Gaming News Journal: Epic Games Releases October 2010 Unreal Development Kit Beta

CARY, NC (October 28, 2010) –Epic Games, Inc. has released the October 2010 UDK Beta, the latest version of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides uncompromised access to the award-winning toolset used in blockbuster video games, 3D visualizations, digital films and more.

Epic is committed to providing the UDK community with regular software releases at no charge, and the latest beta is available now at www.udk.com/download.

This month, we’d like to give everyone a behind-the-scenes look at a non-game UDK project. Developed by Parsons Brinckerhoff for the Michigan Department of Transportation, IntelliDrive is a driving simulation that shows how vehicles can be plugged in to the national transportation grid. We talk with PB about how they created the simulation – which utilizes multiple display screens and a steering wheel – with a small team in just four months.

Are you creating something great with UDK? Drop us a line in the Project Show-Off forums, where links to tech demos, gameplay videos and screenshots are always welcome.

It’s easy to sign up as a commercial UDK developer online. Our FAQ can help you determine which type of license is right for you.

Upgrade Notes

This month there were numerous improvements to the Editor to make workflows easier. Enhancements were made to the various rendering systems as well.

NOTE: The old UI system has been completely removed.

Rendering

Foliage volumes and terrain foliage were removed.
There is a new adjustable tonemapper with a more linear curve.
ImageGrain and Color LUT (ColorGrading) in Post-Processing can now be used even without a tonemapper.

Motion Blur

MotionBlurSkinning has been improved both in terms of memory footprint and performance.
Skeletal meshes now support per-bone motion blur. This motion blur is dependent on bone movement, on a per-bone basis.

More information: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MotionBlur.html

Editor

Tool tips for shortcut keys are now displayed for the main toolbar buttons.
Support for creating new subtractive levels was removed.
It’s now possible to cancel the autosave process in-editor by hitting Esc.
Perspective viewports now default to real time. Disable this via preferences.
WASD keys controlling movement can now be used without holding right mouse.
There are new hotkeys for hiding actors:
- H: Hides the selected actors.
- Shift+H: Hides the unselected actors.
- Ctrl+H: Unhides all the actors.
Unlock and show mouse cursor while in PIE or PIV using Shift+F1.
The PIE and PIV icons are now more distinct.
A separate ‘Play’ menu has been created; the ‘Play Level’ button has been moved to this new menu.
The ability to visualize static mesh edges has been added to the static mesh editor.
The ability to accidentally right-click or middle-click on transform gizmos has been removed.
Mesh painting has been improved:
- The mesh paint tool now supports flood fill.
- The mesh paint tool can now push vertex color from an instance to the mesh.
- The mesh paint tool now supports multi-select.
This build includes code to fix up static mesh objects with zero triangle elements.
- Map check warnings indicating StaticMeshes with zero triangle element can be fixed in the static mesh editor using the ‘Mesh –> Remove elements with zero triangles’ option.
- Map check warnings indicating StaticMesh instances that contain mismatches between their materials override array and the source mesh elements.

Multithreaded cooking is now supported. This yields approximately 4x faster cooks.

New build and submit support lets users rebuild map, save and check it into P4 all at once.

It’s now possible to search the Actor Browser and easily comb the actor list.

Actor Browser Searching

Scaleform GFx

There is now support for GFx AMP, which is available in Binaries/GFx/Amp/GFxAmpClient.exe.

UDN Pages

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ScaleformBestPractices.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/AnimationCompressionAlgorithms.html

Updated

Community Links

UDK Forums: www.udk.com/forums
UDK Developers on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2493123
UDK on Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/UDK/183744733429
Epic Games on Twitter: www.twitter.com/EpicGames

Source: http://www.epicgames.com/news/epic-games-releases-october-2010-unreal-development-kit-beta

SYBASE SUN MICROSYSTEMS

Gaming News Journal

Friday, November 12, 2010

Epic Games Releases October 2010 Unreal Development Kit Beta

NOTE: The old UI system has been completely removed.

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