Author Topic: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine  (Read 12507 times)

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Offline Fury

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Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/11/05/1451256/Epic-Releases-Free-Version-of-Unreal-Engine?from=rss

http://www.udk.com/

I wonder if this UDK actually shows inner workings of the engine and whether some of the code could be reverse-engineered for fs2_open. Code such as OpenGL, OpenAL, shaders, physics, etc...

 

Offline MR_T3D

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
well this is unexpected, but cool.

 

Offline CP5670

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
Nice to see. Epic has taken some flak lately for various things, but they have continued to be excellent in supporting the mod communities, more than most companies. UT3 has a lot of good stuff available for it.

 

Offline Bobboau

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
is there some free content available too?
even if it's not a lot, just one or two character models and a single map, just something to start you off with.
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Offline redsniper

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
What's the catch?
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Offline Flipside

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
Heh, oddly enough, I posted about this in the Programming Forum, didn't realise this was here :)

 

Offline blackhole

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
I wonder if this UDK actually shows inner workings of the engine and whether some of the code could be reverse-engineered for fs2_open. Code such as OpenGL, OpenAL, shaders, physics, etc...

You actually wouldn't really want to reverse engineer that code. There are many, many, many sources that show how to do those things in a more abstract fashion that could be applied to FS2 in a much more reasonable manner, preferably without making FS2 look like the over-processed-3D-crap that is Unreal.

 

Offline Aardwolf

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
over-processed 3d crap, what?

 

Offline Commander Zane

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
What Aardwolf said.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
I gotta go with blackhole here. Most Unreal products look faintly, well, unreal. Plasticky. There have been a few that got past that barrier, though.

 

Offline CP5670

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
UE3 is an odd engine in that there is a lot of variation in the games that use it. Only UT3 has really used it to its full potential. All the other games I've seen on that engine look much worse.

At its best though, it looks great (probably second only to CryEngine 2) and is very scalable, running well on a range of hardware.

 

Offline Mongoose

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
I gotta go with blackhole here. Most Unreal products look faintly, well, unreal. Plasticky. There have been a few that got past that barrier, though.
Isn't that more a function of art assets and/or lighting settings than the underlying engine, though?

 

Offline chief1983

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
The original Unreal (only in Glide mode) was one of the best looking games I had ever seen when it came out.  It was the same era as half-life and it showed what a new engine was capable of as opposed to the old and busted Quake engine modifications that HL did.  Granted we still know which one was the more popular game...
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Offline CP5670

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
Yes, Unreal's graphics were miles ahead of everything else when it came out in 1998. I don't think anything really challenged it until Descent 3 and Quake 3 a year later, and even those were only better in some ways.

UT still holds up fairly well today, especially with the S3TC texture packages. In fact, I have yet to see any modern game match up to that level of texture quality.

 

Offline Commander Zane

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
Yes, Unreal's graphics were miles ahead of everything else when it came out in 1998.
And even then Unreal 1 was released with about 1/4 of the features the engine was going to introduce. :P

 
Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
Yes, Unreal's graphics were miles ahead of everything else when it came out in 1998.
And even then Unreal 1 was released with about 1/4 of the features the engine was going to introduce. :P

And that's stil far more than the original Quake was going to have  :P
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Offline chief1983

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
I remember playing Unreal on a Voodoo card, and walking out of the prison ship for the first time...it was just amazing.  The water effects still look good to this day, the lighting was superb, even the music was well done.  Just never grabbed me as a whole, like Half-Life, which goes to show that a great game is more than the sum of its parts.
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Offline blackhole

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
I gotta go with blackhole here. Most Unreal products look faintly, well, unreal. Plasticky. There have been a few that got past that barrier, though.
Isn't that more a function of art assets and/or lighting settings than the underlying engine, though?

Only if you actually change the stupid lighting shaders. Guess how many people bother doing that? Also, graphics engines impose a given look and feel on all the games that they render based on how they do things. Unreal is powerful, but its still based around a whole bunch of largely fixed-function ideas, like skyboxes. You simply cannot get a game built in Unreal to have skyboxes like Freelancer, because freelancer's graphics engine was built using modular skyspheres, and Unreal's actual graphics pipeline is not as modular as one would think (at least, in terms of efficient modularization. You can hack anything you want to any engine, but doing so often incurs enormous penalties). This is caused by the mindset of "Why would someone not want to use skyboxes?!" etc.

People don't seem to realize that a very tiny and very fast open-source graphics engine called irrlicht can run on any platform you throw at it, using directX, openGL, or its own software renderer. It even runs on a phone. It's not that impressive to look at, but its core functionality is rock solid, and it's FAST. You do not need to be a huge software company to write reliable software.

 

Offline Ghostavo

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
It's fast because the poly count and textures look like an ass.
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Offline Flipside

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Re: Epic Releases Free Version of Unreal Engine
So the aesthetic value of the assets affect the speed of the Engine?

Better not make good textures then, they'll make the thing run slower...