Epic's Tim Sweeney made a massive (I mean massive) update to the Unreal Technology Page with a detailed explanation of their plans for licensing the Unreal Tournament engine for Playstation 2 games, pointing out that like Monolith, Epic is a licensed middleware provider. The basic gist of it, is that Epic plans to have their engine ready for developers to create launch titles for the US release of the PS2, but there's far more to it than that (including a rundown of the engine's advantages for PC developers). Here's a brief excerpt:

One of the great breakthroughs Sony is making with the Playstation2 is recognizing that engines and tools are becoming increasingly important as games increase in scope. Game engines are a relatively new market, informally established by id Software with the licensing of the Doom engine, and brought to the forefront by the "cold war" competition between the Quake and Unreal engines which both achieved tremendous success. Now, Playstation2 developers will have access to the same kind of engine choices and benefits through Sony's middleware program.

And the Playstation2 has become a major focus for us. The Unreal Tournament engine is highly modular and that modularity has really paid off with the Playstation 2. We got a fully playable game up and running in just a few weeks, which gives us a lot of time to focus on making the rendering technology fast and easy for a licensee to use. Now, we're attacking the Playstation2 technology on two fronts.

First of all, we're bringing our enhanced Unreal Tournament engine to the Playstation2, with some new, powerful and heavily polygon-exploiting features:

• Skeletal animated characters: So 2000 to 5000 polygon characters will be a reality for Playstation2 games and PC games targetted at 3D cards with hardware T&L support.
• A multitexture terrain / displacement-mapping system, enabling the creation of large outdoor areas with smooth shading and realtime displacement effects, such as procedurally animated, displacement mapped water waves.

Second, a larger-scale upgrade of the engine's world rendering architecture is underway, adding additional core rendering features like curved surfaces and an enhanced surface shading model. These features will be especially exciting on the Playstation2, which is a powerful but complex beast -- taking maximum advantage of the vector processing units will be the holy grail of Playstation2 engines.

We will have the enhanced Unreal Tournament engine ready for U.S. launch titles on the Playstation2, with a large-scale rendering upgrade soon to follow.