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Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
anomnomnomymous writes "Just a week after Unity announced its engine is now available for free to indie users, Epic Games has revealed a free version of its popular Unreal Engine technology. Called the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), it is a free edition of UE3 that allows community, modder and indie users more access to the engine's features and is available for all. Epic said game developers, students, hobbyists, researchers, creators of 3D visualizations and simulations plus digital filmmakers can all take advantage of the UDK for non-commercial use. The UDK site also offers detailed product features, technical documentation, commercial licensing terms and support resources."
Still behind id software and their GPL releases of the game engines.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
You can get the source Here
UE3 is the FPS that invented the sniper head shot, now considered de rigueur for all shooters.
boooring!
A multi-platform client that allows you to load Google Sketchup files. It would be nice to walk around the models, buildings, etc.
After that, make that multi-platform client compatible with Google Earth. Yes a lot of stuff is still flat but at least they do have terrain data so it would still be nice.
And last, just for kicks, add an option for playing in that map MMOFPS style!
Will! It! BLEND!
Seriously. Can you combine the two?
Technoli
They should GPL3 the engine, this ensures that if any commercial entity wishes to use it, they truly must license it off of Epic. GPL3 basically ensures no commercial exploitation anyways. What'd even be better if they provided some content that was sharealike.
Here is a link to the official press release from the Epic site: Epic Games Announces the Unreal Development Kit, Powered by Unreal Engine 3.
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
Of course, it couldn't be commercial...it'd have to be homebrew. ;)
UE3 is a current, highly popular game engine. Why would they give out the secret sauce? Even id doesn't do that; they give away the source to engines that are no longer being licensed to 3rd parties and are not bringing in cash flows to id.
How would licensees of UE3 feel if the engine they paid highly for got open-sourced at the height of its use?
Seeing the UE2 engine go GPL, on the other hand, would be impressive.
At least the old version of this thing was infested with one of the worst (to the user) DRM schemes in history.
While it's unsurprising given that the current Unreal Engine is still in active development and a ton of commercial games are still being developed and shipped using it, it's worth pointing out that this isn't a source code release; instead, it's something much closer to an elaborate mod engine, with generous swaths of behavioral scripting but no real ability to get 'under the hood' as it were. Still, kudos to Epic for this; it'll be interesting to see who picks up the ball and runs with this.
Well I guess if your goal is to GPL engine then ok. However in general that isn't the goal of a company, they want to make money so they can do things like pay their employees to develop more software. So how have licensing the engines gone? Well Unreal Engine 3, which was released after iD Tech 4, has about 150 games out using it. iD Tech 4? 7 games.
So I'd say Epic has been pretty successful at their primary goal of making a good engine that people wish to license for designing games.
There has to be a catch... probably have to distribute the game for free. If you choose to go commercial, you've gotta license out the full engine.
Having modded for a few different games, I really appreciate the Unreal engine for one specific reason: it assumes that all the space you haven't touched is filled rather than empty. That way, creating the basic flow of a level is just a matter of drawing out a cuboid per room and subtracting it from the filled space. By contrast, the id style starting with empty space requires you to create a cuboid for each wall, ceiling, and floor. There's a three page tutorial on how to make all the seams line up properly - and heaven help you if your room isn't a simple rectangle.
For great justice.
But each release of the Unreal Engine actually changes the Game development scene for alot of game development, not just modding community pertaining to Unreal games. Given Unreal 3 is staarrting to get old, this is probably too late to boost the game back into the light of gamers but Unreal has always had this precedence in the scene of developing.
For example, I myself usually develop with the source Engine. I find it easy to use, and probably more importantly, I find Hammer easier to create maps with instead of the Unreal Editor. In one particular scenario I wanted to have a marsh with really cool fog and properly dripping water and fireflies and all this jazz. Now Source while a great PHYSICS engine isn't as fine tuned towards the details as other engines tend to be. I've found that Valve will only update the Shaders to really meet their own needs, and other little things like that - but I mean you can't complain when they are giving it out for free, right? Anyways, Unreal has been pretty good with those kinds of effects - just look at ANY screenshot of their maps, or any video of the gameplay. I was able to look into Unreal and use their structure as a basis for my own particle effects, after all, I don't want it to look EXACTLY like an UT2K3 Map. Worked like a charm. Now, before you jut in, yes, I know Steam has their own FX for this kind of stuff. But its actually pretty taxing on the system, they still haven't quite seemed to nail fog down as it lags quite a bit (See CS:S When multiple smoke nades go off)
So, the next time you think "Unreal, who cares?" - remember that while they seem to be declining a bit in their sales of games, their rendering technology is still amongst the best free stuff out there. And every bit they give to their community is another bit to every community.
Wow, I got to say I'm impressed with the /. editors. After hastily submitting this story at work, I only had links to the Unity3D- and UDK- sites in there. Whereas the text is still the same as I submitted it, the editors done a great job in actually providing some extra informative links in there.
Well done!
On topic: I think this is a very smart move by Epic. It's great to be able to tinker with a top quality engine without having to buy any of their games first. This can definitely come in use for the scientific community, where you would like other people to download your, for example, simulations, and not be constrained by them having to own a game on which it runs.
Also, as some people above mentioned, this is great for some indie developers, who can now build a complete game, see if it's feasible, and if the end-product is to their liking, they can decide to license the engine and sell it.
Of course I'd prefer them to release the whole source, but that can't really be expected of an engine that is still commercially available.
Overall, great move Epic!
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
"Anyone can try out the Unreal Development Kit powered by Unreal Engine 3" ...as long as your on windows
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Please point me to GPL'ed sources of ID software engine technology equivalent to the technology described in TFA. Thanks.
Xreal
Heavily improved version of the (GPLed) Id Tech 3 engine. Includes features such as shadow mapping, per pixel lightning, etc... bringing the whole project visually closer to what's available in modern engines.
Other questions ?
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More seriously :
Giving away free (gratis) access to some proprietary technology is nothing more than a complex marketing ploy to try to attract more commercial licensee in the long term, by gaining more fans and hackers in the short term. The basic idea is "let the Indie market play around with the engine, and if some group emerge with a new killer-app, they'll have to license our engine".
Whereas giving complete freedom to tinker with the GPL is the most community enabling. Granted, id Tech 5 is not in the GPL now. But on the other hand, the full freedom offered by the GPL has enabled heavy customisation such as the above and many other. And in the long term, are much more valuable for creativity.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
25% of revenue after the first $5000. I understand that there's a TON of code there, but they don't come up with the idea, or market and sell the results. 1/4 of revenues seems like a pretty big chunk to take. Or am I wrong? Is this really a good deal for an indie game developer?
The engine is without a doubt -THE- hardest part of development. I myself have only ever hacked together Frankenstein Engines using bits from everywhere, and never really added my own component (why write your own when someone else already has). With the engine out of the way, a feature Length Game can be done in as little as 6 months*, tested, released, and on the shelf in about a year.
*This is assuming you've got one guy with the ideas who fleshes out a story, 1 guy who does the artwork (both concept and in game), and 1 guy who does the Coding/maping/debugging.
How long do games usually take to make from scratch? Lets See, Half Life 2, about a decade, Unreal 3 from Unreal 2K4 was 3 years, Duke Nukem Forever, ha ha - but do you see my point?
Summary: The Engine is more than half of a games development. (IMHO)
Mario Brothers was the originator even if they didn't have a booming voice letting everyone know about it.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Yay!
If you want to use this for commercial purposes,
> and a 25% royalty on UDK related revenue above $5,000 (US).
Nope, going open-source.
I did a considerable amount of mapping and modding for UT'99 through to UT2k4. Although UnrealED was a bit of a bear, it was easy to use. UnrealScript and the art of making mutators was wonderfully simple, much better than clunking around with DLL's like the Quake world.
UT'99 was bliss to play. So many maps, mods and mutators. But then came UT2k3 and the damnable "Standard Server" switch. Suddenly Epic made the entire spectrum of Unreal maps and mods completely invisible. TO the uninitiated, the "Standard Server" switch, which is enabled by default, basically filters out any server that isn't running a stock UT server with default settings. Run a mutator, and BAM! you were off the list (unless you unclicked the standard server check box, which 99% of the players did NOT).
Yes, with UT2k4 they introduced "whitelists" and "blacklists" and all kinds of bullshit to allow "certain kinds" of mutators, but whatever. Why bother making a system that is so insanely configurable if you're going to punish people for actually doing it? All they managed to do was create a server list full of clones, all running the same damn thing (Usually DM-Antalaus). No variety, no mutators, no mods.
Screw Epic. And I'm still pissed off at CliffyB blaming the PC market for the failure of the craptastic UT3.
No thanks, we've already got 3 Quake engines and a bunch of quality open-source developed ones. But we greatly appreciate the gesture!
Two years after they said it would be available, UT3 for Linux is still vaporware. I'm not that impressed by Epic's latest attempt to stay relevant.
Just a small point - but very often game development doesn't involve building an engine at all because an existing general engine is used. The situation isn't all that different to building a database application - you could start by building a database engine, but to do that right it'll be much more than half your time. Or, you could use one of the existing database engines. Many game engines are flexible enough now that you can do everything you need to for a wide variety of games without modifying the core engine itself.
I keep wondering what the gaming community would be like if we used a single, open source gaming engine, standardized much like a CD player, as a platform for most games. No matter the underlying hardware, it would just take your content and play it. As an open platform, games running inside it would be easy to mod and easy to maintain after the next DirectX or Windows release. The games wouldn't care if they run under Windows, Mac or Linux, they might even boot directly from CD as we had in the Amiga days (Knoppix+game engine...). Special features needed by the games would be integrated preferredly as scripts, or as pluggable modules if necessary. Pluggable modules would require an open interface specification to make ports to other or newer platforms possible. Development costs would drop as there really is only a single platform to support.
Of course, Microsoft or Sony might be in trouble if it happened, so we may never see it. But even EA has spoken up for such a solution, as slashdotted here: http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/10/19/1410234.shtml
Full freedom would be to have a hyper-intelligent oracle that produces a completely bug-free and perfect implemention of any software idea you can imagine, with infinite resources behind it and available to everybody instantly and with no cost.
A civilization without instrumentalities ?
Yes, but the Krell forgot one thing - monsters from the Id !
Squirrel!
This is true, but rarely do you get one that is of high enough standards for todays gaming environment (Which is why every release of the Unreal, Source, Doom, Quake, etc... is such a big deal)
The Original Half Life Series is run off a modified Quake Engine, I believe. and I wouldn't be surprised if the first Unreal Tournament did too. But when you look at how the Unreal engine has evolved and how Source has evolved they are very different.
If you aren't modifying the engine at all, what you're mostly doing is an elaborate Mod (See Total Conversions). If it looks like a duck, Renders like a duck, and handles lighting like a duck, it still feels like a duck when you play it, no matter how much you alter speeds/weapons/textures/Maps. Even when you take an FPS designed Engine and try to run an RTS on it, you will typically have to write in your own scripting.
It's free to use. It is not free to distribute games, even FREE games. Make a simple game, give your brother a free copy and you are required to PAY!
Free is cool but their license is kind of scammy in the way it slides in those requirements. It will be interesting to see them try to enforce it as unsuspecting users who didn't actually read the licensing details.
You don't know what you are talking about. The creation of the game assets (story, dialogue, models, textures, maps, shaders, scripts, particles, sounds and music) are by far more time consuming and arduous then writing the game engine. These days with DirectX, OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, PhysX, Bullet, etc. you basically already have an engine, you just need a glue program to put it all together.
I found a site that shows off the difference between the engine version used in UT3 (version 3809) and the UDK engine (version 5860): http://www.laurenscorijn.com/udk-comparision.html
Windows only, nonfree, and trying to get every penny they can. Oh and pretty sure they stopped icculus from finishing his port of UT3 to linux thanks to gates holding the xbox360 liscensing over their heads. Bah, sellouts.
It's a question of perspective.
GPL enforces full freedom for the end-user.
GPL, specially version 3, makes it so that - no matter what happens, you'll always be guaranteed to hack your freedom to tinker and hack whatever GPLv3 software you stumble upon.
Whereas a public domain software could still be locked behind some patent or blob-signing mechanism.
So you find a device, using some public domain software in its firmware. Theoretically you are allowed by the public domain status to do whatever you want with the software. Except that actually you can't, because the device checks the firmware's signature and will refuse to run whatever you want it to.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Public domain material is, within its own context, fully free, and there is no way that it can in of itself lead to tyranny either.
Two words :
Code signing
If the device on which the public domain soft runs use signature checking, no matter how much "free" the public domain status is supposed to be, you're still restricted to exercise your freedom to hack it.
GPL, specially version 3, is designed to enforce passing freedoms to the next user in chain. From the users' perspective, GPL offers more freedom.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That's the point of public domain. It's the "do what you want, I don't care" option.
From a corporation's point of view - yes.
But *not* from a end-users point of view. GPL is the only license which enforce the his/her freedom to "do what you want", by blocking whatever a corporation may try to invent to stop the user's right to exercice the "do what you want".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]