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PC gamer, WorthPlaying EIC, globe-trotting couch potato, patriot, '80s headbanger, movie watcher, music lover, foodie and man in black -- squirrel!

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Unreal Development Kit - May Beta Available NOW

by Rainier on May 25, 2010 @ 8:00 a.m. PDT

Epic Games launched the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), a free edition of Unreal Engine 3, providing the community access to the toolset like never before, and has now released an updated version.

Get the Unreal Development Kit May 2010 Beta off WP (750mb)

UDK is available to anyone interested in using 3D game engine technology, from game developers to students, hobbyists to researchers, and creators of architectural walkthroughs to digital filmmakers. Use of UDK is free for all schools and students, and anyone can release free UDK-powered games.

Extensive UDK technical documentation is available at the Unreal Developer Network, and community members can share ideas, show off projects and learn from UDK developers like Psyonix and The Prometheus Team.

3D Buzz will soon release dozens of free video tutorials specific to UDK to complement the company’s existing Unreal Engine 3 video training modules. Over 100 Unreal Technology videos are viewable at the 3D Buzz web site free of charge.

Individuals and companies wishing to develop software for commercial purposes should refer to licensing terms. Commercial terms have been structured to make it easy for independent developers, start-up firms and seasoned professionals to use UDK with minimal financial barrier from concept to deployment.

New UDK games: We regularly post information about the best UDK games and applications at www.udk.com/showcase. Check out these exciting projects:

  • ·         Angels Fall First: Planetstorm, a multiplayer sci-fi war game fought in space and on the ground. Crew gigantic capital ships in first person, pilot fighters and launch dropships to board other vessels, or wield advanced ground assault vehicles, infantry and aero-craft to achieve victory.
  • ·         Bounty Arms, a classic 3D side-scrolling action game. Battle a range of enemies across the galaxy, join up with comrades, unlock hidden doors to secrets and collect power-ups that alter your character and weapons.
  • ·         Hazard: The Journey of Life, a philosophical first-person, single-player exploration puzzle art game. The game presents no goals directly; rather, it is up to players to create goals based on what they know of the world.

Are you working on something you want the world to see? Display your work in the Project Show-Off forums.

Don’t forget, you can now purchase a commercial UDK license over the web. It’s easy and secure.

Many notable additions and improvements are included with this month’s beta release:

§  Scaleform GFX user interface solution now available!

§  Steam is now the default online distribution system.

§  Make more beautiful games with light shafts, exponential height fog, color grading and many other new technological advances.

§  Save time and enjoy better performance with dozens of engine upgrades.

Scaleform GFx (screenshot)

·         Scaleform is now supported in UnrealEd and in-game! (watch video)

·         Supports

o   UI screens

o   Dynamic interaction via UnrealScript or Kismet

o   SWFs playing into dynamic render targets

·         GFx version of UDK HUD, scoreboard and pause menu now fully functional

·         Added example Adobe Flash Studio files to UDKGame/Flash/example/...

o   Controller input setup for GFx movies

o   Basic scene using Scaleform CLIK components to create a UI

o   Files: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Scaleform.html#UDK Example UI Files

·         New GFx import path

o    Textures used by SWF movies imported from original art

o    Current import path is not final; subject to change!

o   More details: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Scaleform.html#Importing Pipeline

·         Started implementing localization for GFx menus

·         Additional documentation: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Scaleform.html

Steam

·         Steam is now the default OnlineSubsystem for UDKGame Win32

·         Steam now handles friends, matchmaking and server browsing in the UDK

Light Shafts (screenshot)

·         Point Lights are now supported

·         Added Bloom Threshold and BloomTint properties

·         Documentation: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentBlog.html#Light Shafts

Exponential Height Fog (screenshot)

·         New kind of global fog with density that decreases with height

·         Never creates a hard line (unlike standard fog); supports one layer

·         Can specify both "towards the light" and "away from the light" colors

·         Rendering cost similar to two layers of constant density height fog

·         Can now use different colors for the hemisphere facing the light and vice versa

Color Grading Blending (screenshot)

·         Can now blend between different color LUTs on different post process volumes!

·         Documentation: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ColorGrading.html

Editor

·         UDK now supports running 64-bit binaries for the editor

·         Added ‘search by object’ type to Kismet

·         New mesh emitter camera facing option: "Apply Particle Rotation As Spin"

·         Editor now shows up in system tray while starting up (and Alt+Tab works!)

·         Can now capture content browser thumbnails from PIE viewports

·         Added ability to tint editor icons similar to Point Lights

·         PNGs can now be imported as textures; RGB and RGBA formats are supported

·         Viewports

o   New Alt+F/G/H/J shortcuts to switch between viewport types

o   Greatly reduced the time it takes for volume visibility updates

Installer

·         Now being localized for

o   INT - English

o   FRA - French

o   ITA - Italian

o   DEU - German

o   ESN - European Spanish

o   ESM - Latin American Spanish

o   RUS - Russian

o   HUN - Hungarian

o   CZE - Czech

o   SLO - Slovakian

o   POL - Polish

o   JPN - Japanese

o   CHN - Simplified Chinese

o   KOR - Korean

Editor Fixes

·         Materials can no longer be placed as decals unless the decal usage flag is set

·         Fixed fog volumes being created when dropping materials sometimes

·         Fixed support for non-standard languages

FBX Importer

·         Added support for rigid animation!

·         FBX import settings are now remembered between sessions

·         Importer will detect the type of asset to import by peeking at the FBX file

·         New import option to override naming of imported assets

·         Textures can now be imported (with or without a material being created)

·         The FBX import dialog has been improved

·         Updated to the latest FBX SDK (2011.2)

·         Can now re-import skeletal meshes from FBX files

·         Fixed smoothing group warning dialog spam on mesh import

UDKGame

·         Scaleform / UI

o   Added (prototype) Scaleform-based front end and HUD to UDKGame

o   Added GFx example content to ExampleMap

o   Scaleform implementations of HUD, Pause Menu, Scoreboard

·         Code clean-up

o   Moved UT-specific functionality from Weapon to UTWeapon.

o   Moved HUDIcons and HUDCoords properties from UDKVehicleBase to UTVehicle

o   Cleaned up UDK default engine.inis down to two

o   Moved DeathTime from UDKPawn to UTPawn

o   Removed unused UDKPawn property LookYaw

o   Removed PlayFiringSound() call from Weapon.FireAmmunition() (not implemented for any game except UTGame)

o   Moved bio death material effect system from UDKPawn to UTPawn

·         Enabled tone mapping and color grading support to UDK

o    Enabled by default now so all scenes will receive contrast-enhancing tone mapping

·         Misc

o    Changed input handling of controller demo to not recurse, therefore stopping the CLIK button from swallowing the GAMEPAD_A event

o   Spawn player as spectator if ?causeevent=flythrough is passed on the commandline

o    Set bFixedPlayerStart=true, bForceRespawn=true, and bQuickStat=true if ?causeevent=flythrough is passed on the commandline

Swarm

·         Fixed several issues related to version numbers and matching Agents to Jobs

·         Change usage of "localhost" to using the localhost IP address (127.0.0.1) instead

Gameplay Profiler

·         Replacing old UE2 ueScriptProfiler

·         Adds ability to drill into actor and component tick

·         Documentation: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/GameplayProfiler.html

Attachment Editor

·         Draw bone/socket label on connector for actors attached to skeletal meshes

·         Allow nodes to be manually moved around

·         Allow attachments to be made in a more 'Kismet like' way

NavMesh

·         Lots of runtime navmesh optimizations (mostly related to dynamic submesh builds)

o   Huge speed gains

AnimSet Viewer

·         Added copy and paste animations to the AnimSet browser

·         New options for calculating Bone Break

o   Default: Both meshes have to influence to use rigid

o   Auto Detect Rigid: Detects rigid when soft body misses the weight

o   Alternate weight preferred: Second weight has more priority

·         Added "Delete selected bone weighting" option

·         "Toggle Mesh Weights" option

o   Displayed if there is a valid set of weights for the current LOD

o   Otherwise, the option is disabled

·         Added info to display chunks/sections when swapping vertex weights

Max Quality Mode

·         Added MaxQualityMode option for taking high-resolution screenshots

·         Increases texture res and shadow quality regardless of performance

Property Multi-Select and Cut-Paste

·         Control-Click on properties to add to selection

·         Control-C, Control-V or right click to copy and paste!

Lighting Changes

·         Improved unbuilt lighting performance

·         Changed bUseBooleanEnvironmentShadowing to default to TRUE for best performance

o   Light environments will not receive dynamic shadows from the static environment unless bUseBooleanEnvironmentShadowing is changed back to false!

·         Primitives with bShadowIndirectOnly=true no longer cast dynamic shadows

·         Added bForceNoPrecomputedLighting to WorldInfo, allowing maps with fully dynamic lighting to skip time-consuming light building during a full rebuild

·         Hid light environment settings that are rarely used, edge cases, or only set by gameplay code to simplify the interface

Scene Capture Optimizations

·         'Max View Distance Override': Set a culling distance for objects rendered into the reflection

·         'Skip Update If Owner Occluded': Skip rendering to the scene capture entirely if it's not going to be visible

·         'Skip Rendering Depth Prepass': Controls whether a depth prepass is performed when rendering the scene capture

·         Capture will be culled if last-bound time of the render target texture is more than a second ago

Rendering

·         Added map check warning for large shadow casters unless they have bAcceptsDynamicDominantLightShadows=false

·         New mesh emitter camera facing option: bApplyParticleRotationAsSpin

·         Changed bRenderAsVelocity to default to TRUE for RadialBlurComponents as they are much faster to render this way

·         Mesh area lights now affect dynamic objects!

o   UE3 creates a spotlight at the center of the emissive area which is applied to dynamic objects

·         Added a new volume type: LightmassCharacterIndirectDetailVolume

o   Lightmass generates higher density indirect character lighting samples inside these volumes

o   Useful for sections where characters are not over static ground, e.g., elevators

·         Using down-sampled scene texture for depth of field, bloom and motion blur  http://epicwiki.epicgames.net/display/UEWiki/DOF+and+Bloom

UDN Documentation

New

Updated

Warnings

·         Exporting TGAs is temporarily broken and results in weird interlaced images

Upcoming changes (as of the next UDK build)

·         SM2 support will be removed

Additional notes, code samples and more are available at the Unreal Developer Network (UDN): http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitHome.html

UDK includes:

  • The Unreal Editor toolset, complete with fully integrated game editing environment.
  • Unreal Gemini multithreaded rendering system with support for all modern rendering and shading techniques, advanced lighting and shadowing, ambient occlusion and a powerful material system for creating complex shaders on the fly.
  • Unreal Lightmass global illumination solver for high-quality static lighting.
  • Unreal PhAT visual physics modeling tool with state-of-the-art physics system powered by NVIDIA PhysX.
  • Unreal Kismet, an advanced visual scripting solution that facilitates rapid prototyping of ideas and gameplay mechanics.
  • AnimSet Viewer and AnimTree Editor, which give animators precise control over every muscle and bone movement.
  • Unreal Matinee, which includes movie director-class tools for creating in-game cut scenes and gorgeous cinematics.
  • UnrealScript, a fully integrated, high-level object-oriented programming language.
  • Unreal Cascade particle effects system for implementing explosions, fog, fire and smoke. Module-based system gives real-time previews of visual effects.
  • Terrain building tool for placing and customizing vegetation, structures and countless in-game points of interest.
  • Audio control through UnrealEd's visual Sound Cue Editor, plus support for major audio compression schemes; 3D sound positioning, spatialization and attenuation; multi-channel playback, and much more. Built-in Internet and LAN networking support for up to 64 players.
  • Integrations with leading game development middleware including NVIDIA PhysX, SpeedTree, FaceFX and Bink Video.
Included Content:

UDK ships with "UT Demo," which is demo content from "Unreal Tournament 3" consisting of four maps: Deck, Necropolis, Sanctuary, and Sandstorm; with deathmatch, team deathmatch, and vehicle capture the flag gametypes. Assets include one robot character, three weapons and four vehicles.

In "UT Demo," blood, gore and human opponents have been removed. Levels have been enhanced to showcase recent upgrades to UE3 technology. See udk.com/showcase-ut-game.html for comparison screenshots.

The "Unreal Tournament 3" Unreal Editor is widely used for learning UE3, and now UDK provides all of its game creation tools in addition to high-level engine features developed since the game?s release. "UT Demo" is an excellent starting point to explore UDK?s capabilities, especially for those looking to develop their own first-person shooter experience.

System requirements

Minimum:
  • Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
  • 2.0+ GHz processor
  • 2 GB system RAM
  • SM3-compatible video card
  • 3 GB Free hard drive space
Recommended for Content Development:
  • Windows Vista 64 SP2
  • 2.0+ GHz multi-core processor
  • 8 GB System RAM
  • NVIDIA 8000 series or higher graphics card
  • Plenty of HDD space
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