Unreal Engine 3 - UDK

[Officer D]

Unreal Development Kit

I just saw this on the unrealed.info forum and thought I might as well post it here too. Since some may not be aware of it.

UDK is Unreal Engine 3 – the complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations. The best tools in the industry are in your hands.

Lot's of new stuff has been added Might be useful for some of the TA developers

[MrFred]

yah we already know... proto is so damn excited about this thing!
Thanks for poiting it tho

Stay tuned to see what how it will or wont  affect TA ( cause even I dont know the answer to that yet )

[Molez]

Yea thats been a hot topic today amongst the team. No real answers from me either as to how it will change things if it will at all but I am sure within a few days we will be able to give you an idea of what our game plan is in terms of taking advantage (or not) of this new deal.

Either way its wicked! I have it downloaded at work and am really tempted to install it and have a look

[Mr. Pig]

It should make TA a stand-alone game. UT3 has a rather small user-base so you'd be really limited as a mod.

[Molez]

Yes it definitly gives us the chance to go standalone wich increases the player base by a massive amount. Wich is a good thing for both us as the devellopers and the community playing the game. However it will no doubt require some form of porting and I don't yet know how much time that would take us. It most likely comes down to a decision about weather its worth the extra time to port it before an initial release. Porting would delay the release by a bit and technically it could be done after its realesed as a mod I would think.

I am sure Proto or Bode will make an official post on this matter some time soon.

[TOP-Proto]

i started porting.

i got rid of all my errors, but i got 1220 warnings (all need fixing )

and im trying to get used to how the -mod switch is supposed to work as it dont appear to work now...

[Mr. Pig]

Yes, it definitely gives us the chance to go standalone which will increases the player base massively. That would be a good thing for both the developers and the community. However, it will no doubt require some form of porting and I don't know how much time that would take us. It will most likely come down to a decision between spending the extra time to port it before an initial release, as porting would delay the release by a bit, or not porting. I suppose the port could be done after its released as a mod, however.

I am sure Proto or Bode will make an official post on this matter some time soon.

FTFY.

Good luck porting it Proto. At least it's not like you're moving the codebase to another operating system and you didn't bother adding any system-abstraction... I've been there man... :x

[MrFred]

i got 1220 warnings (all need fixing )

let's try to be optimism, shall we?
1220... it's aint that bad could be worst

[Bode]

I am sure Proto or Bode will make an official post on this matter some time soon.

If I knew what you guys were talking about.. I totally would!

Sounds promising though

My understanding is that we could run TA as it's own game rather than a UT3 mod. Yes?

[Molez]

Yes, its appears to be the full dev kit allowing you to basically build what ever you want. Epic basically changed some of their licensing to allow for the use of the dev kit for free (with some conditions obviously). I acctualy think it was a very smart move on their part for many reasons, and its definitly a huge move for the mod community, and to a lesser extent emerging companies and indi developers.

[Tank//]

I was so hyped when I read this yesterday. Last time I was this hyped was when XNA was announced.

It is indeed a huge move for the modding community. Epic is giving away after all the Unreal Engine 3's development pipeline for free.

As we all know, the Unreal Engine 3 is probably the most prolific engine of the seventh generation of consoles, so developing a game under its pipeline adds a lot to its value (in terms of visibility in the video game industry), in my opinion. We're talking about an engine which is widely used in the video game industry.

That being said, I totally agree that the smartest move for TA would be the transition to it. As Molez and Mr. Pig pointed out, it would expand the TA player base by a large margin. Everyone would have access to play the game, for free, without having to buy UT3. This is a major break through in my opinion for TA.

The commercial license included with UDK is also quite interesting. To my quick understanding, you're entitled (depending on the profit you make) to 75% of the profits, and consequently only pay 25% royalty. Quite similar to Apple's approach.

Seeing how MW2 was a total disappointment (they killed the competitive scene, at least, for now), I'm definitely looking forward to this game.

[Scorpion]

OH YOY!
I need to change my pants now 

[StuD]

I've done some research and this is basically how it affects an UT3 mod. UDK only uses roughly 20% of UT3 packages so any maps using UT3 packages most likely are broke. The script is still based on UT3, but is much slimmer version from what I can see and apparently some of the technical aspects have changed. Any packages created for UT3 mods like weapons and characters appear to work just fine in the new UDK editor (great news).

So basically, TA needs to recruit a few new programmers and some more modelers to rapidly fix the maps to get a port quickly. Should be much easier to recruit now that UT3 is not required and I'd assume this will cause much of the source community to switch.

[Tank//]

Question is, could you import UT3 meshes and use them in UDK? Or does that goes against its user agreement.

[joolzz]

woohoo !! standalone !!!