After a long wait Epic Games has finally released UDK – Unreal Development Kit. If you haven’t heard of it before, UDK is complete development environment for Unreal 3 engine. Of course there are some restrictions – it is free for non commercial use only. There were lots of examples for use of UDK in past like VRND – Notre Dame visualization demo and others.
Epic has excellent reputation when it comes to supporting user community. We all know about Make something Unreal contest with $1,000,000 prize pool and EDK equivalent for older versions (Unreal Engine Runtime, etc)
UDK content
Like with UT UDK comes with famous UnrealEd. In its own UnrealEd is very powerful editor and it may take a while to master it. If you do invest time and learn it rewards are great. Just look for custom maps for UT3, check out Community Bonus Packs for maps made by users. If you are very new to UnrealEd check out videos at 3D Buzz.
Apart from editor you also get all components of Unreal 3 engine:
- Unreal Matinee – for creating cinematic
- UnrealScript – build prototypes and add gameplay elements
- PhysX support and PhAT physics editor
- Lightmass – lighting and shadowing engine
- Terrain editor
- LAN and direct IP support
- Ogg Vorbis audio support
- AI with crowd behaviour
- Swarm – distributed computing support for increased performance
- Destructible environments
- SpeedTree editor
- FaceFX facial animation
This list is not complete but gives you an idea what to expect. The UDK is used by Epic and other game developers to create games like Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War, BioShock, Borderlands and many more. For complete list of feature go here.
Support content
Just looking at the list of features makes you realize that making something useful is not an easy task. Even with all videos available it is not that simple. Epic is very much aware of that and they have provided some content to help you to get things rolling.
There are 7 maps you can butcher, I mean open, explore and customize. The list includes famous DM-Deck, DM-Sanctuary, VCTF-Necropolis and VCTF-Sandstorm.
There is also a simple ExampleMap if you find others too complex to start with (I would recommend you to start with this Example Map). There is lot of other content provided like vehicles, characters, weapons, textures, etc.
Separate UDK downloads
If all of the sample content is not enough there are 3 showcase applications you can download:
- Whizzle – 2D platform game developed in UDK by Psyonix
- The Ball – entry for Make Something Unreal content
- UT3 demo
On-line documentation is available but I haven’t checked it out yet. If it is anything like in the past there will be plenty resources for you.
