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Unreal Development Kit May 2010 Beta

Author: Epic Games

The Unreal Development Kit is a standalone version of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 framework, the engine and tools behind such games as Gears of War 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum. The UDK is completely free for non-commercial and educational use, perfect for anyone looking to dabble in development.

Included are tools for everything from programming to level design, plus code and assets for a barebones Unreal Tournament 3 to get you started.

The May update brings a variety improvements and new features including Steamworks support, all detailed below.

May 2010: UDKInstall-2010-05-BETA

Scaleform GFx

Steam

  • Steam is now the default OnlineSubsystem for UDKGame Win32
  • Steam now handles friends, matchmaking and server browsing in the UDK

Light Shafts

Exponential Height Fog

  • New kind of global fog with density that decreases with height
  • Never creates a hard line (unlike standard fog); supports one layer
  • Can specify both "towards the light" and "away from the light" colors
  • Rendering cost similar to two layers of constant density height fog
  • Can now use different colors for the hemisphere facing the light and vice versa

Color Grading Blending

Editor

  • UDK now supports running 64-bit binaries for the editor
  • Added ‘search by object’ type to Kismet
  • New mesh emitter camera facing option: "Apply Particle Rotation As Spin"
  • Editor now shows up in system tray while starting up (and Alt+Tab works!)
  • Can now capture content browser thumbnails from PIE viewports
  • Added ability to tint editor icons similar to Point Lights
  • PNGs can now be imported as textures; RGB and RGBA formats are supported
  • Viewports
    • New Alt+F/G/H/J shortcuts to switch between viewport types
    • Greatly reduced the time it takes for volume visibility updates

Installer

  • Now being localized for
    • INT - English
    • FRA - French
    • ITA - Italian
    • DEU - German
    • ESN - European Spanish
    • ESM - Latin American Spanish
    • RUS - Russian
    • HUN - Hungarian
    • CZE - Czech
    • SLO - Slovakian
    • POL - Polish
    • JPN - Japanese
    • CHN - Simplified Chinese
    • KOR - Korean

Editor Fixes

  • Materials can no longer be placed as decals unless the decal usage flag is set
  • Fixed fog volumes being created when dropping materials sometimes
  • Fixed support for non-standard languages

FBX Importer

  • Added support for rigid animation!
  • FBX import settings are now remembered between sessions
  • Importer will detect the type of asset to import by peeking at the FBX file
  • New import option to override naming of imported assets
  • Textures can now be imported (with or without a material being created)
  • The FBX import dialog has been improved
  • Updated to the latest FBX SDK (2011.2)
  • Can now re-import skeletal meshes from FBX files
  • Fixed smoothing group warning dialog spam on mesh import

UDKGame

  • Scaleform / UI
    • Added (prototype) Scaleform-based front end and HUD to UDKGame
    • Added GFx example content to ExampleMap
    • Scaleform implementations of HUD, Pause Menu, Scoreboard
  • Code clean-up
    • Moved UT-specific functionality from Weapon to UTWeapon.
    • Moved HUDIcons and HUDCoords properties from UDKVehicleBase to UTVehicle
    • Cleaned up UDK default engine.inis down to two
    • Moved DeathTime from UDKPawn to UTPawn
    • Removed unused UDKPawn property LookYaw
    • Removed PlayFiringSound() call from Weapon.FireAmmunition() (not implemented for any game except UTGame)
    • Moved bio death material effect system from UDKPawn to UTPawn
  • Enabled tone mapping and color grading support to UDK
    •  Enabled by default now so all scenes will receive contrast-enhancing tone mapping
  • Misc
    •  Changed input handling of controller demo to not recurse, therefore stopping the CLIK button from swallowing the GAMEPAD_A event
    • Spawn player as spectator if ?causeevent=flythrough is passed on the commandline
    •  Set bFixedPlayerStart=true, bForceRespawn=true, and bQuickStat=true if ?causeevent=flythrough is passed on the commandline

Swarm

  • Fixed several issues related to version numbers and matching Agents to Jobs
  • Change usage of "localhost" to using the localhost IP address (127.0.0.1) instead

Gameplay Profiler

Attachment Editor

  • Draw bone/socket label on connector for actors attached to skeletal meshes
  • Allow nodes to be manually moved around
  • Allow attachments to be made in a more 'Kismet like' way

NavMesh

  • Lots of runtime navmesh optimizations (mostly related to dynamic submesh builds)
    • Huge speed gains

AnimSet Viewer

  • Added copy and paste animations to the AnimSet browser
  • New options for calculating Bone Break
    • Default: Both meshes have to influence to use rigid
    • Auto Detect Rigid: Detects rigid when soft body misses the weight
    • Alternate weight preferred: Second weight has more priority
  • Added "Delete selected bone weighting" option
  • "Toggle Mesh Weights" option
    • Displayed if there is a valid set of weights for the current LOD
    • Otherwise, the option is disabled
  • Added info to display chunks/sections when swapping vertex weights

Max Quality Mode

  • Added MaxQualityMode option for taking high-resolution screenshots
  • Increases texture res and shadow quality regardless of performance

Property Multi-Select and Cut-Paste

  • Control-Click on properties to add to selection
  • Control-C, Control-V or right click to copy and paste!

Lighting Changes

  • Improved unbuilt lighting performance
  • Changed bUseBooleanEnvironmentShadowing to default to TRUE for best performance
    • Light environments will not receive dynamic shadows from the static environment unless bUseBooleanEnvironmentShadowing is changed back to false!
  • Primitives with bShadowIndirectOnly=true no longer cast dynamic shadows
  • Added bForceNoPrecomputedLighting to WorldInfo, allowing maps with fully dynamic lighting to skip time-consuming light building during a full rebuild
  • Hid light environment settings that are rarely used, edge cases, or only set by gameplay code to simplify the interface

Scene Capture Optimizations

  • 'Max View Distance Override': Set a culling distance for objects rendered into the reflection
  • 'Skip Update If Owner Occluded': Skip rendering to the scene capture entirely if it's not going to be visible
  • 'Skip Rendering Depth Prepass': Controls whether a depth prepass is performed when rendering the scene capture
  • Capture will be culled if last-bound time of the render target texture is more than a second ago

Rendering

  • Added map check warning for large shadow casters unless they have bAcceptsDynamicDominantLightShadows=false
  • New mesh emitter camera facing option: bApplyParticleRotationAsSpin
  • Changed bRenderAsVelocity to default to TRUE for RadialBlurComponents as they are much faster to render this way
  • Mesh area lights now affect dynamic objects!
    • UE3 creates a spotlight at the center of the emissive area which is applied to dynamic objects
  • Added a new volume type: LightmassCharacterIndirectDetailVolume
    • Lightmass generates higher density indirect character lighting samples inside these volumes
    • Useful for sections where characters are not over static ground, e.g., elevators
  • Using down-sampled scene texture for depth of field, bloom and motion blur  http://epicwiki.epicgames.net/display/UEWiki/DOF+and+Bloom

UDN Documentation

Warnings

  • Exporting TGAs is temporarily broken and results in weird interlaced images

Upcoming changes (as of the next UDK build)

  • SM2 support will be removed
Filename: UDKInstall-2010-05-BETA.exe
Size: 762.19 MB
Post Date: May 25, 2010 4:04am PDT
Last Updated: Sep 23, 2010 8:40pm PDT
Downloads: 418

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