Epic released Unreal Engine 3, for free! Thread

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Epic released Unreal Engine 3, for free! (Forums : Development Banter : Epic released Unreal Engine 3, for free!)	Post Reply
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Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer	Nov 5 2009, 5:01pm Anchor
I don't think its catchy when you consider that $1million licensing is catchy anyway. If you're making over $1million, and half of that goes to Epic and Steam, you've still made around $500,000... which isn't bad at all.. especially for an indie.. Also think of it like this.. that money will go to hopefully making the services that those companies provide better. Meanwhile if I had $500,000 from an awesome game, I'd be bloody happy, Most/if not all indie developers won't ever make that much from a single IP- We're just developing this to make a living off of, that's why we're indies- It is definitely possible though for an indie.. at least now to develop a $1mill profiting game. I think that this will improve the quality of indie games in general. If that's the only catch then, seriously its not a big deal. However I do agree with you with the Source Code issues.. for someone that relied on the technology side to give them an edge, this is a bad deal.. On the other hand though for someone that relies on content mostly this is a great deal. But hey if you do find anything sus please let me know.. I'd love to use the engine but if there's something bad hidden there I'd like to know about it. I'm wondering though how the other Engine developers will react to this news. Edited by: Mr_Cyberpunk
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Nov 5 2009, 5:07pm Anchor
Personally, I believe that this is where the school of design that favours manipulation of existing capabilties over battling to get required features will come to fare better - you can still rely on technology to give you the edge; you just need to orientate your goals to suit it.
MrTambourineMan Working on Maggie's Farm	Nov 5 2009, 5:10pm Anchor
Tripwire guys definitely made lots more money than 1/2 a million - if we can believe their publisher for boxed games they've sold 400k of RO alone - you do the maths. $500 000 would not nearly be enough to fund a year(or year and a half) of serious game development with 9,10 people (which is very indy). Edited by: MrTambourineMan
Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer	Nov 5 2009, 5:25pm Anchor
MrTambourineMan wrote:Tripwire guys definitely made lots more money than 1/2 a million - if we can believe their publisher for boxed games they've sold 400k of RO alone - you do the maths. $500 000 would not nearly be enough to fund a year(or year and a half) of serious game development with 9,10 people (which is very indy). This is why you use Community Funding and the Episodic business model as that way you'd have ongoing cash flow- no indie could capitalize the cost of this from the very start. I get what you mean though if you work out the fact that it costs around $60k-$80k per year for each staff member then it is very limiting.
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Nov 5 2009, 5:28pm Anchor
Alternatively you can pay your staff a lot less or work on a royalty based model. Has it's limitations mind - not everyone wants to work for peanuts / promised peanuts. So come on then? Who's game xD?
O N L I N E Dragonlord Linux-Dragon of quick wit and sharp tongue	Nov 5 2009, 5:30pm Anchor
ambershee wrote:Personally, I believe that this is where the school of design that favours manipulation of existing capabilties over battling to get required features will come to fare better - you can still rely on technology to give you the edge; you just need to orientate your goals to suit it. Depends on how much you can manipulate existing capabilities. I prefer a white box engine over a black box engine. What breaks games is usually not the design part but having to take out good ideas because you can't fumble the black box into the direction you need it. As mentioned above though it depends on the game in question. If the game is close to what UE is made for to begin with ( FPS games ) then this is the right horse to bet on. Indies in general though differ from AAA developers in that they like to venture outside the beaten path ( without stakeholders eating you hole if your game is not the next cash cow ). For this though you need a certain flexibility which a black box usually can not provide. This is where you need source code access and this requires lots of cash and lots of time ( you don't modify optimized foreign code over night ). But if you are up for a black box then why not mod an existing game which already has assets for you to use? @Mr_Cyberpunk: Not really something bad hidden. The only catch is that as soon as money is involved you have to get the pricey license. Only problem is when it counts as money involved and who decides this ( examples given already in this topic if I'm not mistaken... or some other website, not sure anymore ). So I assume as long as you put a huge no-money wall around you then anything is alright. But indies usually don't plan on using a no-money wall. -- Leader, Head Programmer: Epsylon \| Drag[en]gine Game Engine \| ModDB Profile by Salohcin
Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer	Nov 5 2009, 5:32pm Anchor
Ah I see DL but wouldn't you be able to protect yourself from that via Copyrights? (as in, you own the IP, therefore only you have a say in what happens to said IP.) Further more what Epic have essentially done is taken a Revenue Share from you, this is a perfectly normal practice in the industry.. what would have been awesome is if they also provided some publishing services too (like Marketing and Distribution).. aw well.. A lot of the time the Publisher and Developer take rev shares of the product they're selling.. its common practice- so think of it like that. From someone that is not established as a game developer I can understand how difficult funding a project with this would be- most of the AAA devs are already establish and have millions from prior successes to invest. Edited by: Mr_Cyberpunk
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Nov 5 2009, 5:38pm Anchor
Dragonlord wrote: ambershee wrote:Personally, I believe that this is where the school of design that favours manipulation of existing capabilties over battling to get required features will come to fare better - you can still rely on technology to give you the edge; you just need to orientate your goals to suit it. Depends on how much you can manipulate existing capabilities. I prefer a white box engine over a black box engine. What breaks games is usually not the design part but having to take out good ideas because you can't fumble the black box into the direction you need it. As mentioned above though it depends on the game in question. If the game is close to what UE is made for to begin with ( FPS games ) then this is the right horse to bet on. Indies in general though differ from AAA developers in that they like to venture outside the beaten path ( without stakeholders eating you hole if your game is not the next cash cow ). That's kind of missing the point; you never develop ideas that you cannot implement, instead you develop ideas around what you have already implemented - what you have implemented in turn is based on what the engine has provided and documented (or exampled), as well as from personal experimentation with the software. That experimental stage in itself is pretty vital; if you're familiar with your technology, you won't find yourself designing features that you'll either have to leave out, or end up brick-walled with. As it happens, out-of-the-box, you can go a lot further than an FPS with this particular piece of middleware - one of my gripes is this misrepresentation. Case in example, one of the first games shipped using UE3 was a Wipeout style racing game. Admittedly, it wasn't very good, but then that's what you get with a newer developer and untested, in-development middleware. Knowing what the engine is capable of will allow you to create other, more abstract examples. UE isn't made for FPS games, FPS games are just made for UE3, and represent the examples.
O N L I N E Dragonlord Linux-Dragon of quick wit and sharp tongue	Nov 5 2009, 5:38pm Anchor
@Mr_Cyberpunk: You own the IP but the engine license is about sold units. The two are different. @ambershee: So according to this reasoning new ideas have to be tossed out since if they don't fit in the existing engine you have to modify them long enough until they fit even if this doesn't look like the original idea anymore. Hacking around limitations is a nice skill to have but if this reasoning would hold then we would be using only one engine and no other. Can't say this is true. Edited by: Dragonlord
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Nov 5 2009, 5:47pm Anchor
That's not it at all, the whole point is to focus ideas around what's available, building on what you have, and not what you haven't. This isn't hacking around limitations. Case in example, there's a supposed limit of 64 players in the multiplayer game - you don't even start to look at ideas that don't fit the bill; you start looking at what you could be doing with 64 players. Same with dynamic shadowing / lighting; knowing what it does, and how it works - use it for the purposes of deploying interesting game mechanics - not creating ideas, and trying to shoehorn them into whatever they have. This is why some existing UE3 indies have been facing difficulties - they started with a game idea and tried to put it into the engine, not taking the engine, and using it to generate an idea.
Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer	Nov 5 2009, 6:20pm Anchor
Someone wrote:not creating ideas, and trying to shoehorn them into whatever they have. err isn't that what game designers are supposed to do?.. lol. I get what you're saying, your suggesting that the game design be built based on what they know the engine can do not based on what they "Assume" is possible to do in the engine. But reality is that more people will be coming up with an idea and trying to put it into the engine- its going to happen. Its rare to see someone design a game based on just playing with the engine.. Most people will pre-plan it. That said though I understand why you've said it, and its usually a better design practice.. but not everyone is going to do that. Edited by: Mr_Cyberpunk
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Nov 5 2009, 6:35pm Anchor
Well yes, but then that'd be a different 'school of design', and not what I'm talking about in the first place xD If other people don't want to do that however, that's quite simply, not my problem. They can enjoy their limits, walls and half-baked implementations to their heart's extent; I don't have to suffer trying to make it work myself (although I'm quite happy to accept payment to solve their problems for them).
Mastasurf	Nov 6 2009, 12:40am Anchor
This is a very smart business move for them. In my opinion Valve was able to set themselves apart by being the first company to really support modding. Now Unreal is going to take the next step by catering to indie start-ups. The main difference between the two is that Unreal has actually implemented a way to monetize the more successful games without having to acquire the projects like valve did with CS, DoD, etc.
Gibberstein Generic Coder Type Thing	Nov 6 2009, 1:32am Anchor
Another side of the 'innovation' card is setting, atmosphere and art style - not all progress has to be in game mechanics. If this is your goal you couldn't be in a better position - you now have one of the most polished and robust art pipelines in the industry available without any kind of initial cost. As for the royalties, they probably sound a lot to some people, but I doubt you could find a better deal out there. For an untested startup team to be able get this kind of engine would previously have required a lottery win, or surrendering a lot of creative control, assuming you could even find someone willing to risk funding such a team. It's the control aspect that's the amazing one for me - if I had any kind of artistic ability I'd be shitting bricks in sheer excitement right now. Also, this is the first time in a long while that Epic have acted like their PC Gaming Alliance membership is more than lip service. I can't say enough how much this has made me happy that I was right to stay with Unreal all this time -- "lets say Portal is a puzzle game, so its a rehash of Tetris" - Wraiyth points out the craziness of stereotyping games by their genre
M@ty Professional	Nov 6 2009, 5:00am Anchor
Wow from UDK to a discussion on what games design is, I love this place . Despite some people's reservations (about linux and what not), despite the fact its not entirely open-source. That's not the important part here. The important part is that we've gone one large step forward in terms of modding and indie capabilities now. Sure its not perfect, but can't we celebrate this 'gift' a bit before pissing on its parade? Overnight the face of modding has changed rather dramatically. Everyone has access to a full set of tools that almost completely negate the purpose of building your own engine (unless you're targetting something very specific) and gives you the very reasonable option of a license. The tools are as next-gen as you could wish for and Epic have done something amazing for everyone. It'll force other companies to do the same to still be in with a shot, and if they follow suit, the whole developing world will open up. Rather than compain about what it doesn't have or doesn't do, celebrate what it does. It does a darn sight more for the community than it doesn't.
Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer	Nov 6 2009, 5:45am Anchor
Did anyone notice that UDK includes SpeedTree? Man that's crazy, I mean they even included middleware with it. If you look at the cost for Speed Tree then this is awesome. We need a LOT of tutorials --
Grobi Game designs lumpy interior.	Nov 6 2009, 8:46am Anchor
Hurrah hurrah, Unreal for the masses! Handy too considering a lot of my final year stuff here at uni are around Unreal.
Rich_Zap Modder	Nov 6 2009, 12:31pm Anchor
This should certainly be a good thing for any FPS creators out there but it will surely kill all UT modding pretty quick as what would be the point of making a mod on UT3 anymore. I wonder if we will see some of the UT3 mods get converted over to UDK ? -- Fear is the Mindkiller
Metal_Warrior5/10 Newbie	Nov 6 2009, 12:43pm Anchor
Wow! Now it will be easier to make mods and maybe there will be more moding tools, nice news that its practicaly free... This is going to kick ass.
Gibberstein Generic Coder Type Thing	Nov 6 2009, 4:17pm Anchor
Rich_Zap wrote:This should certainly be a good thing for any FPS creators out there but it will surely kill all UT modding pretty quick as what would be the point of making a mod on UT3 anymore. I wonder if we will see some of the UT3 mods get converted over to UDK ? That's kinda the point - it doesn't kill UT3 modding, it unleashes it onto a whole new audience of people who won't buy UT3 Porting a UT3 mod to UDK should be pretty easy, and the less UT3 content you were using the easier it gets. -- "lets say Portal is a puzzle game, so its a rehash of Tetris" - Wraiyth points out the craziness of stereotyping games by their genre
Sigma Resident Stepmania Freak :D	Nov 6 2009, 4:49pm Anchor
been trying to get some of the new features to work: structural analysis tool -> i do it like explained on hourences site (there are 3 UDK specific tutorials there btw :p) and when i place the fractured mesh, it doesn't show, its not there even :/ soft body physics -> work in the preview window, fall trough the floor ingame >_< Quote:That's kinda the point - it doesn't kill UT3 modding, it unleashes it onto a whole new audience of people who won't buy UT3 indeed run the "game" that comes with it :p its basicly a UT3 demo :3 i think its mainly because things like this gives people the idea that they actually like the community (they are a company after all xP all they care about are numbers lol) it IS a good move tho will get lots of people into modding...well...game making xP its a move i applaud tho, if someone makes a game, but does not earn money of it, whats in it to loose? if it was up to me, i would release my engine (if i had a succesfull one) allmost full (maybe not full source code) for free for non-commercial products, and just attach a license to it, depending on the size of the company Edited by: Sigma
Wraiyth That Guy Who Does Those Things With The Stuff	Nov 6 2009, 4:58pm Anchor
Fractured mesh worked fine for me -- My Homepage
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Nov 6 2009, 5:00pm Anchor
I found fractured meshes rather easy to work with?
Sigma Resident Stepmania Freak :D	Nov 6 2009, 5:08pm Anchor
well from what i saw, it was easy indeed, but: i pick a mesh (any mesh should do), select the chunk division thingy (50 was my last attempt) click slice and save it to a package do the options (material, chuck hp, etc..) and when i place it...its invisible >_< actualy its not even that, it doesn't block anything, so its not even there D: maybe its the chunk division? shouldn't be, otherwise they wouldn't limit it to 150 if they know its broken above value x :/ -- Looking for musicians for unannounced project, PM me for further details
ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks	Nov 6 2009, 5:37pm Anchor
Moddb.com /whistles.

Thread Options

1 2 3

Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer

Nov 5 2009, 5:01pm Anchor

I don't think its catchy when you consider that $1million licensing is catchy anyway.

If you're making over $1million, and half of that goes to Epic and Steam, you've still made around $500,000... which isn't bad at all.. especially for an indie..
Also think of it like this.. that money will go to hopefully making the services that those companies provide better.

Meanwhile if I had $500,000 from an awesome game, I'd be bloody happy, Most/if not all indie developers won't ever make that much from a single IP- We're just developing this to make a living off of, that's why we're indies- It is definitely possible though for an indie.. at least now to develop a $1mill profiting game. I think that this will improve the quality of indie games in general.

If that's the only catch then, seriously its not a big deal.

However I do agree with you with the Source Code issues.. for someone that relied on the technology side to give them an edge, this is a bad deal.. On the other hand though for someone that relies on content mostly this is a great deal.

But hey if you do find anything sus please let me know.. I'd love to use the engine but if there's something bad hidden there I'd like to know about it.

I'm wondering though how the other Engine developers will react to this news.

Edited by: Mr_Cyberpunk

ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks

Nov 5 2009, 5:07pm Anchor

Personally, I believe that this is where the school of design that favours manipulation of existing capabilties over battling to get required features will come to fare better - you can still rely on technology to give you the edge; you just need to orientate your goals to suit it.

MrTambourineMan Working on Maggie's Farm

Nov 5 2009, 5:10pm Anchor

Tripwire guys definitely made lots more money than 1/2 a million - if we can believe their publisher for boxed games they've sold 400k of RO alone - you do the maths. $500 000 would not nearly be enough to fund a year(or year and a half) of serious game development with 9,10 people (which is very indy).

Edited by: MrTambourineMan

Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer

Nov 5 2009, 5:25pm Anchor

MrTambourineMan wrote:Tripwire guys definitely made lots more money than 1/2 a million - if we can believe their publisher for boxed games they've sold 400k of RO alone - you do the maths. $500 000 would not nearly be enough to fund a year(or year and a half) of serious game development with 9,10 people (which is very indy).

This is why you use Community Funding and the Episodic business model as that way you'd have ongoing cash flow- no indie could capitalize the cost of this from the very start. I get what you mean though if you work out the fact that it costs around $60k-$80k per year for each staff member then it is very limiting.

ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks

Nov 5 2009, 5:28pm Anchor

Alternatively you can pay your staff a lot less or work on a royalty based model. Has it's limitations mind - not everyone wants to work for peanuts / promised peanuts.

So come on then? Who's game xD?

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Dragonlord Linux-Dragon of quick wit and sharp tongue

Nov 5 2009, 5:30pm Anchor

ambershee wrote:Personally, I believe that this is where the school of design that favours manipulation of existing capabilties over battling to get required features will come to fare better - you can still rely on technology to give you the edge; you just need to orientate your goals to suit it.

Depends on how much you can manipulate existing capabilities. I prefer a white box engine over a black box engine. What breaks games is usually not the design part but having to take out good ideas because you can't fumble the black box into the direction you need it. As mentioned above though it depends on the game in question. If the game is close to what UE is made for to begin with ( FPS games ) then this is the right horse to bet on. Indies in general though differ from AAA developers in that they like to venture outside the beaten path ( without stakeholders eating you hole if your game is not the next cash cow ). For this though you need a certain flexibility which a black box usually can not provide. This is where you need source code access and this requires lots of cash and lots of time ( you don't modify optimized foreign code over night ). But if you are up for a black box then why not mod an existing game which already has assets for you to use?

@Mr_Cyberpunk: Not really something bad hidden. The only catch is that as soon as money is involved you have to get the pricey license. Only problem is when it counts as money involved and who decides this ( examples given already in this topic if I'm not mistaken... or some other website, not sure anymore ). So I assume as long as you put a huge no-money wall around you then anything is alright. But indies usually don't plan on using a no-money wall.

--

User Posted Image
Leader, Head Programmer: Epsylon | Drag[en]gine Game Engine | ModDB Profile

by Salohcin

Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer

Nov 5 2009, 5:32pm Anchor

Ah I see DL but wouldn't you be able to protect yourself from that via Copyrights? (as in, you own the IP, therefore only you have a say in what happens to said IP.)

Further more what Epic have essentially done is taken a Revenue Share from you, this is a perfectly normal practice in the industry.. what would have been awesome is if they also provided some publishing services too (like Marketing and Distribution).. aw well..

A lot of the time the Publisher and Developer take rev shares of the product they're selling.. its common practice- so think of it like that.

From someone that is not established as a game developer I can understand how difficult funding a project with this would be- most of the AAA devs are already establish and have millions from prior successes to invest.

Edited by: Mr_Cyberpunk

ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks

Nov 5 2009, 5:38pm Anchor

Dragonlord wrote:

ambershee wrote:Personally, I believe that this is where the school of design that favours manipulation of existing capabilties over battling to get required features will come to fare better - you can still rely on technology to give you the edge; you just need to orientate your goals to suit it.

Depends on how much you can manipulate existing capabilities. I prefer a white box engine over a black box engine. What breaks games is usually not the design part but having to take out good ideas because you can't fumble the black box into the direction you need it. As mentioned above though it depends on the game in question. If the game is close to what UE is made for to begin with ( FPS games ) then this is the right horse to bet on. Indies in general though differ from AAA developers in that they like to venture outside the beaten path ( without stakeholders eating you hole if your game is not the next cash cow ).

That's kind of missing the point; you never develop ideas that you cannot implement, instead you develop ideas around what you have already implemented - what you have implemented in turn is based on what the engine has provided and documented (or exampled), as well as from personal experimentation with the software. That experimental stage in itself is pretty vital; if you're familiar with your technology, you won't find yourself designing features that you'll either have to leave out, or end up brick-walled with.

As it happens, out-of-the-box, you can go a lot further than an FPS with this particular piece of middleware - one of my gripes is this misrepresentation. Case in example, one of the first games shipped using UE3 was a Wipeout style racing game. Admittedly, it wasn't very good, but then that's what you get with a newer developer and untested, in-development middleware. Knowing what the engine is capable of will allow you to create other, more abstract examples. UE isn't made for FPS games, FPS games are just made for UE3, and represent the examples.

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Dragonlord Linux-Dragon of quick wit and sharp tongue

Nov 5 2009, 5:38pm Anchor

@Mr_Cyberpunk: You own the IP but the engine license is about sold units. The two are different.

@ambershee: So according to this reasoning new ideas have to be tossed out since if they don't fit in the existing engine you have to modify them long enough until they fit even if this doesn't look like the original idea anymore. Hacking around limitations is a nice skill to have but if this reasoning would hold then we would be using only one engine and no other. Can't say this is true.

Edited by: Dragonlord

ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks

Nov 5 2009, 5:47pm Anchor

That's not it at all, the whole point is to focus ideas around what's available, building on what you have, and not what you haven't. This isn't hacking around limitations. Case in example, there's a supposed limit of 64 players in the multiplayer game - you don't even start to look at ideas that don't fit the bill; you start looking at what you could be doing with 64 players. Same with dynamic shadowing / lighting; knowing what it does, and how it works - use it for the purposes of deploying interesting game mechanics - not creating ideas, and trying to shoehorn them into whatever they have. This is why some existing UE3 indies have been facing difficulties - they started with a game idea and tried to put it into the engine, not taking the engine, and using it to generate an idea.

Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer

Nov 5 2009, 6:20pm Anchor

Someone wrote:not creating ideas, and trying to shoehorn them into whatever they have.

err isn't that what game designers are supposed to do?.. lol. I get what you're saying, your suggesting that the game design be built based on what they know the engine can do not based on what they "Assume" is possible to do in the engine. But reality is that more people will be coming up with an idea and trying to put it into the engine- its going to happen. Its rare to see someone design a game based on just playing with the engine.. Most people will pre-plan it.

That said though I understand why you've said it, and its usually a better design practice.. but not everyone is going to do that.

Edited by: Mr_Cyberpunk

ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks

Nov 5 2009, 6:35pm Anchor

Well yes, but then that'd be a different 'school of design', and not what I'm talking about in the first place xD

If other people don't want to do that however, that's quite simply, not my problem. They can enjoy their limits, walls and half-baked implementations to their heart's extent; I don't have to suffer trying to make it work myself (although I'm quite happy to accept payment to solve their problems for them).

Mastasurf

Nov 6 2009, 12:40am Anchor

This is a very smart business move for them. In my opinion Valve was able to set themselves apart by being the first company to really support modding. Now Unreal is going to take the next step by catering to indie start-ups. The main difference between the two is that Unreal has actually implemented a way to monetize the more successful games without having to acquire the projects like valve did with CS, DoD, etc.

Gibberstein Generic Coder Type Thing

Nov 6 2009, 1:32am Anchor

Another side of the 'innovation' card is setting, atmosphere and art style - not all progress has to be in game mechanics. If this is your goal you couldn't be in a better position - you now have one of the most polished and robust art pipelines in the industry available without any kind of initial cost. As for the royalties, they probably sound a lot to some people, but I doubt you could find a better deal out there. For an untested startup team to be able get this kind of engine would previously have required a lottery win, or surrendering a lot of creative control, assuming you could even find someone willing to risk funding such a team. It's the control aspect that's the amazing one for me - if I had any kind of artistic ability I'd be shitting bricks in sheer excitement right now.

Also, this is the first time in a long while that Epic have acted like their PC Gaming Alliance membership is more than lip service. I can't say enough how much this has made me happy that I was right to stay with Unreal all this time

--

"lets say Portal is a puzzle game, so its a rehash of Tetris"
- Wraiyth points out the craziness of stereotyping games by their genre

M@ty Professional

Nov 6 2009, 5:00am Anchor

Wow from UDK to a discussion on what games design is, I love this place .

Despite some people's reservations (about linux and what not), despite the fact its not entirely open-source. That's not the important part here. The important part is that we've gone one large step forward in terms of modding and indie capabilities now. Sure its not perfect, but can't we celebrate this 'gift' a bit before pissing on its parade?

Overnight the face of modding has changed rather dramatically. Everyone has access to a full set of tools that almost completely negate the purpose of building your own engine (unless you're targetting something very specific) and gives you the very reasonable option of a license. The tools are as next-gen as you could wish for and Epic have done something amazing for everyone.

It'll force other companies to do the same to still be in with a shot, and if they follow suit, the whole developing world will open up.

Rather than compain about what it doesn't have or doesn't do, celebrate what it does. It does a darn sight more for the community than it doesn't.

Mr_Cyberpunk Game Developer

Nov 6 2009, 5:45am Anchor

Did anyone notice that UDK includes SpeedTree? Man that's crazy, I mean they even included middleware with it.

If you look at the cost for Speed Tree then this is awesome. We need a LOT of tutorials

--

Grobi Game designs lumpy interior.

Nov 6 2009, 8:46am Anchor

Hurrah hurrah, Unreal for the masses! Handy too considering a lot of my final year stuff here at uni are around Unreal.

Rich_Zap Modder

Nov 6 2009, 12:31pm Anchor

This should certainly be a good thing for any FPS creators out there but it will surely kill all UT modding pretty quick as what would be the point of making a mod on UT3 anymore. I wonder if we will see some of the UT3 mods get converted over to UDK ?

--

Fear is the Mindkiller

Metal_Warrior5/10 Newbie

Nov 6 2009, 12:43pm Anchor

Wow!

Now it will be easier to make mods and maybe there will be more moding tools, nice news that its practicaly free...
This is going to kick ass.

Gibberstein Generic Coder Type Thing

Nov 6 2009, 4:17pm Anchor

Rich_Zap wrote:This should certainly be a good thing for any FPS creators out there but it will surely kill all UT modding pretty quick as what would be the point of making a mod on UT3 anymore. I wonder if we will see some of the UT3 mods get converted over to UDK ?

That's kinda the point - it doesn't kill UT3 modding, it unleashes it onto a whole new audience of people who won't buy UT3

Porting a UT3 mod to UDK should be pretty easy, and the less UT3 content you were using the easier it gets.

--

"lets say Portal is a puzzle game, so its a rehash of Tetris"
- Wraiyth points out the craziness of stereotyping games by their genre

Sigma Resident Stepmania Freak :D

Nov 6 2009, 4:49pm Anchor

been trying to get some of the new features to work:
structural analysis tool -> i do it like explained on hourences site (there are 3 UDK specific tutorials there btw :p) and when i place the fractured mesh, it doesn't show, its not there even :/
soft body physics -> work in the preview window, fall trough the floor ingame >_<

Quote:That's kinda the point - it doesn't kill UT3 modding, it unleashes it onto a whole new audience of people who won't buy UT3

indeed run the "game" that comes with it :p its basicly a UT3 demo :3
i think its mainly because things like this gives people the idea that they actually like the community (they are a company after all xP all they care about are numbers lol)
it IS a good move tho will get lots of people into modding...well...game making xP
its a move i applaud tho, if someone makes a game, but does not earn money of it, whats in it to loose?
if it was up to me, i would release my engine (if i had a succesfull one) allmost full (maybe not full source code) for free for non-commercial products, and just attach a license to it, depending on the size of the company

Edited by: Sigma

Wraiyth That Guy Who Does Those Things With The Stuff

Nov 6 2009, 4:58pm Anchor

Fractured mesh worked fine for me

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ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks

Nov 6 2009, 5:00pm Anchor

I found fractured meshes rather easy to work with?

Sigma Resident Stepmania Freak :D

Nov 6 2009, 5:08pm Anchor

well from what i saw, it was easy indeed, but:
i pick a mesh (any mesh should do), select the chunk division thingy (50 was my last attempt)
click slice and save it to a package
do the options (material, chuck hp, etc..)
and when i place it...its invisible >_< actualy its not even that, it doesn't block anything, so its not even there D:
maybe its the chunk division? shouldn't be, otherwise they wouldn't limit it to 150 if they know its broken above value x :/

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ambershee Nimbusfish Rawks

Nov 6 2009, 5:37pm Anchor

Moddb.com

/whistles.