Epic Launches Free Unreal Development Kit

[mindcycle]

Gears of War and Unreal developer Epic Games today released its Unreal Engine 3 dev tools as a free download, aimed at providing noncommercial and educational use of the technology that powers many PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games.

The 563MB Unreal Development Kit can be found on FileShack, with various Unreal Tournament 3 assets included to help you get started. Two UDK-crafted sample games are also available: Psyonix's vertical puzzler Whizzle and Toltec's The Ball.

"I'm excited about the possibilities the Unreal Development Kit opens to those who are looking to get into the game business but don't otherwise have the means to acquire world-class technology and tools like ours," said Epic VP Mark Rein. "UDK is Unreal Engine 3, which has been used to create games in a wide range of genres, as well as military simulations, 3D architectural walkthroughs, animated movies and more."

Read the rest on Shacknews: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/61138

 

[Kromis]

This is definitely some good shit.

 

[s44]

Does this mean we can mod Mass Effect?

 

[Modelworks]

Good for the mod community.
On a related note both unity and dark basic pro are now free and you can use unity in a commercial project.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2020150

 

[sticks435]

Does this mean we can mod Mass Effect?

No joke on this. Guess they got tired of everyone posting about how bad Garrus' face texture was, and the uproar when they said they wouldn't fix it.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

No joke on this. Guess they got tired of everyone posting about how bad Garrus' face texture was, and the uproar when they said they wouldn't fix it.

That was fixed in the last patch.

 

[Zenoth]

Mass Effect and Borderlands would greatly benefit from an active community working on different mods, I could see both, especially Borderlands turning into new Elder Scrolls in terms of community mods, not as much, of course, but still, it would help them both and many other UE3-based games out there, it's a fantastic move.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

How does Epic benefit from this? Don't get me wrong, it's awesome and I can't wait to dive into it, but what does Epic gain?

 

[coloumb]

Awesome. I wish we would've had this quality of free gaming tools back in the early days of Quake...

 

[Zenoth]

How does Epic benefit from this? Don't get me wrong, it's awesome and I can't wait to dive into it, but what does Epic gain?

It gains a lot of respect by the PC gaming community, releasing a tool kit for a PC game is one of the most fundamental feature of PC gaming itself, just ask the modders of the Elder Scrolls series and those still to this day actively working on mods for Morrowind and those having it installed just to play those mod and even suggested strangers on forums and their friends to go buy it and try out those mods.

In other words it increases the life span of a game and a franchise, for how long, it's difficult to say, it depends on what the tool is capable of doing mostly, the more it can do, the more it's easy to work with, the more people are on it, the more mods you get, and the longer your game/franchise last. I'll say it again, the best example is the Elder Scrolls series and its Construction Set along with the GECK tools. The other very good example is the modding community for Half-Life/GoldSrc-based games (Sven Co-Op, Poke646, Natural Selection, and literally hundreds of other such mods).

There's also all the mods based on the DOOM source code, etc. Just take a look at the videos on YouTube of the third-party/free mods for DOOM or even Quake, you can get stuff as weird as DOOM with Mario Brothers sprites and sounds or Quake with completely new levels.

 

[Fox5]

It keeps Epic around in the modding community. The poor sales of UT3 and Gears of War means almost no one is modding its engine. There have been sneak hits to come out of mods before (Red Orchestra, Counter Strike, a few others), and without this, none would be coming from Epics engine.

It also gets talent using Epic's tools and code. Epic loves to draw from the mod/mapping community for its new hires, so in a way, this is in direct competition with Valve and its very prolific source mod tools. (not sure if they're also free, but who doesn't own at least one valve game?)

 

[WhipperSnapper]

That's wonderful.

It's too bad they can't release a real sequel to Unreal Tournament (1999).

 

[n7]

That's wonderful.

It's too bad they can't release a real sequel to Unreal Tournament (1999).

You've got access to the dev kit now, why don't you do it? :twisted:


Seriously though, this is an epic win for modders!

 

[sticks435]

That was fixed in the last patch.

No, no it wasn't. They fixed the portrait resoluiton, but his in game texture is still crap. Go read the forums dude. There is a 15 page thread on it, and even a dev who commented that they don't have the time or resources to release a 1 gig texture pack with all the places it shows up.

 

[BladeVenom]

How does Epic benefit from this? Don't get me wrong, it's awesome and I can't wait to dive into it, but what does Epic gain?

All small studios, modders, and independent designers will now learn how to use the their engine. So the next new big game studios will use an Unreal engine since that is what everyone learned on and is familiar with.

 

[Lonyo]

All small studios, modders, and independent designers will now learn how to use the their engine. So the next new big game studios will use an Unreal engine since that is what everyone learned on and is familiar with.

Everyone already uses UnrealEngine.
Everyone.

 

[EarthwormJim]

How does Epic benefit from this? Don't get me wrong, it's awesome and I can't wait to dive into it, but what does Epic gain?

If indi-developers make a successful game on this engine, they're likely to develop more successful games and possibly grow in to a full fledged main-stream developer.

If they're success came because of an Unreal engine, wouldn't they be more likely to actually license future Unreal engines?

 

[BladeVenom]

Everyone already uses UnrealEngine.
Everyone.

While it may seem that way at times, it's far from the truth. Still plenty of game engines like Id Tech, Gamebryo, Source, Cryengine, Dunia, Vision, Hero, RNA, Riot Engine, Alamo, RAGE, X-Ray, Essence, and dozens more from smaller developers. Then there are still many developers who make their own proprietary engine for their games like CoD series, Battlefield series, Alan Wake, Diablo 3, etc.

 

[Dkcode]

How does Epic benefit from this? Don't get me wrong, it's awesome and I can't wait to dive into it, but what does Epic gain?

Epic can't be arsed to make PC games any more, so they throw the tools to us and say "here, make your own games".

Jokes aside i always appreciate these kind of things.