Epic Games, has released the February 2010 UDK Beta, an updated version of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides access to the game development toolset.
Epic is committed to providing the UDK community with regular software releases at no charge, and the latest beta is available now for download.
An extensive list of new additions and improvements included with this version is available at:
The February 2010 Beta UDK Features and Tools
New color picker
Update in real time, e.g., change color and see level lighting update as you drag!
Properly deal with HDR colors
Capture from the entire screen – even your desktop!
Screen door fades
New screen door dissolve effect for fading primitives (SM3+ only)
Actors can fade in/out based on their MaxDrawDistance
Static meshes, ProcBuildings, Skeletal Meshes and SpeedTrees are supported
Static Mesh LODs can and Massive LODs can cross-dissolve between each other
UDK Improvements
Dramatically improved Navigation Mesh simplification
50-60% reduction in polygon counts, with corresponding 50-60% reduction in memory footprint
Faster at runtime due to less nodes to traverse, etc.
Makeup of mesh is much improved with edges that span obstacle to obstacle and provide more accurate width representation of the geometry
Matinee improvements
Multi-select support for Matinee groups and tracks
Users can now copy and paste many tracks at once in Matinee
Multiple Matinee groups can now be moved into a folder in a single action
Curve Editor new feature: Movement axis locking
Kismet improvements
Added Kismet “And” gate
Fires its output once, only after every linked input has fired at least once
CameraAnim Improvements
Greatly improved CameraAnim handling and blending of post-process values
Static mesh LOD improvements
Screendoor fade between static mesh LODs for supporting materials based on time
Static meshes are forced down the dynamic rendering path while transitioning
Static mesh dynamic rendering path now uses the same LOD heuristic as the static path
Screendoor fade even works on dynamic shadows from the static mesh
Necessary to avoid popping due to LODs shadowing each other
Lightmap resolution is now halved for each static mesh LOD level
Moving UTGame native code to UDKBase native package
Volumes, static meshes and triggers now have more apparent collision hull wires
Optimizations, Upgrades, and Fixes
Bink update fixes the #3 most common UDK crash
SpeedTree applications upgrade from 5.0.0 to 5.0.2
Fixes an incompatibility with tablet drivers
Exports the G channel of normal maps correctly for use with UE3
A few other minor fixes
Static mesh component vertex color memory savings
Painted vertex colors now use half as much memory
Save System overhaul to unify map and content package code paths and enhance usability for content creators.
Over the two year period that I have spent blogging and writing about gaming, I’ve been approached by a lot of people who wanted to get into game development. The typical questions I’ve faced are, how do I start off in the industry, is there any course I need to take, which is best college in India that teaches game development among others. I generally end up telling them to stick to basics, understand art design/coding language involved better and then search for specialised courses for the same.
Though gaming has evolved a lot over the years, from 2D scrollers to present-gen realistic graphics based games, the basics are still the same, well almost. What has really evolved are the ideas. Most games try to bring in something new to the market — a new way to play it, a new way to interact with the environment, a different way of story telling, multiple endings or even vast environments which you can explore forever!
If you ask me today how to start off as a game development, I would point my fingers towards iPhone, iPod Touch platform. You may not be able to develop a next Doom on it, nor will you be able to make the game with the best graphics ever. What you can do, is concentrate on the basics and utilise the platform to the maximum to develop a game that is easy to pick up and play and thoroughly enjoyable.
Another reason why I suggest this platform’s also because it’s easier to make a return as you won’t need to depend on distributing the game and piracy. I spoke to Rohit Gupta, who with a friend started Rolocule and developed the first Squash game for the platform — Touch Squash. He told us how he went about developing the app, the motivation, know-how among others. Read on…
Have you developed games in the past?
Yes, I have worked on “The Sims 3″ for PC while I was at Electronic Arts (EA) in Redwood Shores, California, USA. I have also developed couple of games while I was pursuing my Master of Science (MS) in Computer Science at Columbia University, New York, USA.
What motivated you to develop the app?
We are a game development startup and in developing our first game, I wanted to do something that was never done before. I love squash as a sport but the principal limitation has always been the difficulty in observing the sport as a spectator, either in person or on television. Enjoying squash through the medium of interactive entertainment like a Squash 3D sports video game looked perfect.
Secondly, my focus was developing a powerful game with high quality graphics. Developing games for mobile phones was clearly out of picture because of their less processing power. Since we are a startup, it is also not easy to directly jump to making games for consoles or PC because of the many complexities involved. iPhone gave us the perfect platform to showcase what we can do. It is way ahead of any mobile phone as a gaming device in terms of technology. iPhone’s powerful processor gave excellent graphics and ability to develop great gameplay in the game – exactly the way I wanted.
Also, Touch Squash looked perfect since I want to build our game development company on the foundation of creativity, innovation and originality which is deeply missing in Indian game development companies today.
How much time did you spend developing it? What was the most difficult part of developing the game?
It took me 3 months to develop the game. With no experience developing for either iPhone or Mac OS X, it was a completely new world and I wanted to make sure that the game matched the standards of our big brothers (big game developers) on the App Store.
Secondly, incorporating real physics into the game was a real challenge. To make the game look realistic and natural, it was very important for the game to follow all the Newton’s laws of motion, kinetic energy, potential energy, etc. Simulating the real world in a computer language gave a god-like feeling and this was actually the best part of the entire development.
What knowledge is required to develop an iPhone game? (which all languages should one know) What is the investment required?
Knowledge of C, Objective C, object oriented programming, OpenGL (for 3D games) will suffice. However, it is also important to have some art and UI background. Art and UI play a very important role when it comes to developing applications for iPhone.
You need a computer running Macintosh operating system Mac OS X (Macbook or iMac), an iPhone/iPod touch and you should be registered in Apple’s iPhone Developer program (Standard program costs $99).
Do you plan to make the game for other similar platforms life Nintendo DSi or even Wii?
Yes, we do have plans to make games on DSi and Wii.
What is the level of complexity in comparison to let’s say making a flash game
Complexity actually varies between 2D and 3D games. Developing a 2D game for iPhone won’t be very different as compared to a flash game. However, complexity increases 5 to 10 times when you develop a 3D game for iPhone.
How many time was the app downloaded? In first 3 months since the launch of Touch Squash, tens of thousands of people across 50+ countries are playing the game and this is just a beginning.
How much money can one expect to make of a decent app on iPhone? There are close to 85,000 apps on the App Store, with many of them made very nicely and are very decent. So, it is very important to stand out of the crowd to get notice first.
Each app performs differently depending upon the popularity it gains in the App Store. The amount of money that one can make on the App Store varies from million of dollars to few hundred dollars. It all depends on how you pull it off.
After films like Sin City etc, now games enter the exclusive noir genre. Rockstar Games brings LA Noire. Long in development, never seen in any sort of playable form and without any confirmed platforms the game has been raised many eye brows. As the name suggests, the game is supposed to draw heavily from the noir genre films. That means we can expect a lot of visuals in black, red & low key lighting. The game is tipped to use a distinctive colouring-style in homage to the visual style of noir films. This should impress Frank Miller’s & Tarantino’s around.
Set in a perfectly recreated Los Angeles with a post-war backdrop of corruption, drugs and jazz, LA Noire is tipped to blend cinema and gaming. It is an interactive detective story set in the late 1940s. The game blends action, detection and complex storytelling and draws players into an open-ended challenge to solve a series of gruesome murders. Whether it can be better than Mafia is quite debatable, of course until we get our hands on it.
Looking at the trailer , graphics look as good as it does in Mafia II also I’m looking forward to a lot of hand-hand combat in the game. For people like me who are fans of this genre, the game will be something to look forward to. We can enjoy the trailer till then here…
The game is currently a PS3 exclusive, but there are talks that it might release for Xbox360 later on.
Good news for PSP, and not so good news for PS3. Sega has decided to develop a sequel for their famous PS3 action-strategy title, Valkyria Chronicles. The sequel to the PS3 action-strategy title will be available exclusively for PSP by summer 2010 and not for PS3.
Valkyria Chronicles received widespread critical acclaim when it launched on PS3 last year, so their decision to launch it on PSP alone has raised eyebrows everywhere.
The story of Valkyria Chronicles II is expected to be similar to the original. The events in the game, takes place two years after the conclusion of the original. In Valkyria II, a group of young military academy cadets find themselves plunged into a bitter civil war when the newly formed Gallian Revolutionary Army stages a coup.
Lets face one thing. By going to PSP, the game will lose one of the best things about the game… its beauty..lets wait & see.
Civilization is one of the best turn based games ever. It’s not just thought provoking but also one of the best in turns of quality of gameplay.
Turns out the game has been ported to iPhone, bit by the Doom on iPhone on iPhone bug I suppose. (Download)
All that said, the touch interface of the iPhone and iPhone Touch suits turn-based games more than rail-based shooters like Doom.
However, Cricket on iPhone I suppose is not a bad idea. Speaking of cricket, expect review of Ashes Cricket 2009 this weekend (both PC and console versions).
PS: Why couldn’t they just use this tech instead of porting the whole game to iPhone?
It all started with a post up at gamer.nl on how Pyro, who developed all the games in the commandos series, is planning to make one more game in the series. The new game was supposed to go back to real-time strategy basics and ignore FPS and 3D transitions which Pyro admits were bad choices.
It was also supposed to look like Commandos 2, which I have spent hours playing as a kid. But now they have come out to the press again and denied that they are working on such a game. While speaking to Eurogamer Spain, they said that the story by gamer.nl was entirely false.
We always had in mind to bring back to life the Commandos series; this isn’t something new, but nowadays there’s nothing official or decided and everything is still a wish, nothing else.
I think that the Gamer.nl journalist turned the wish into news, and he quoted things that nobody said (I was in the gamescom and we always said to whoever asked, and was a lot of people, that perhaps in the future but nothing now). We’re only focused in the Planet 51 game and this is the only game that we’re working on.
– Pyro spokesperson
Pyro might be busy making Planet 51, but as we see it, there is no reason for them to not make one more game in the series. The missions were great, challenging and gritty. There are a lot of people who grew up playing the game so one can expect the game to sell in large volumes, provided Pyro doesn’t screw up.
Also, just in case they are developing the game for real, I hope they are making it for consoles too. What do you think?
Good news for all fans of Colin McRae series of rally videogame. According to Codemasters newsletter a demo for the game will be made available “soon”.
DiRT 2 is the first videogame in the series since the death of Colin McRae, but the game will still feature him.
Apart from the regular rally based tracks and events, this version will have a few stadium based race-events. So get hold of your urge to skid around and say hello to tarmac. The stadium based events will feature in the multiplayer mode as well.
The game is releasing one September 11 and if interested, you can pre-order the game here. (You can save as much as £10.00 with the pre-order)
Do check out the official game site as well. The game is available for all platforms
When it comes to gaming, Valve is one company most people look up to. They have a great track record right from Half Life, to the the way it handled the numerous mods of half-life. Then they brought out steam which provided a unique multiplayer gaming and game distribution experience.
But of late, I need to say they are losing it. Either the popularity has got to their head or they have lost their mind dealing with all the law suits filed against them.
Finally, the users too have started protesting against their arrogant tone. It started with Valve announcing a sequel to Left 4 Dead which was released in November, 2008. Valve’s usual policy is to develop a game, build up the gamer-base for the game for a year at least, then announce extra gaming packs and another year later, may be, they announce a sequel. But with Left4Dead they decided to go ahead and announce a sequel after just half a year, The move reminds me of electronic arts who are notorious for churning out sequels (especially for sports games) with hardly any improvements, just changes in the roster.
With this move, Valve has already isolated a huge chunk of gamer base who were passionate about the company and the games they brought out. As if this wasn’t enough, at E3 they went on to say that PS3 is too complicated to develop.
The PC and the 360 are just more straightforward. We can focus on what we want to do, which is make game experiences, instead of sweating bullets over obscure architectural decisions they make with their platform. [...] I didn’t come into this business in the 90s because of some technical fetish. I came in because I wanted to give people experiences that made them have fun.
PC and 360 are not “straight forward” you are just familiar with them. Can you imagine what would have happened to gaming if developers said that 3D is too complex and continued to make side-scrolling 2D games? That is such a ridiculous comment to make. Now don’t mistake me for a PS3 fanboy, I am, and always will be a PC gamer.
An Israeli-American company, Vollee has come with an iPhone app that can run PC games (mostly online MMO type games) on iPhone. It does it by running the vollee software as a game in a PC and streaming the actual game SecondLife/World of Warcraft to the iPhone.
This is one killer app which could revolutionise mobile phones as a serious gaming platform. As of now, most of the games on mobile phones are only slightly different from the other.
But iPhone I feel, is restricted by the it’s own strong points – like touch technology, abscence of a real keypad. There are some things fingers moving on a flat screen can’t do. For example look at the time it took to kill two creatures in WoW. When playing on a PC that would have just taken a moment.
Nevertheless, this is a great start. Hope there will be such apps coming up for other mobile phones (which have a proper keypad) as well.
Must read: Interview with Vollee’s head of business development Julian Corbett and Linden Lab’s VP of platform development Joe Miller
Read on…
Have you developed games in the past?
What knowledge is required to develop an iPhone game? (which all languages should one know) What is the investment required?
What they said…