Animation software developer NaturalMotion has announced that 38 Studios, a new developer and publisher founded by baseball pitcher Curt Schilling, has licensed the company’s morpheme animation engine for its upcoming PC MMO game.

NaturalMotion says the morpheme middleware is "designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and state machines in real time."

The package is available for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PC, and, with version 1.3, was integrated with Epic's Unreal Engine 3.

38 Studios also recently announced an agreement to license BigWorld’s Technology Suite for the MMO.

Said 38 Studios chief technology officer Jon Laff: "When selecting middleware we are very careful to find solutions that enable us to focus our attention on our game. morpheme allows us to create very high-quality character animations quickly, cutting down on a lot of intensive animation design and implementation time.”