LithTech is a game engine which was initially developed by Monolith Productions in collaboration with Microsoft. Monolith later formed a separate company, LithTech Inc., to deal with further advancements of the engine technology and currently, after a change of its corporate identity, LithTech Inc. is known as Touchdown Entertainment.
 

A number of different video game developers, including Monolith itself, have used LithTech to power their first-person shooter games, establishing it as an alternative to other products, such as the Quake and Unreal engines. LithTech's latest incarnation is "Jupiter Extended" (or Jupiter EX).

 

LithTech 3.0

LithTech 3.0 was being developed concurrently with Talon, but, along with its revisions, LithTech 3.x would largely be considered an internal version of the engine. While it was sent to licensees, no games were finished on it. The primary feature announced for LithTech 3.x was the Distributed Object System, a new system for MMORPGs and multiplayer. Unfortunately, LithTech 3.x was also plagued by a significant number of bugs and problems and all games developed with LithTech 3.x would eventually convert to the newer LithTech Jupiter or to Talon.

 

The unreleased Monolith game Shogo II was being developed with this iteration of the LithTech engine.

 

LithTech Jupiter

LithTech Jupiter was a thorough overhaul of the LithTech technology, developed as an alternative to 3.x.[7] In some ways, the original version of Jupiter was even more technologically advanced than its competitors, since it supported Shader Model 1.x and included a visualization tool, whereas at the time Unreal and Quake only supported CPU-based shaders[citation needed

 

A custom version of Jupiter was made especially for Monolith, for use with their Tron 2.0 game; this release was codenamed LithTech Triton. Eventually, LithTech Triton's new features were merged back into LithTech Jupiter for licensees.