of writing tons of scripts to handle the same tasks. According to Epic team member Alan Willard this kind of function allowed Epic to ship their 2006 Xbox 360 game Gears of War on time and on budget.

Rein told us that Unreal Engine 3 can and will be used for titles that will be used for Xbox Live Arcade and Sony PS3 downloadable titles and that these kinds of games can license the engine for a lower price than for a full retail game. Rein wouldn't go into specifics on UE3 license terms but said that the typical price is around $500,000. However he did say that there are difference prices for different needs. Rein said that while mods for games like UT3 will be made on a PC, they are working on a way for those mods to be used for the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game. Rein also re-confirmed that there will be a mod contest for UT3 just as there was for UT 2004. There is still no plans to officially support UE3 for the Wii due to the fact that the Wii can't handle things like shaders and high definition resolutions. Rein did say that some outside developer could make the engine work on the Wii just as UbiSoft made the UE2 engine work on the PSP console.

While there wasn't a lot of new info announced about UE3 in the GDC 2007 demo presentation it's clear that Epic Games is leading the charge in making their current engine to be the number one third party game tech solution.

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