UT SDK January 2012 Beta Release news

Starting the new year for the SDK with a bunch of new features and improvements: The next new and fresh release of the Unreal Tournament Community SDK. In this month's release new Sprite/Texture Drawing and Blending Functions were introduced and the OpenGL Driver has been totally rewritten which improves performance and stability.

There're also a lot of bug fixesand new minor feature extensions for the Particle Engine and some neat new features like the first appearance of Beam Emitters. This release includes the bugfix of Build 300a fixing problems with Static Meshes. Last major new feature to name for this release is a completely new Interpolation System for the UnrealED, but see for yourself in the Changelog.

• added: new Texture/Sprite Rendering Functions

- DrawSpinTile (draws a sprite that spins around it's center)
- DrawAxisTile (like DrawSpinTile but with advanced axis settings, an axial sprite) - DrawStretchedTile (specialized for stretched textures, drawn between 2 individual points) - supports rotatable and stretachable Textures
- Axis Sprite Rendering
- STY_Modulated supports coloring!
- A lot of new Texture Blending Styles (see below)

• added: new Texture Styles supported by Particles, Sprites, Canvas, BSP and Post Processing:

- Blend_Brighten / Blend_Darken
- Blend_SubtleBrighten / Blend_SubtleDarken
- Blend_ModBrighten / Blend_NegativeDarken
- Blend_Multiply
- Blend_Negative
- Blend_Inverted

• added: new Base Render Device „sdkRenderDevice"
• added: Beam Emitter, easy to use for realistic and stunning graphics including features like:

- Light Rays, Beams and other Light Effects
- Lasers
- Wireframe Support (Vertex, Line, Length)
- Beam Noise, Tessellation, Axis Orientation

• added: Directional Beam Emitter, let's you create Light Beams/Rays that react realistically to the player's view
• added: working LOD Support

- LOD dependant smooth Emission Frequency and Particle Count change
- additional LOD Settings like: NoDraw, NoUpdate etc.

• added: Vertex Emission, let's you emit particles at random vertices of a given mesh or brush
• added: time based Particle Size Interpolation (similar to Color)
• added: new Color Interpolation Modes: CTrans_Interpolate, CTrans_Switch
• added: rotatable Particles for all Sprite-based Emitters
• added: Axis Particles for all Sprite-based Emitters
• added: new Interpolation System:

- interpolated movement of any Actor (not only Player Classes)
- supports smooth interpolated position
- supports smooth interpolated rotation/direction
- in-Editor statistics: connectivity between nodes, start/end node, orientation
- in-Editor Preview, watch the interpolation sequence directly inside the Editor!

• updated: when the skin list of a Static Mesh is going empty (or some element(s)) the original mesh skins are restored and the mesh is retextured with them (Build 300a, Hotfix1)
• updated: OpenGL Driver completely recoded on base of UT GLR 3.7: stable, high performance and new features (as stated above)
• updated: removed sdkBaseEmitter.uc and moved all content to sdkEmitter.uc for clearness and rebuild ability reasons
• updated: merged CTrans_Lerp, CTrans_Smerp and CTrans_Interpolate as CTrans_Interpolate, all
• these were too similar, uses Lerp formula (linear interpolation from A to B)
• updated: Particle Color List contains 16 elements now (not 8 anymore)
• fixed: critical error when adding Static Mesh Actor to the map (strange I didn't notice that... the bug was caused by missmanaged skins (Build 300a, Hotfix1)
• fixed: Actor Selection Bug, thanks to Dr.Flay again drawing attention on this bug
• fixed: incorrect color transition between different and equal Particle Color Transition Modes (a short flicker of the previous color appeared before going to next color)
• fixed: Wireframe Shape "SHAPE_Box" of Emitters is rendered correctly
• fixed: Particle Texture Animation improved, fully working
• fixed: Emitter Instant Preview Mode fully working

---

UT Community SDK January 2012 Beta (Build 335)

---