UDK Opinions/Tips/General Discussion

Hey InstantLife here... I have been working with UDK for a bit and im in a group of about 6 people making a game using it... I enjoy all that it provides to me for free! Its kind of cool for Epic Games to put this out for free into the indie community (them being a huge company in-all). People have made some REALLY neat things using UDK and I cant wait to work with some more 3D stuff! I have had 3D modeling programs for a while now just to play around with... I have ZBrush... Sculptris... Blender... a bunch of that stuff... Im getting 3DS Max as we speak and I'm really interested in using those to maybe make some assets or something for our game along side coding in UDK... I wanted to make this to see if anyone else is interested in/have used/are using UDK... and also if anyone has any tips/any overall knowledge about UDK that they are willing to share go ahead! WE ARE THE UNDERGROUND!

I havent personally used it, but ive played a ton of games that were built with it...and not all teh same genre...ive played everything from side-scrollers to FPS games all with the same engine, so its pretty impressive. I think in the end, tools exist to compliment our creative ability as developers. I always coded my own stuff to actually learn it...not so much to build it. Things like UDK can help out a ton with that if you just want to let your creative juices flow.

Yeah... It saves some time so we can work on some of the greater aspects of the game... The creative planning time is key for a game and we are all putting in our ideas and thoughts...

I have only used it for a little becase my laptop couldnt take it anymore but my experince with it was fun because it made designing highly detailed games easy

UDK is my primary development tool. I spend about 1-2 hours a night trying new things and trying to make my own game. I can do single player, multiplayer (but that's what it does out of the box) and I'm semi good at Kismet. Matinee would be my strongest point I guess in it as it's all keyframing which I learned early on from my wife who went to art school to learn computer animation with max (back on R2.5 and R3 before Autodesk took it over). I also just got my Oculus Rift and have been exploring my levels in virtual reality which completely changes things.

UDK is a monster and in my experience not an entirely friendly one at that. It is very powerful, but can be extremely confusing and a pain in the rear to get up and running. I haven't used it in about a year, but it would crash for everyone on my team constantly. If that is still relevant here's a pro tip: save often. Also, you don't necessarily have to use the latest build. I would do some research and find the most recent that is the most stable. I don't use it personally because of the royalty fees and the fact I am a one man band, but if I made 50k I doubt I would complain too much anyways. Hopefully that didn't scare you away because it is an amazing engine and I still cherish the time I spent in it! Like Tim mentioned UDK powers a lot of great games today. I was very fortunate to run across this blog while I was deving in it: http://romerounrealscript.blogspot.com/p/table-of-contents.html. I highly suggest going through it as there is a lot of valuable information regarding UnrealScript in it.

Here is the game we built for our final project in UDK: https://www.facebook.com/trappedthegame

yeah UDK is very helpful to me, i enjoy using it a lot

<3 UDK

does blender work well with UDK?

ummm yeah... people use blender and UDK all the time... i make things in Blender and put them in UDK all the time...

Yup you can use Blender. If you check out the game I linked above all of those assets were created with Blender.

The 3D Buzz videos are how I learned the basics. They us a much older version of UDK, but all the buttons and terminology is still there. Some of the newer features are not in there but you should learn the basic before using most of those anyway. He take you through the hole process of making a simple 2 room single player game in one of the sets. He covers the systems, materials, kismet, etc in the others.

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VideoTutorials.html

3/4's of the way down

Which version of UDK do you guys use? Cause the 2013 versions content broswers are seriously lacking compared to the 2012 versions so I just went back to those. Also @Jimmy nice game dude me and my son play it together

i use 2013 july version, i havent used any 2012 build before so i didnt know that its content browser was better

It it alittle but switch over to 2013 because the browser is alot easier to navigate

I'm using 3-2013 for the Oculus Rift, I'm not sure which versioni that's comparable to. I stopped upgrading every release because it got to confusioning to remember all the settings changes I was making.

Do you guys use kismet much?

I'm not really good at scripting so yes, I use Kismet for almost everything.

sometimes but not very often since I am learning scripting

Kismet is good for scripting matinee's and a couple other triggered events, but outside of that we focused on UnrealScript. If you’re building levels for show, Kismet is fine, but if you’re building games you’ll have to get your hands dirty in UnrealScript.