Epic Games, creators of the gib-tastic pixel-pr0n Unreal Tournament series were showing off the latest version of the tech behind their games at GDC: Unreal Engine 3. So, we all know it's pretty. How pretty? Super duper pretty. It'll make you give up religion and find faith in fragfests, it's so pretty. Beyond it being pretty, what else was there to show off?

Epic showed off Kismet, an advanced scripting system that allowed them to create gameplay elements in a graphical UI that strongly resembled a flowchart. It's this middleware system that they claim will prevent the budgets of next-gen projects using their engine from jumping 200-300%, instead citing a more reasonable 50%.

The ability to simplify many of the core game design elements will theoretically result in increased creativity; it'll be amazing to see what the mod community turns out using these tools.

They showed off the system running on both a high end Dell Renegade and a PS3 dev kit, both of which elicited many oohs and aahs, despite the fact the PS3 version wasn't running on all of the system's SPUs and contained some textures from Unreal Tournament 2004. For a more in-depth look at the demonstrations, check out Gamespot and GamesIndustry.biz.

Read - Epic shows off Unreal tools [Gamespot]
Read - Getting Unreal with Epic's Mark Rein [GamesIndustry.biz]