Epic Games had one of the larger booths inside the business center area of the Moscone Center during the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2013) – and with good reasons.

Just two weeks after the launch of its latest “Gears of War” title, a series that has produced more than $1 billion in sales across the first three titles alone, Epic sent a team to GDC to tout the continuing growth and evolution of its Unreal game development engine.

As usual, the booth was packed with developers, media and analysts throughout the conference. Epic founder Tim Sweeney and vice president Mark Rein kept busy with meetings and demonstrations of the latest Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) technology.

Epic Games has entered into a partnership with NVIDIA to use its UE4 technology to promote NVIDIA Project Shield. NVIDIA debuted the portable gaming device at its Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013) press conference, but Epic just revealed that the computer-generated video was actually a real-time UE4 demo.

(Related story: Epic embraces virtual reality technology.)

NVIDIA had three large HD TVs running Unreal Engine 4 graphics demos at its booth at the GDC Career Pavillion. NVIDIA also had some Unreal Engine 3 games running on its new Project SHIELD device, including Vivid Games’ Real Boxing and Adhesive Games’ HAWKEN. NVIDIA’s PhysX technology has been incorporated into UE4.

Epic has also partnered with Firefox developer Mozilla, which has developed new technology that will allow Unreal Engine 3 to play in web browsers very soon through HTML5. Mozilla has created a highly-optimized version of Javascript, which will allow developers to bring UE3 games directly to web browsers and, in turn, to the growing number of smartphones and tablets that are being utilized for gaming. Mozilla is collaborating with companies like Disney, EA and ZeptoLab to optimize their games for web on mobile.

“We showed Unreal Engine 3 on Flash last year and this year we have it running on web html 5 and javascript with no plug-ins and no compromises,” said Rein at GDC.

Martin Best, Games Platform Strategist at Mozilla, said at the Epic booth that this new technology near native performance in a browser.

This means that any Unreal PC game has the potential to run through the Web or on a mobile device without needing a browser.

“We’ve worked with Epic Games to show what can now be done on the web,” said Best. “It’s taken us two years of work to get to this level. This is the culmination of all that work. And working with Epic allowed us to turbo-charge this project. We’re looking forward to collaborating with them in the future.”

Rein used GDC to discuss the evolution of Unreal Engine technology. While the company continues to license its Unreal Engine 4 to developers, UE3 remains a mainstay for game makers. The recently released BioShock Infinite from Irrational Games – one of the best-reviewed games of the year – was developed using that technology.

“We originally created this engine to compete with teams larger than us so we could out-produce them and get better results with smaller teams,” said Rein. “In our early days, we put a lot of our profits from game sales into the engine. Over the years, Unreal has powered some of best games out there.”

When you add in BioShock Infinite, five of the Top 10 best reviewed Xbox 360 games were made with UE3. Four of the Top 12 games of 2012 were developed with Unreal. Upcoming games on display at GDC like Capcom’s Remember Me, Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment’s Injustice: Gods Among Us and Tecmo Koei’s Ninja Gaiden Z are also being developed with UE3.

Rein singled out a few smaller game studios as an example of how easy it is to use Unreal Engine technology. Adhesive Games’ HAWKEN Mech shooter was created by a team of a dozen developers. The game was demoed at GDC running on the new Oculus Rift virtual reality headset with head tracking and stereo 3D. Another independent developer, Zombie Studios, is developing a new Unreal Engine 4 game called Daylight with just a team of six. The new horror game will trap players in a haunted insane asylum and each playthrough will be unique thanks to procedurally-generated rooms.

Jared Gerritzen, Studio Head and Creative Director of Zombie Studios, said his small team was able to create Daylight in under six months.

“Developers can do things they haven’t been able to before with Unreal Engine 4 like create a environments from scratch and provide massive replayability with procedurally generated challenges,” said Gerritzen.

The first PlayStation 4 UE4 game will come from developer Lukewarm Media, which is created the dinosaur action game Primal Carnage Genesis. That game is being developed by a team of 20. Rein said Epic is excited about small developers being able to do “big boy stuff” with this UE4 technology.

Epic continues to develop its own UE4 game, Fortnite. The game was not on display at GDC but Rein did mention it in his presentation.

That PC game will blend action and strategy as gamers build forts and then protect them from invading monsters in a multiplayer experience.

With Epic also continuing to develop Infinity Blade Dungeons, UE3 is being used for many mobile games today. Rein said UE4 will be more efficient for mobile devices because of changes in the engine that will allow for the full power of the engine to be displayed on smartphones and tablets.

Rein did mention that while there are many UE3 games running on the Nintendo Wii U, UE4 is being developed for PlayStation 4, the new Xbox console, PC and the web (through HTML5). He said UE4 wouldn’t run on the Wii U, which isn’t as powerful a device as the new consoles coming from Sony and Microsoft this fall.

“Unreal Engine 4 is written in C++, which is the defacto language of programming as more people know that language than any other,” said Rein. “It’s been designed to help developers provide maximum power regardless of their team size or business model.”

Epic continues to offer its UDK for free to aspiring game makers and small development teams. The UDK has been downloaded more than 2 million times already.

[EPIC ARCHIVE: Check out more than a decade of Epic Games stories as reported in WRAL Tech Wire.]