I find this quite exciting and thought some of you might too if you’re into making mods and indie games, the public now has free access to very powerful tools to make games with the fantastic Unreal engine 3. I’m looking forward to see what great games might be created.
For free? They can’t be serious. If they’re serious, I may just download it sometime and go to my 3D roots. But they can’t be serious. Are they? 
Ah, I prefer Hammer, though. I’m a SP mapper, and my Hammer skills are much better than my UED skills ever were.
Unreal3 is a fantastic SDK for 3d artists. I read about this earlier today, they have a really generous revenue model too.
This is an industry trend. Unity 3d did this too, last week. Provide your tools for free to indy developers, then charge modestly for the right to publish the games.
Luckily for you, UE3’s content pipeline hinges greatly on static meshes (prop models, basically) for level art - in fact most of the BSP structures in UE3 engine maps are very simple base geometry and most, if not all, detailing is static mesh based.
I for one am glad they are doing this; it opens up the possibilities for great games with the engine to everyone, not limiting it to mods of UE3 games that support editing (which are only UT3 and Gears as far as I know)
Epic live up to their name yet again!
Awesome, going to try this out soon. Downloaded Unity last week, so now that’s two free game engines to muck around in! :retard:
Something they haven’t done in years.
Why not? The Gears of War series has been great, UT2004 was fantastic and UT3 (imo) was also excellent, I rank it second in the UT series behind the original. They’ve also created 3 wonderful engines (2, 2.5 and 3) that have been incredibly successful and useful to not only themselves but also other devs. I don’t really understand how you can say they haven’t been epic for years. I think they’ve been one of the most consistent dev studios around.
When they switched their focus to consoles they lost the ‘epic’ status. GoW 1 was pushed out so they could get their name in the console market where no one knew of them, pretty much abandoning the PC market (which made them who they are in the first place) in the process.
The engines are good yes, and so was UT2k4. I played that game so much. But they dropped the ball on UT3. The consoleish menus sucked and there wasn’t really anything new. It was pretty much UT2k4 on UE3 but it didn’t play or feel as good. 2k4 is still a better game.
I will try this, maybe I can learn to make maps or something.
I’m betting we’ll be using this next year in the game design course, with level design.
It does not support shader 2.0. I tried to play some map. Colours were strange and it had extremely low fps.
Source engine seems to be better, it does not need super-gaming computer.
You card does not support pixel shaders 3.0? You may want to upgrade for blackmesa as I doubt you’ll have smooth framerate…unless your gonna play in ugly mode known as directx 8.0…
Well, i dont really see a big difference between dx 9 and 8.
I play most HL2:Ep2 mods in dx 8 mode, because it makes them a lot more playable.
Personally, I much prefer UT3. Warfare, for example, is a much better mode than Onslaught and even though it does suffer from visuals that look like Gears of War vomited all over it, the recent updates and patches (including the ludicrously awesome Titan Pack) have tipped the balance in it’s favour. For me.
does someone know how to make realtime reflections in UDK/UE3?
All UT’s have been the same since it’s inception, basically. They’ve added more modes but it basically boils down to nothing more than a glorified tech demo for the next-gen Unreal tech. It’s an awesome and sometimes fun tech demo, but still…
I’m kind of amazed. Right as I’m planning my first major project, they decide to help me in such a huge way! Like you have no idea; this is just what I needed =P.
Time to install Windows and start learning the SDK…^^
Breaking news: Black Mesa switches to Unreal Engine 3. Expected release date 2012.