During Microsoft's Keynote presentation here at the 2008 Game Developers Conference, Epic Games had several things to talk about, and among them was some details on the Unreal Engine's new features.

Epic's Tim Sweeny took the stage and mentioned fancy, technical terms like ambient occlusion, new character pipelines, dynamic fluid engines, destructible environments, and soft body physics for the Xbox 360 version of the popular engine. I really had no idea what he was talking about, but all the game makers in the conference were nodding their heads. I had to settle for admiring the video footage.

One clip showed a rolling, soft ball of "meat" blobbing about. If this sounds disgusting, it should, and seeing it in motion was gross and cool at the same time. This footage was created to show off the soft body physics feature of the Unreal Engine. Marcus (from Gears of War) was able to interact with and even shoot this meatball, and it reacted in its own wobbly way.

Other additions include pretty new water physics and realistic enviroment destruction, but one of the most interesting clips showed over a hundred Locusts (also from Gears of War) in a crazy swarm. I don't know what this footage was showing off as far as technical features goes, but I sure hope that Epic isn't thinking of including anything like that into Gears of War 2.