Micro Forté was on hand at GDC to demonstrate the latest version of its BigWorld online engine, which Microsoft 2896028announced last October would be at the heart of an upcoming Xbox online game. The BigWorld engine has been in development for four years and was designed from the ground up to support an extremely large number of players in seamless worlds. We found out that the planned PC game, BigWorld: Citizen Zero , is effectively on hold because Micro Forté is putting the majority of its resources, including 45 of its 60 total employees, into developing the Xbox game.

　　BigWorld was conceived as a complete high-end engine and includes both the graphics engine and networking technology. The demo shown at GDC took place in rolling hills covered with lush grass. There were many dozens of nonplayer characters wandering through the area to give an example of how the engine can support a lot of characters on the screen at once. Zooming in to look at the player character showed a high-detail model that was nicely animated with blinking eyes and lip syncing. There's a material system that tracks whether parts of a player's armor are made of metal or leather, and it can then apply an appropriate visual effect, like metal's shininess.

　　To maintain a solid frame rate, the engine's level of detail (LOD) system can greatly reduce the number of polygons in distant objects. The animation system is flexible enough to allow model meshes to morph and still maintain the facial animations, and we watched as the player's head morphed into a goblinlike shape, as if by a spell. The morphing can also be used to allow players to further customize the body and facial shapes of characters.

　　As its name implies, it's the networking technology that's been a big focus for BigWorld. The engine can support up to 4 million players and doesn't require sharding--breaking up the gameworld into separate servers--except in ways that developers find necessary for gameplay reasons. The world doesn't require any zoning and can seamlessly transition from exterior to interior environments. The server technology is said to be very stable and has been complete since last year.

　　Micro Forté representatives naturally couldn't reveal any information on the upcoming Xbox game. We even found out that the content and environments in the demo aren't representative of the Xbox game, and as a few hobbit holes in the green hills hinted, the demo level was originally created for a Lord of the Rings online project. We'll have more details as they become available.