Scaleform Being Added to Unreal Engine, UDK

According to a report earlier today by industry magazine Develop, Epic Games and the middleware group Scaleform are going to begin offering Scaleform Gfx user-interface tools to Unreal Engine 3 licensees later this year, free of charge.

In a pleasantly surprising follow-up announcement, the companies also revealed a deal that will bundle the tools into Epic's free-to-use Unreal Development Kit.

In a nutshell, Scaleform Gfx allows developers to create robust user-interface designs with hardware-accelerated vector graphics and video based in Flash. In the company's own words, it offers "scalable data-driven Flash UI elements for videos, menuing systems, overlays, HUDs and animated textures directly on 3D objects."

Just last month, Epic Games and Valve revealed the integration of Steamworks into the Unreal Engine 3, and the free inclusion of the hardware-accelerated vector graphics user-interface tool is sure to make the package even more attractive to developers.