Unreal Engine 3 is a complete game development framework for next-generation consoles and DirectX9-equipped PCs, providing the vast array of core technologies, content creation tools, and support infrastructure required by top game developers.

Every aspect of the Unreal Engine has been designed with ease of content creation and programming in mind, with the goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists and designers to develop assets in a visual environment with minimal programmer assistance; and to give programmers a highly modular, scalable and extensible framework for building, testing, and shipping games in a wide range of genres.

Main Features:

  • 64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.

  • Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; custom artist controlled per material lighting models including anisotropic effects; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; directional light maps; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.

  • Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for four shadowing techniques:
    • Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.

    • Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows on the scene using shadow buffers. Shadow buffer filtering takes samples on a jittered disc that are rotated per-pixel to detect shadow penumbras. Dynamic branching is then used to refine shadow coverage in penumbra regions.
    • Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.

    • Directional Light Mapping enables the static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting of an unlimited number of lights to be precomputed and stored into a single set of texture maps, enabling very large light counts in high-performance scenes.

  • All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.

  • Volumetric environmental effects including height fog.

  • Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.
  • UnrealKismet, our visual scripting system:
    • Gives artists and level designers virtually limitless control over how a level will play without touching a single line of code.
    • By connecting together simple events and actions created by programmers, everything from simple behaviours to complete gameplay prototypes can be assembled quickly.
    • UnrealKismet supports hierarchies of scripts for organizing very complex sequences into manageable units.

  • The Unreal Editor (UnrealEd) is a pure “What You See Is What You Get” content creation tool filling the void between XSI, 3D Studio Max and Maya, and shippable game content.

  • A powerful browser framework for finding, viewing, and organizing game assets of all types.
  • Visual placement and editing of gameplay objects such as players, NPCs, inventory items, AI path nodes, and light sources – with a full realtime view of their appearance, including 100% dynamic shadowing.
  • Includes a data-driven property editing framework, allowing level designers to easily customize any game object, and programmers to expose new customizable properties to designers via script.

  • Realtime terrain editing tools allowing artists to elevate terrain, paint alpha layers onto terrain to control layer blending and decoration layers, collision data, and displacement maps.

  • Visual Material Editor. By visually connecting the color, alpha and coordinate outputs of textures and programmer-defined material components, artists can create materials ranging from simple layered blends to extremely complex materials and dynamically interacting with scene lights.

  • Animation tool enables artists to import models, skeletons, and animations, and to tie them to in-game events such as sounds and script notifications.

  • In-editor “Play Here” button puts gameplay just one mouse click and a fraction of a second away. Here, you can test gameplay in-editor in one window while modifying objects and rearranging geometry in another.

  • Plug-ins for 3D Studio Max and Maya to bring models into the Unreal engine with mesh topology, mapping coordinates, smoothing groups, material names, skeleton structure, and skeletal animation data.

  • Fully integrated source control, so that artists and level designers can check out content packages, modify, and check in from within the editor.
  • All the other niceties you'd expect from a modern content editing tool: Multi-level undo/redo, drag-and-drop, copy-and-paste; customizable key and color configuration; viewport management.
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147 comments by INtense! on Nov 5th, 2009 digg this super bookmark


Only a week after Unity announced the free use of their engine for indie and mod teams, Epic Games has unveiled UDK UNREAL DEVELOPMENT KIT (clever name that) for use by indie and mod teams. While the choice of tools and engines available to mod and indie developers increases by the day, traditionally engines the magnitude and relevance of UE have been out of the reach of smaller teams due to licensing costs edging close to a million.


However while it may be free to develop and release a non-commercial game, should you wish to profit from your hard work the current UDK license states that 25% of all revenue earnt beyond $5,000 will be paid to Epic as your licensing cost. I consider this a small price to pay with no risk for developers who now have access to proven technology.


What will the developers do with this? Only time will tell, I for one see the availability of unrestrictive powerful tools like this as PROOF of the POWER that PC gaming still has. While traditional PC developers (i.e. Infinity Ward and others) may be shunning the PC crowd with "consolized" versions of their game and trying to convince us that the reason for these decisions are to provide a better experience, we know better, and we deserve better. No other platform provides the power and creativity possibilities that the PC does, no other platform makes you jump through hoops to release via digital distribution. Indie developers... I for one eagerly await the games you make because of decisions like this, as I know you only making games you want to make and play.

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Comments  (0 - 10 of 63)
Ekonk
Ekonk Nov 18 2009, 11:22am says:

Does this include all the materials, models, and sounds etc from Unreal Tournament?

Because if it doesn't, I kind of have no use for it.

+1 vote     reply to comment
CrystalCore
CrystalCore Nov 16 2009, 7:25am says:

This is a group for all UDK users, lets keep UE3 and UDK seperate :)
Moddb.com

+1 vote     reply to comment
ichiman14
ichiman14 Nov 11 2009, 11:12am says:

"64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline"
32-bit color is nice, but 64-bit color o_o

+1 vote     reply to comment
Johnchief117
Johnchief117 Nov 8 2009, 1:27pm says:

I am sorry if this is a stupid question, but now that I have UDK, could I use any Unreal Tournament 3 mod without UT3?

+1 vote     reply to comment
Bucky0125
Bucky0125 Nov 12 2009, 8:11pm replied:

Only if the mod developer has made a UDK version. It doesn't require too much for them to transition from UT3 to UDK though, so I think a lot of them will.

+1 vote     reply to comment
Johnchief117
Johnchief117 Nov 14 2009, 9:24pm replied:

ok.

+1 vote     reply to comment
RavenITA
RavenITA Oct 8 2009, 2:21pm says:

If only it had better BSP creation... I'd love to use it but making rooms like in Hammer requires MUCH more work

0 votes     reply to comment
fdslk
fdslk Oct 3 2009, 2:44am says:

how many polys can this one support? more than 30k? I read in UDN that Unreal 2.5 supportted 35k, but I'm not sure about it :S

+1 vote     reply to comment
GameGuy99
GameGuy99 Sep 26 2009, 11:52am says:

this engine is the most amazing engine ever!!!! the only thing it's missing is the destruction of Geo Mod 2.0

+1 vote     reply to comment
joeypc1
joeypc1 Oct 3 2009, 6:11am replied:

yeah lol geo-mod is Über awesome :D

+1 vote     reply to comment
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