Gaming News Journal: Epic Games releases December 2010 Unreal Development Kit Beta with iOS Support

News from Epic Games – December 2010 UDK Beta Released
December 16, 2010 – Epic Games, Inc. has released the December 2010 UDK Beta, the latest version of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides 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 are thrilled to ship a new and improved UDK, now with iOS support. Keep reading for more details, and check out www.udk.com to see examples of what you can do with these new tools.

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.

NEW! iOS Support
Brand new features and content that users will immediately notice are:

Build levels, visually script gameplay events and add visual effects for mobile applications using the Unreal Editor and its major tools, including Unreal Kismet, Unreal Cascade and Unreal Matinee.
Superior rendering features for mobile development, including Unreal Lightmass global illumination accelerated by Unreal Swarm distributed computing.
The full source and content for the “Epic Citadel” App, plus an additional castle demo map.

UDK Remote: A handy tool that enables iOS devices to serve as wireless controllers with full touch and tilt functionality for testing games on the computer.
New Unreal Frontend system compiles scripts and deploys builds for multiple platforms with the simple click of a button.
Mobile Previewer: Preview your application locally using a fully feature OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer with mobile input simulated.
One-click Deployment: Easily deploy your application from the Unreal Editor to your iOS device with only one click.
Next-gen Mobile Graphics: UDK’s highly optimized mobile renderer has support for per-pixel lighting, environment mapping, precomputed visibility and more! And of course, Unreal Lightmass computes stunning light and shadows to bring your scene to life.
Unreal Kismet Visual Scripting: Artists and level designers can string together actions, inputs and events in Unreal Kismet to dictate how the world flows and how the player interacts without having to touch a single line of code.

iOS Feature List

Base UE3 Features
- Highly shippable, proven engine core
- Unreal Editor: Almost entire editor is supported
- Unreal Lightmass: Global illumination, ambient occlusion and more
- Unreal Swarm for distributed lighting builds
- UnrealScript dynamic scripting language
- Unreal Kismet visual scripting
- Pathfinding and navigation meshes
- Unreal Matinee cinematics tools
- Unreal Cascade particle designer
- Mesh painting tools
- Canvas-based UI rendering
- Unreal Content Browser asset manager
- Full support for Autodesk FBX file format
- Unreal animation system (AnimTrees, additive animations, blending, etc.)
- Play In Editor, one-click game preview
- Real-time inverse kinematics
- BSP level construction system
- Crowd system
- Level-Of-Detail systems, including Massive LOD
- Performance and memory profiling tools
- Mesh simplification tool
- Texture unwrapping and LOD generation tools
- Perforce source control support
- Physics and collision systems
- Unreal Frontend tool for launching/packaging your game
- Unreal Console lets you connect to mobile apps, issue commands and view logs
- 64-bit tools allow for huge data sets

Mobile
- Portrait and landscape modes fully supported
- Multi-touch control support including tilt/gyroscope
- Touch-based look controls, gesture support
- New mobile "input zone" system
- Unreal Kismet and UnrealScript support for mobile input
- Mobile input emulation on PC
- Basic UI system based on canvas, with simple buttons/sliders
- Movie playback

Engine
- Fast performing iOS game engine
- Level streaming with asynchronous loading
- Share assets between multiple platforms
- Mobile shader precaching/warming for hitch-free gameplay
- Unreal Lightmass normal map baking
- Precomputed Visibility system with Unreal Matinee path support
- Cooker generates optimized minimum set of shaders based on game usage
- Sound and music playback using OpenAL
- 3D sound spatialization (stereo output)
- Asynchronous music streaming

Tools
- Mobile Previewer for PC with nearly 1:1 graphics preview
- UDK Remote for previewing mobile input on PC using iOS device
- Movie generation tools with authentic mobile-style graphics
- Capture screenshots and movies from device
- Preview iOS device resolutions, system settings and landscape/portrait from editor

Graphics
- State of the art graphics features on mobile
- Flexible material system generates highly optimized OpenGL ES2 shaders
- Real-time shadows (planar)
- Particle systems
- Bump offset mapping
- Skeletal animation
- Shading
  - Real-time per-pixel lighting
  - Normal mapping
  - Specular lighting, including per-pixel specular
  - Dynamic lighting (movable, animated lights)
  - Animated materials
  - Translucency, opacity masks
  - Rim lighting
  - Fresnel effects
  - Texture blending
  - Vertex coloring (paintable meshes)
  - Emissive lighting
  - Vertex deformation (foliage, cloth rendering)
  - Environment mapping
  - Baked ambient occlusion (skeletal meshes)
  - Water surface effects
  - Masking for emissive, environment maps, rim lights and more
- Decals
- Static mesh rendering
- Non-uniformly scaled objects
- Automatic Texture Flattening tool
- Atmospheric fog

Tools

New Unreal Frontend UI

UFE now supports multiple profiles. A profile is a collection of settings for cooking, syncing, and launching that makes switching between projects and configurations a breeze.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UnrealFrontend

Unreal Editor

A vertex color matching tool was added. It allows re-imported meshes to have their hand-painted vertex color paint refitted.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentBlog#Vertex color matching tool

Unreal Kismet