Unreal Development Kit

So a few days ago, Epic Games, the maker of the Unreal and Gears of War series and the unreal engine, decided to release the full development kit for Unreal Engine 3.0, for free. This means that anybody can download and start developing with the engine, which is among some of the most advanced game making tools around, aswell as being one of the most easy-to-learn development tools out there for high-end game developing.
There is of course a catch though, and that is you can't release the games you make commercially, ie. take money for them.

I don't know how interesting this is for someone who doesn't know how to code in C++, but it's still a very impressive move by Epic Games.

Here's a thread on another forum with download links, press release and a small news story to cover the entire thing.

http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=189340


This screenshot from the map DM-Deck17 was rendered with UE3.0 and speaks for itself to be honest :)

http://www.beyondunreal.com/media/gen_091105_1.jpg

I'll look into this a little...

However, I'm quite excited for Unknown Worlds Entertainment's "Spark" engine.

No compile times. Real-Time lighting/particle effects. Cinematic Editor.

It's going to rock.

Lets make a Dreamviews game! Yeah! Woo! *dead silence*

... or not.

I have a lot of experience with UE3 back when I used to mod Unreal Tournament, so as long as I don't get swamped, anybody with questions can feel free to ask.

Wait, a development kit, or an API? They're different and this looks like an API. This isn't unprecedented, quite a few game companies have released the source code to their engines. Open source usually means greater stability and more features.

It's basically the same tools as what they give the companies that license Unreal Engine 3.0, such as Gearbox and 2K Boston.

Epic Games also released Unreal Runtime some time back, which was basically the same as this, just Unreal Engine 2.0.

It's seen before yes, I think id software released the source code for Tech 3 some time ago actually.

I'm actually rather excited by this.


I've been looking for a decent 3d engine for a while now.

Here is a guide on how to create a very basic game with UDK.