New Technologies to be Revealed at GDC 2005

Game technology developers Havok and Epic both plan to introduce the newest iterations of their systems at this year's GDC. Havok will be revealing the newest version of their middleware, while Epic Systems will be showing the Unreal Engine version 3 along with their new scripting tools and AI behaviors. From the article: "...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."

Comments

Seamless world support?

[drinkypoo]

I've heard this before. Is it actually here this time? (I'm downloadng the video but I won't have it for over an hour.) It's the last step to making really gigantic worlds. It would also allow you to generate new content and use it on the fly. That's key to doing things like persistent environments with deformable terrain. You could implement a first-person MUD by allowing people to place geometry objects which are processed into level data every [insert time interval here] and allowing people to destroy and manipulate the terrain as well.