The rumour is true as 2K Community Manager, 2K Elizabeth confirms: the recently released $5 cosmetic Downloadable Content for BioShock 2 is already on the game disc. Ponying up the cash simply unlocks the extras. (thanks Evil Avatar)

I noticed there was a bit of confusion about our Sinclair Solutions Tester Pack file size, and I wanted to clear things up for you. The way our engine and game structure works is that people need to have the exact same content for people to play together. One of the challenges with post launch content for MP is that it can split the player base, and we want to avoid that whenever possible. For this content, creating the DLC package the way we did allowed for us to not split the player base – so whether you purchase the new content or not, you can still play with your friends.

I know some of you have strong beliefs about DLC, and I'm not here to sway your opinion or convince you to buy our stuff - if you like what we're offering, I hope you get it and enjoy it. If it's not your speed, enjoy BioShock 2 as we released it.

I want to let you know that DLC is not interfering with our patching capabilities, which are a top priority and are still being actively worked on. We're committed to supporting you and making BioShock 2 the best experience possible.

I hope this clears up a lot of the questions and confusion in this thread!

Calling it DLC might have lead to that confusion.

Kotaku summarizes Mark Rein's presentation of the new Unreal Engine 3 features at the GDC. Among the surprises are Mercury Cubes and a city-building on-the-fly exercise. Kotaku rightly points out that Unreal Engine demonstrations are often indications of things that will soon make their way into new Epic Games.

Another demo showed a floating blob of liquid medal that warbled fluidly. "Remember last year we had the meat cube?" Epic Games vice president Mark Rein asked his audience here. He was referring to a GDC demonstration of Unreal from two years ago when a bloody cube of flesh was shown, getting shot up and chopped away, a precursor to some of the gore in Gears of War 2."This is the mercury cube."

In another demonstration, an Epic engineer zipped through a city scene, showing off how quickly he could drop in new buildings and construct a vast and detailed city.

Rein pointed out this was just programmer art, even though it already looked passable. "One day we'll show you what we're doing with this. When you see what we're doing with this, it's going to blow your mind."

In related news Gamespot points out the announcement Epic Games made today regarding the integration of NVIDIA's 3D Vision into Unreal Engine 3.

News from the GDC: Epic Games announces that Unreal Engine 3 now provides full Steamworks integration for licensees. Here's hoping that encourages more developers to go that route instead of the deficient Games for Windows LIVE platform. The press release follows:

CARY, N.C., March 11, 2010 - Epic Games, Inc. and Valve Software LLC, two of the PC industry's leading technology and content development studios, have inked an agreement to deliver Valve's Steamworks suite of services to all licensees of Epic's industry-leading Unreal Engine 3 for use in their products, free of any additional fees.

"Valve has created a world-wide phenomenon with Steam and we're excited to be able to have the Steamworks suite of services available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees so they can take full advantage of all that Steam has to offer," said Mark Rein, co-founder and vice president of Epic Games. "With Valve offering these services free of charge, the idea of providing the Steamworks SDK to all Unreal Engine licensees was a no-brainer."

"Epic's technology is one of the most widely used engines in the industry and has powered many of the best games created in the past 10 years, on multiple platforms," said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. "It's an honor to have Steamworks included in the technology offered to all Unreal Engine 3 licensees. It's hard to think of a larger, better targeted group of developers who could derive more benefit from the Steamworks services."

Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles and PCs, providing the vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by top game developers. Every aspect of the Unreal Engine has been designed with ease of content creation and programming in mind, with the goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists and designers to develop assets and gameplay in a visual environment with minimal programmer assistance; and to give programmers a highly modular, scalable and extensible framework for building, testing, and shipping games in a wide range of genres.

Steamworks is a complete suite of publishing and development tools that offers PC game developers and publishers access to the game features and services available through Steam. These include product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology and more. The features and services available in Steamworks are offered free of charge and may be used for both electronic and tangible versions of games.

The March version of the Unreal Development Kit has been released. Loads of new and updated documentation as well.

Autodesk FBX format support (FBX version 2010.2)

• Static meshes, skeletal meshes and animations can now be imported from FBX files
• The FBX format is supported by many 3D modeling packages including 3ds Max, Maya, and MotionBuilder.
• Download FBX plug-ins from Autodesk

Interactive Static Meshes

• Static meshes can now be configured so that all instance of that mesh placed in a level can become dynamic and react with physics when shot or pushed, giving the environment a more interactive feel.
• The advantages of this implementation are:
  • Consistent behavior - all objects using that mesh will be interactive, instead of it depending on level designer set up.
  • Transparent to meshing - L.D.s don't have to do anything special, but they can prevent specific objects from being able to become dynamic when necessary.
  • These meshes are lit like any other static meshes until they move so there is no visual impact to using this system.
  • No additional performance or memory cost to these meshes except during the short period when a mesh is being physically simulated.
• This system is intended for use with small decorative meshes that don't have any gameplay implications.
  • The interactivity is client-side and is not replicated.

New Attachment Editor

• For displaying and modifying object relationships
• Lets you view and edit the attachment graph for a selected set of actors

mipmap sharpening

• Increases perceived resolution of textures w/o memory or performance impact

Property window favorites

• Simply mark a property as a favorite and it will always be displayed at the top of your property window.
• Combined with the search capability, this will greatly stream-line data access in the Unreal Editor.

Declaring that the Borderlands DLC would become a template for future games, Take-Two CEO Ben Feder also let slip that they would "continue to support the title with more digital content" Eurogamer has more.