Epic has announced the release of the Unreal Development Kit today! The UDK is a free for non-commercial use Unreal Engine 3 runtime that allows you to create your own games using UE3 without the enormous expense of an Unreal Engine 3 license!
With UDK, you will also be able to create commercial games to sell on digital distribution platforms like Steam. The licensing details for this have yet to be released, however it seems likely you will be able to start selling your game without spending a dime out of your own pocket.
This is great news for the modding community, since now they will have a platform they can develop mods on that does not also require the purchase of any particular game. Now, their target audiences can be much larger.
Along with this release are two games. The Ball Demo, which is a new experience in The Ball universe, created by Toltec Studios (
http://theball.toltecstudios.com/), and Whizzle, by Psyonix, creators of the Onslaught game mode for UT2004. Whizzle also comes with a design document that explains a lot of the code that was written for the game, as well as a 350mb developer diary describing how the game was developed, including subjects such as rapid prototyping. The kit also contains the most recent version of UnrealEd, which has Unreal Lightmass lighting, the new content browser and many more new enhancements from the UT3 Editor.
UDK has far more than I can possibly explain in this simple news post. We look forward to having people dig into the kit and find all the possibilities. The official UDK site (
http://www.udk.com/) has now launched as well as the opening up of over 200 documents previously locked on UDN (
http://udn.epicgames.com/). This, along with all the other content being released with UDK should help modders and developers start building great games with the most powerful game creation toolset there is.
