“What I believe Mr. Carmack said was that he did not currently see a compelling reason to develop on DX10,” Wickham says, adding: "We obviously work with id, and a lot of id’s progeny.”

“Stay tuned.” Wickham thinks we’ll see great DirectX 10 titles from all of the developers that one would expect to see on the cutting edge. “I will be shocked and amazed if id doesn’t build a DirectX 10 title some day,” he says, adding, “And I will suspect that it will be sooner rather than later.”

We are updating with nine of the weapon models and three maps. As always we are hard at work towards our first beta. A special thanks goes out to [Rapid-Fire] for all of the tea, crumpets and map textures he provided to our mappers. FA2 is currently looking for texture artists and mappers, if you are interested pm Jonneh on the forums.

"The executive also revealed some tidbits about the plot of the Aliens game, which is due on 'next-gen platforms' in 2009. 'Our game's about becoming a Colonial Marine, and looking at it from the Colonial Marines' perspective,' explained Pitchford. The Colonial Marines battled the acid-blooded xenomorphs in Aliens, and were a template for the troopers who fight alongside the Master Chief in the Halo games.

"Pitchford also revealed there was a limited amount of collaboration going on between Gearbox and Obsidian Entertainment (Neverwinter Nights II), which is making an Aliens-based role-playing game. 'There's people on our production team that share things with them,' he said, before explaining the two titles were 'going in totally different directions.'"

Tim Sweeney: The Gears of War experience on Xbox 360 taught us to optimize for multi-core, and to improve the low-level performance of the key engine systems. This has carried over very well to PC. The division of UE3's rendering and gameplay into separate threads, implemented originally for 360, has brought even more significant gains on PC where there is a more heavyweight hardware abstraction layer in DirectX, hence more CPU time spent in rendering relative to gameplay.

Also, the 360 work we did resulted in an engine that also runs well on low-end and mid-range PCs. This is very important for games today; the high-end PC gaming market alone is not big enough to support next-generation games with budgets in the $10-20M range. You need to run on ordinary mass-market PCs as well. In reading PC gaming websites, one might get the impression that everyone owns a dual-core PC with a pair of $600 GPUs in SLI configuration, but the reality is very different. More than 80% of PCs sold today are still single-core, and have very low-end DirectX9 graphics capabilities. Unreal Engine 3 supports those configurations well.

PCGH: How do the general hardware requirements look like?

Epic: Since optimization work is still ongoing, these details may change every day. Generally speaking, the game runs quite smooth with DX9 hardware released by NVidia and Ati since 2006. On high-end cards, including the DX10 models, UT3 runs incredibly smooth already. Additionally, we also support shader 2.0 graphics hardware, with only a few technical limitations.

PCGH: Will SLI and Crossfire provide significant advantages?

Epic: We're testing SLI configurations on a regular basis. Their positive influence can be felt significantly, especially at higher resolutions. So, if one wants to have full details at very high resolutions, a SLI-system would be the ideal way to secure optimal performance. We had no opportunity to test crossfire systems yet, but we are expecting similar results.

We don't know when the game will be released but it won't be ready in time for September 3rd. In addition the idea that we would release the game in the US and UK several weeks apart is just plain silly.

The Interlopers video section has been neglected for a long time so with that in mind I have given it a much needed update. Firstly there is now a dedicated 4-part Beginner's Guide that takes you from opening a new map right through to compiling your first room. All newbies should start there. Secondly I have re-recorded all the other tutorials, combined sections of previous videos into each other and also created brand new ones.

We present a new map, Westerlyn. And also showcasing some in-game scenes from one of our Alpha playtests. Some of the Audio from the Alpha tests aren't perfectly recorded onto the movie, but it gives you a pretty good idea of how it can and will look once the game is ready.

And yes, we have some more media to show! You may have seen the exclusive render of the WIP skinned loader we showed during a ModDB interview, now the skin is completed and there is a higher quality beauty render on the Media page! In addition, we have some more shots of Residue Processing, new shots of the multiplayer map Rapidcore, and a Bullsquid animation video, showcasing some of this Xenian's animations.

* Many, many, many bugs/design features (hah) quashed and fixed, resulting in better performance, particularly serverside. Thanks to Kiros72 for highlighting and helping to fix a variety of problematic areas.

* Reworked EXP system: that is, it's gone. No more killing monsters for points and gaining rewards. Instead, certain monsters will randomly drop these items, ranging from small health packs to teleporters and explosive orbs. The new system uses the standard UT2004 inventory keys.

* The Impact Hammer is now a possession tool. In particular maps, you can now manipulate various objects such as seats, spheres, statues and other structures to build barricades with. Additionally, you throw these objects at enemies, usually for massive damage (a cookie to the person who can identify where that phrase came from!).

* Weapons reworked. Typically, the main weapon set in each map will now be the uWM variants (those that Radiosity designed). The other weapons, such as the Riot Shotgun, Flamethrower and Toyomoto Cannon will be designated as special weapons that are not always readily available. The Riot Shotgun has had a slick redesign thanks to Daedalus (screenshots below), and the Kalashi rifle (using the model from Unreal 2) has been introduced into the arsenal.

* General refinement of the map choices and the custom scripting within them. Doesn't sound very exciting, but it will stop them breaking servers!