Blender Underground

Okay instead of flooding the general section with thread after thread of comments made about my favorite game engine, I've decided it may be best to just have an ongoing of the UDK and post separate Post to the one thread also rating what I feel about them.

First off I'll be starting from the current release (August 2010) of the UDK Beta and it can be assumed that all other release have gotten pretty much the same review up to this point.

For anyone not already in the know (I can't imagine anyone here not knowing what the UDK is or what it is meant for) about the UDK, It is a Free to create and fully use and abuse Game engine Package meant to allow free mods of the unreal Game Engine with out needing to require players to already have an existing unreal engine based game. It can also be used to make a commercial game project with a very Indie Game studio royalty system that is very much more accessible to amateur game creators and low budget studios.

I will not only be reviewing each release but also the built in support community services here as well as this is not a finished project but rather the start of all new ones.

So lets kick this off right...

UDK August 2010 BETA:

Epic games has done it again, With their monthly updates and offerings come a whole new list of added features, improved existing features, and streamlining work flow issues added to the mix. As always The Base UDK installation comes with an ever evolving demo Version of the Engines and Studios Flagship title Unreal Tournament 3 which has a few key levels that show off the added and existing features well as well as what else is new and spiffy.

This month UT3-Demo has now got the Scaleform Menu System fully integrated where as before it was only shown in the Head Up Display and in game inventory menu added for the demonstration. Scaleform is a way of using adobe Action scripting and Flash Animations to make interesting and visually awesome 3rd party developed menu and GUI elements easy and quickly for those who know how to use programs like Adobe Flash Professional or the like. It can be use to supplement the already internal Unreal GUI system, or totally releace it as the project team sees.

As of the Augest 2010 beta Scaleform was not only fully integrated, it's been improved and made much more stable it seems from the July 2010 Beta what it was first implemented. Scaleform is now easier to import into game and even supports a wider range of commands and scripting options available in the ActionScripting language.

Next on the offering is Improved Point light Shadowing. Now i really don't see much of a difference here. The engines already powerful LightMass Lighting system is pretty insanely cool, where it calculates not just one light source but also the bounced lighting effects and the like for a much more realistic feel using less resources to build a realistic lighting system. I honestly do see much of a difference. However, At least for me Gone is the Noisy and/or Blotchy dynamically shadowed corners and creases in the game. This was a glitch that showed up in June, got worse in July and seems to be fixed in August. I am very happy to see that nonsense go away.

Motion Blur is such a minor this in the grand scheme of things, however if done right it can really add some stylized realism to your project should you decides to use it rather then deactivate it. I personally don't use it a whole lot, and thus tend to turn it off per level (Which can be done zonally via effects volumes and the like in a level or even in very isolated spots of a level if you choose to.) It does seem to be working a bit better then it was last month however i still don't like it much but who knows others may like it more.

Next we have a new and vastly improved Editor viewing mode. Normally there is a viewing mode that allows the designer to see shading of the level by applying a flat white color on everything. The problem with this is that In older version of the editor, this view mode didn't take into account material effect such opacity mask, two side materials, or normal maps to add more detail to the flat surface.

We can now see these effect clearly with the flat white applied and shadowing information baked on for a better idea of what out shadows are doing in the scene with out all the complex diffuse textures interfering with our views.

There are a few other features down this list that really are just improvements to already existing evolving features the game already has. However one that stands out is normal Map now receive indirect lighting like almost everything else in the game via lightmass. it was a pain in the butt before because Lightmass would just outright ignore Normal maps of a material when it bounced a light meaning the normals on the section not inside of directly light blur out and get a bit ugly blotchy. this has been fixed and now a Material Normal Maps are take into account and have shadowing details baked to them as well...

Over all the UDK just keeps getting better and better, however it still called beta, and for good reason. the fact of the matter is there will likely never be anything other then a beta release of UDK ever released. It's not the point to get out of beta for that matter. but as such you will likely slam head first into some major issues while working with UDK that if you are not ready for them or some what Unreal Engine Savvy, can lead you into hating the system.

Now lets talk about the user community for a moment.

The Website http://www.udk.com is the engines official documentation client and portal to all this UDK. It's an offshoot of the UDN Which stands for Unreal Developer Network. where almost anything you could want to know about how to use the Engine to make your own game is house there.

This is far from complete however. Many of the subject you would like to know about are either locked away from you because they really only relate to professional studios that have a full License of the source code accessible version of the unreal engine, or because that not all the subjects are fleshed out or complete or fully current as the unreal engine is rapidly evolving. the UDN is not really a tutorial website with lessons for the casual user to learn from. It is more a technical Manual of the most used features and systems of the engine.

This however is not to say the information here is stagnate. in fact it actually not the case at all. With every new feature added to UDK and unreal engine 3 New Documentation is added (maybe at first with the basics as place holders) and changes to the documentation is released with each release of UDK so far. This can really be a life saver if you can take that information and experiment with what it's talking about. However this takes a little extra effort if this is your sole learning device.

Good thing Unreal has such a long tradition of a strong Modding community that come stock with any Unreal engine based game ever made. One major source for help is in the form of a few third party website dedicated to such matter. The top of the list being 3D Buzz and a few key others.

When Epic released a special "BLACK BOX" edition of Unreal Tournament 3 on release day, They turned to 3D Buzz to design and produce a series of video Tutorials all about modding the unreal engine. To do this the boys at 3D Buzz had full access to the Unreal Engine for months, at least a year even, before the release of the game to write the Ultimate book series to make mods and games with the unreal engine. So why not have them make the Official Video Tutorials.

This wasn't the first time Epic has release a bonus disk with 3D Buzz video Tutorials as well. and will likely not be the last time either.

Along with the 3D Buzz website and video tutorials, there is a large Forum Community on a whole long list of subject from Modeling to programming and beyond. Almost a one stop source of information if you ask the right questions.

There is however another forum community to support the fledgling game developer, and that via epic official forums community as well. which is all found at the UDK.com address under the Community tab if you want to get in there and ask your question.

with that said, Now is the time to review.

this release I found that while cool and helpful, this release was rather weak compared to the other before it. Voxel Terrain was supposed to be implemented by now and there is no word yet as to status of the feature.

At some point Epic is going to have to offer us something other then BINK Video formats for our games and project yet they still seem die hard on pushing that as our only video option.

Another issue I have at this moment in tile is that while in the past music was handles with the open source OGG audio encoding standards, this is no longer supported. everything is now all WAVE. they really should go back to the OGG+WAVE format as it had been, and do this soon.

over all I give UDK August 2010 Beta a 7 out of 10.

LOL more wall of text LOL

yes

Okay, just let me put my "Wall of text glasse"

fine

Thanks you.

I'm glad "Scaleform Menu System" is implemented.
Seems like that to use it I'll have to buy additional adobe packages which I am not really looking to do.
On another side I'm looking forward for new games using such kind of menu. I hope they'll make good use of them rather than over-using them.
I'm also hoping there isn't much compatibility issues about this new feature, otherwise I'm more likely to suffer this incompatibility, happen to me all the time.


I'm with you about ogg & wave combo.
There is nothing more ridiculous than to force users to use wave format rather than ogg.
...oh wait, there is more ridiculous : forcing users to use BINK Video formats only

Nice review, and nice pre-review too.

Well the September 2010 Beta Release of UDK was released today. and I've now had a few hours to give it a go and play with it.

Many of my UnrealScript Code Source files and tutorials where killed last month, due to the way Epic has changed UDK and some of it's syntax changes and the like. This has apparently gotten a lot worse this month as Now almost not of my Source File will even compile the old way or the new way. If you are going to advance the Coding system for UDK over the Unreal Engine 3.0 Give the Mod Developer Community some time to cross over before you whip it out. Also some fair Public warning would be nice as well that way we know that we need to cross over.

Next, There seems to be a lot of bug Fixes but one of the most annoying visual bugs that was fixed, has returned again and it worse then ever. there are ways to fix this but you loose a few effects doing this and that just not a good thing if you wanted or relied on these Visual effects for you game. Like for instance. I rely on the Light Emissive causing a Bloom effect for my lightsaber blades. but to fix this lighting issue, I have to turn light bloom totally off and thus my effect looses it's effectiveness.

Next, some new features:

The first and best feature I noticed is that in the Built in cinematic editor called "Matenee" we apply a movement track to out scenes to almost anything. that goes with out saying. We can then use this track to translate and rotate that Object all we want. It's always been like that otherwise why have a system like this if you can't move anything right?

Well in Matenee the level designer can now Further refine his or her movement track by placing separate key frames for translation on the x, y or Z Axis, as well as rotations along it's local X, Y, or Z.

This make it cleaner to rotate a box 20 time in a second while moving the box 16 units (about the length of a real world foot or more accurately exactly 32 centimeters)

While Learning how to make a Dynamic Day/Night Skysphere System last week, That is one thing I really wish I had to help make my animation of the Light source (Which drive the World shadows and Projects a "Sun Disk" object on the material of the Skydome) a lot more cleanly and more manageable. Now that I have it I quickly threw together my animation and was done and happy with it. Unlike the Last months beta version which too me hours to figure out and only got close to fudging the effect I was going for. this feature is really really handy and I'm glad they made this for use finally.

There are a few other minor Update and additions but nothing really of note, and nothing that is in it final form or at least close to final form.

However the ability to add Film Grain and other effects like that to your real-time in play of a level (as seen in game like Left 4 Dead and Mass Effect) has just gotten a whole lot easier. You can also add Screen Edge Distortions. Full screen Distortions, Gunk/Blood splatters and a whole list of other thing way more easily.

these effects can be controlled in one of many ways but the three main ways you can do this. through the Unreal Engine's Build in Level and event scripting Editor Kismet, Via Adobe Flash Actionscript (Via Kismet or UnrealScipt source code) and finally this can be effected by UnrealScript source Code itself. there are many other ways as well but these are the main three.

Scaleform it seem has still yet to totally phase out the original GUI editor that is built into the Editor, however It's really starting to loose it's usefulness. The GUI system now getting key features bugged or totally with out function, and following along with the original GUI tutorials are becoming harder and harder with every version of UDK that is release. On the other hand, Scaleform is still not adequately documented and it's hard to integrate it into your UDK project still. there are a few people trying to write or film Tutorials but it just seems that they are re-interpretations of the same Tutorials over and over again which helps but some of the instructions are out of date now and just don't work well sometimes.

This brings me to the next phase of this months Review.

The documentation.

There has been many updates to existing documentation while a few new subject have been added for our reference. This month sees a lot of light additions of subjects that should have had Documentations months and months ago while the Update are just additional links, fixed broken links, and place holder for more detailed information with the promise of being updated later. IE it was a pretty weak offering this month, and it's really going to effect my score.

This month I am sad, and pained, to say I am going to actually score this release rather low. 5 out of 10 is just not good. Over all of all the free Engines Out there, I still find this one the best but this offering is weak and buggy. Stick with July or august build if you are working with UDK at all. If you want to play with some of the new stuff however, You'll have to be aware of some of the Issues it has and work around them...

Here is a supplemental:

September Build is actually not all that craptastic as I initially thought it was. The fact is, It's gotten a bit more stable and it's seem to run strong during things I would have made it crash under.

The next addendum I wish to make, involves the UnrealScript observation. The code has really changed as much as I had initially stated rather then the demand for a more rigid and elegant appearance to the syntax and flow. This means less lazy/sloppy source coding cheats are allowed making the over all source code more elegant and better to follow at the expense of being lazy as long as it functions.

This is actually not as hard of a thing to correct as I had thought it would be at first. U-script coder and Programmers in general tend to get into some bad habits, it seems, when they feel that speed is an issue. In many cases, the Programming language tend to make being a bit lazy possible for the sake of new programmers, however there is a draw back. when the Instructor/pro/teacher take advantage and even encourage bad coding habits, the student (me in this case) tends to learn these bad habits and can't understand why it's not working, later down the line, because it should work like the pro/teacher said it would.

After running through the code "with a fine tooth comb" as they say, I was able to correct all the sloppy code that was holding it back along with a little change here and there, Mostly with few operators and a couple of function calls. I got my code to work as expected with out errors or warning. it was a pain in the ass, but an easy pain in the ass, to fix.

documentation vs Implication of features is still lagging way behind. most of the time the feature is finally fully documented well past the time it has already been changed and thus needs new and different documentation to explain the new way to do this. if documented at all.

I am going to ammend the score a little.

instead of 5 out of 10, UDK September 2010 Beta Build gets:

6 out of 10, still not great but still better then any other free game engine I've seen thus far.

We're so close to another release of a new version of UDK (The October Build) but i had to correct a few opinions I had given out after some further usage of September's UDK. See you in a couple of weeks for the review of October Build...