What level editor is the new hotness Thread

Hi

The last time I made a level was a few years ago using the hammer editor and unreal Ed before that.
I have been working as a real world architect for the last 8 years and I am finding it is not scratching my creative itch the way I thought it would ,so I am planning on jumping back into level design.

What I want to know is what level editor should I jump into?

Or should I just go to a quarry and break rocks with my head?

Edited by: klawhammer

UnrealEd is still very popular. UDK is freely available and widely used.

If your wanting a job in industry i would say go for UDK to learn level design alot of companies use unreal engine now. Second maybe checkout cryengine 3 new level editor seems pretty nice from what i've used of it so far.

I'm betting developers aren't looking for specific knowledge in a specific level editor but just great work. I know people who've gotten industry jobs while using whatever source uses (who now edits on a GTKRadient variant)& D3/GTKRadient (who I believe uses a GTKRadient variant). It wasn't because of what editor they used though, it was because of what they produced.

Edited by: TheHappyFriar

Thanks for the advice.

Are there any good mods that have released a sdk that I can Mess with

I think Cryengine 3 is the most powerful engine around and will draw a lot of teams away from using UDK. They are both good, but Sandbox 2 is easier to learn and faster to master, imho. If you like, join this new community, which deals with everything regarding Cryengine 3:

Justmakegames.com

Unity is the easiest to learn and produces a great result, it might not be visually better than the other engines presently but it is the easiest to learn and has the best UI out of all of them IMO (because its UI consists of only 3 windows and a small toolbar with very little on it). I prefer Unity over UDK for PC development because Unity is able to do games that would otherwise be impossible in UDK. CryEngine looks nice but shares similar limitations that UDK has.

UDK is best if you want to target Iphone, hands down best engine on Iphone, its a lot better than Unity on Iphone due to how much power it can pump out (whereas on Unity you're really limited and the SDK costs too much). I will likely be using UDK for all my Iphone products in the future.

Edited by: formerlyknownasMrCP

I am going to say cryengine 3 here hands down I know UDK has been popular for years but UDK just doesn't have some of the great and robust features the cryengine offers.
I do how ever love speed tree and many of the cool feature of the UDK but I am really enjoying the cryengine.
For instance the cryengine has textured lights that use scrolling UV's that is not the cool part. Lets say a table in a room has the light penumbra pointing at the table top. The light creates rain particles what ever the light hits it is raining and rain will drip off. Anything in the lights shadow say under the top surface is dry. Now if you pick up the table rotate it the water just animates real time. No simulation. No effort and very innovative stuff