The Adrenaline Vault News is reporting on plans to begin development on an Unreal port for the PlayStation 2. Here is part of the report, which goes on to say there are no plans for a PSX2 port of Unreal Tournament.

Sweeney says Epic has the PlayStation documentation from Sony and has signed an agreement to obtain a development system, which should happen soon. This, combined with continuing development on the Unreal Tournament engine, will provide them to start the process of porting their technology to the upcoming machine. Interestingly, Sweeney says there will be benefits as well as tradeoffs. “The PSX2 is very capable technically of running Unreal engine games, though there will be some tradeoffs, such as lower resolution textures, since memory, especially video memory, is more limited. On the plus side, there will be higher polygon counts,” he clarified.

Their plan is to bring the Unreal Tournament engine up to speed for the console while remaining binary compatible with the PC version, which is useful for both development and running game servers. Imagine a 3D game that enables both PC and PSX2 gamers to battle it out on the same servers, once and for all determining which system is superior. Until they have a development system in their hands, though, Epic is doing research and development on the PC side, including getting skeletal animation up and running, and porting the server to Linux using the GNU-EGCS compiler, which will expedite progress on the PSX2 since it uses the same compiler.