Epic Offers Free UE3 Dev Kit For Non-Commercial Use

[SuperApe]

via Gamasutra:

Epic Offers Free UE3 Dev Kit For Non-Commercial Use

Epic Games will offer a free edition of its Unreal Engine 3 so that developers can start working with the toolset, the company announced today.

The free edition, which Epic calls the Unreal Development Kit, is available to anyone with interest in exploring 3D game technology, from professionals to students and hobbyists. Those users will also have access to documentation and resources on an official website -- which also offers information on how to license UE3 commercially.

Currently, the free kit is only offered to PC users, although Epic says console support is "under consideration." It's intended as a tool for experimentation and hands-on learning; anyone wishing to use UE3 to develop a commercial product still needs an official licensing agreement.

Epic notes its thriving mod community should also enjoy the kit -- historically, users could only work with Unreal tools by using the editor to modify and add onto Epic games via the Unreal editor on PC.

Epic says the UDK is up to date and in step with the commercial version of UE3, including all its latest upgrades and features. The company promises to continue to support UDK users by offering ongoing, updated builds for free.

According to the company, Unreal development technology is already in use at over 100 schools where game development-related courses are taught, and other universities, like the Art Institutes, DeVry University and the University of Pennsylvania, among others, plan to incorporate the tech into their curricula.

"’m excited about the possibilities the Unreal Development Kit opens to those who are looking to get into the game business but don’t otherwise have the means to acquire world-class technology and tools like ours," says Epic VP Mark Rein.

"UDK is Unreal Engine 3, which has been used to create games in a wide range of genres, as well as military simulations, 3D architectural walkthroughs, animated movies and more. Users are only limited by their imaginations. Go ahead make something Unreal!"

Full Article Link
Available download plus snazzy video for the launch of UDK on NVIDIA's site here
UDN link to condensed list of the UDK build notes

[outpt.co.uk]

Thanks for this.

p.s. epic's server seems very very fast for download (maxed out my line).

[SuperApe]

Grabbed mine already. Not exactly sure *when* I'm going to be able to take a serious look at it, but ... I got it.

At first, I was wondering, how is this different than just using the Ued you get from UT3 or Gears? Then, I realized this is more about the stand-alone aspect, you can make your mods run without UT3 or Gears. They talk about possible console support for runtime. The licensing details for releasing anything commercially AFAIK are still forthcoming.

Seems The Ball folks were in on this, their mod is one of two featured demos for the UDK.

EDIT: I guess this is much more than what you get with UT3 or Gears; check this from neoduck on BUF:

Man, one thing I hope you guys realize is that this is almost EXACTLY the engine build that we're using here at Epic!

You get every single feature that we've been using here that aren't even in any games yet! We only got some of these features last week!

Can't wait to see some of the cool shizzle that comes out of this

[Freakish]

Step 1 to repairing their relationship with PC gamers...

[Scott]

Originally Posted by Freakish

Step 1 to repairing their relationship with PC gamers...

Its a good start.


Logical step too as UT3 is not a huge success for development. This gives the inclined another reason to mess around with the UE3 engine.



I guess thats what their announcement was.

[maxdamage]

How big is the devkit?

[cooloola]

Originally Posted by maxdamage

How big is the devkit?

500 megabytes give or take. And it's great it just makes you want to get a team together and just make a game.

[JoystickMonkey]

They're also offering a licensing deal that's $99/year, you get the first $5000 revenue and then they start taking 25% after that.

Not bad if you ask me - I was going to make something using the Torque engine, but now I'm probably going to make a free demo using the Dev kit, and then do the licensing deal.

It's just me and an artist at the moment, but once there's a solid amount of content made, I'll be recruiting.

[share_the_pain]

I can't even get the damn thing to install.