February 2013 Unreal Development Kit

Unreal Development Kit (UDK)

Epic Games Releases February 2013 Unreal Development Kit Beta

Substance Integration

The latest release of UDK features integration with allegorithmic’s Substance Designer. Substance is a toolset for the rapid creation of high quality materials and textures, and can greatly reduce the time it takes to create textures, while creating smaller files. Integration with Substance is now native in UDK based on parameters in the Unreal Editor, or using Matinee.

A non commercial license of Substance Designer 3 is $99, and for a limited time, UDK users can a 50% discount on a commercial license.

Mobile Updates

The following updates were made to the mobile output in the beta:

• Updated iOS audio functionality
• Added support for Game Center Achievement banners
• Added commandlet ReplaceMaterial to help reduce usage and correct old assets to use MaterialInstanceConstants (MICs)
• Now suppors texture tiling for ribbon particles
• Enhanced mobile modulated shadows to support color fading
• Improved Depth of Field (DOF) quality
• Improved lightmap and Scaleform texture quality
• Added the option to disable game rendering while full screen movies are playing
• Added option to remove selected textures from final packages
• Added Subtitle option to native m4v movies
• Added a WriteTFCReport option to package generation that displays all textures in a TextureFileCache (TFC) file

General Improvements

There are a number of other tweaks to the beta as well:

• Animated mesh creators can now set three custom notify buttons in the AnimSet Editor
• Added a Reconnect Target item to the UnrealConsole menu

Android

Another item on interest is that Epic Citadel, the showcase app for demonstrating the Unreal Engine 3 technology, has been released for Android. It is avialable on Google Play and the Amazon Appstore for Android.

This is interesting because about the same time Citadel was announced for iOS, UDK added support for creating iOS games. A UDK Remote was released for iOS to help designers work with the new mobile target. UDK support for Android has not been announced, but this does raise hopes that UDK will become even more multi-platform capable in the releases to come!

Go get it!

The February 2013 beta for UDK is available at www.udk.com.