Eftirfarandi frétt fannst á <a href="http://www.planetunreal.com“>planetunreal.com</a>:

Good news for you aspiring UT2003 level designers and modelers out there: It's been announced that a version of Wavefront's Maya will be shipping with UT2003.
Alias|Wavefront, an SGI company, today announced that its Maya Personal Learning Edition software will be distributed with the highly-anticipated PC game, Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2003), developed by Digital Extremes in collaboration with Epic Games, Inc. and distributed by Infogrames, Inc. Each UT2003 box will contain a copy of Maya Personal Learning Edition and a special plug-in jointly developed by Epic and San Francisco-based Secret Level, Inc. This plug-in will allow dedicated game players/developers (MOD makers) to build and export game objects and characters to the game engine.
”Unreal Tournament had a very active and successful community of developers who created some spectacular modifications for the game using the tools we provided,“ said Mark Rein, Epic's Vice President. ”But, this is the first time we've been able to provide modeling and animation software as part of the package and we've got the best with Maya Personal Learning Edition. Secret Level also helped out by providing an enhanced plug-in to make it work seamlessly with the Unreal Editor.“

”UT2003 will be a crown jewel of first person shooters and we think Maya Personal Learning Edition working in concert with the Unreal Editor provides an unprecedented creative environment for those looking to expand on UT2003.“ explains Maya® marketing manager, Geoff Foulds. ”With the Maya Personal Learning Edition plug-in, MOD makers will be able to export levels and characters with a simple button push. And they will see the results instantly in the Unreal Editor window, side-by-side with their Maya Personal Learning Edition window. Epic has done a superb job of providing to the MOD community the kind of integrated 3D pipeline used by top game developers.“

Availability
The game is currently scheduled to ship in Fall 2003. Demonstrations of how the pipeline will work for creating MOD's for UT 2003 will be on display on the NVIDIA stand at the ECTS exhibition taking place August 29 - 31, London, UK.

What? Fall 2003?!?!? Don't freak out, Mark Rein was there to clear things up:

Holy smoke, did it actually say Fall 2003? Bummer!!!!
Nobody at Alias or Infogrames (or myself or Jay Wilbur who reviewed this for Epic) caught that huge TYPO! We're so used to seeing 2003 in various things about the game that our eyes just skip over it! UT2003 will be released in 2002 (two thousand and two), not 2003. It is actually funny how often I've said 2003 this year when I meant to say 2002. The guys who make sports games (like Madden, etc.) must go through this too.

Mark further explained what the heck you'd actually use Maya for:

Oops, small mistake in Geoff's quote that I didn't notice previously. It says you can export ”level“ but in actual fact you wouldn't use Maya for making whole levels but for making objects and decorations (static meshes) that are used in level design which you do in UnrealEd. But regardless being able to have Maya PLE along with Secret Level's plug-in is going to be a big boon to mod-makers and anyone who just wants to make cool stuff with the game.
From a content standpoint the addtion of Maya PLE in the package pretty much puts mod makers and users on an equal footing with professional game developers! Maya PLE has the full functionality of Maya Complete with just a few minor exceptions, the biggest of which (the inability to save in anything but their own private format) is eliminated if your source/destination is UT2003 anyway. Maya is a world-class modeling/animation package used by many of the biggest names in game development.<br><br>—-Fragman póstaði þessu——-
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