TOOLS | BUILD
velopments It was only a few months ago that Epic released the free UDK – how do you feel the launch went for you? It has gone very well. So far we’ve had over 125,000 unique user installs of the Unreal Development Kit which is pretty amazing considering it is, after all, a development kit. Are you seeing much upsell from people wanting to go commercial with their products, or is it still early days? Yeah, it definitely is still early days, but the initial and ongoing interest in using UDK for commercial products is beyond what I would have expected. So I’m very pleased with the way things are going. As mentioned above, you’ve clearly been after the smaller developers for some time now. Has this done much to curry favour with them? Is it much more than an extended evaluation period? I think there are a lot of developers for whom UDK is a great fit and a breath of fresh air. Many of them never had the possibility of gaining commercial-use access to Unreal Engine 3 prior to the release of UDK, so I think we’ll see some really awesome and unique products released using it. For some, UDK could be a stepping stone to gaining a full Unreal Engine 3 licence by being able to demonstrate their ability to create something really cool. They can use that to attract a partner who can make that a reality, or show us something special that opens the door for them directly. Either way, it’s a win for gamers and developers alike. DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
Could you see yourselves expanding the ‘Make Something Unreal’ competition to include stand-alone content created with the UDK? I don’t know. The nice thing about UDK is that developers can ‘make something Unreal’ and be in control of their own commercial destiny. They don’t need a contest to be able to make money from their talent; they can simply get the commercial license for UDK and go out and sell what they’ve made.
requested features, and Jack Porter at Epic implemented it rapidly, using the opensource libffi package.
I think what we’re showing right now is that Unreal Engine 3 never stands still; we’re constantly working on it to make it better and extend its appeal.
What other new features have you added since the launch of the UDK? We’re constantly improving Unreal Engine 3 and its tools so UDK, being a full-fledged binary version of UE3, has received a ton of new features and improvements – far too many to pick out just a few. Just as significantly, we’ve also opened up loads of documentation and worked with partners to create some awesome training materials, including over 170 video training modules from the folks at 3D Buzz and two sample games that illustrate how to use UDK in different ways. With those games we’re releasing the source code and developer diaries to show how they were made. These are incredible resources for UDK and UE3 users alike. Prior to UDK, only Unreal Engine 3 licensees knew the sheer breadth of the improvements we make to the engine on a month-to-month basis, but hopefully now more people can appreciate it.
Some people originally thought that the UDK was slightly limited at launch – how has the DLLBind functionality in the recent update helped with that? UDK’s new DLLBind feature enables developers to easily interface UnrealScript code with external libraries written in C/C++, such as middleware components and hardware drivers. When we released UDK in November, this was one of the top user-
With regards to the more traditional UE3 platforms, what sort of things can developers expect for Unreal Engine 3 in 2010? I think what we’re showing right now is that Unreal Engine 3 never stands still; we’re constantly working to make it better and extend its appeal. Developers looking for game engines should come visit our Expo Suite at GDC to get a small glimpse of that. www.epicgames.com
Far left: Unreal Engine 3 running on an iPhone Left: Epic’s Tim Sweeney takes to the stage with Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun-Huang Above: The UE3 iPhone demo
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