Volitions Advocate on 11/11/2009 at 17:07
the stuff on the collectors edition is really helpful, but yes it deals specifically with UnrealEd. Which is good, because it teaches you everything, BSP, kismet, the materials editor, matinee. all of it. But I think those vids are up on the web now for free, I dont remember the name of the guys that made them (they don't work for epic) but I think It's up on their site. i was going to break it open and take a look so when I find out I'll post it.
EDIT: I haven't watched them all but I don't think it touches unrealscript at all
Volitions Advocate on 11/11/2009 at 17:09
Quote Posted by Judith
Btw. there are lots of stock textures/materials/meshes in UDK to begin with, mostly from UT3 or Gears maybe.
Oh i didn't realize that, Are they free for use as well with UDK? that seems a bit weird. Most of the time If you release mods your'e not allowed to actually bundle the games' native assets with your file, because they're accesible through the game you install it on anyway. I guess Epic thinks its okay to release these things for free through UDK but I doubt they'd be cool with somebody using them in a commercial product.
Digital Nightfall on 11/11/2009 at 17:19
If the UDK is used to make commercial products the developers have to pay Epic some fairly large sums. It will allow people to create their own unreal-engine games, but they can't be sold in any form without licensing agreements and hefty royalties. As long as people are paying Epic buckets of cash I doubt they'll mind what assets they're using! (
http://www.udk.com/licensing)
I went through the entire video series from 3DBuzz that came with the UT3 collector's edition. It's very detailed in what it covers, but it really only covers a very small set of specific things. It touches the tip of the iceburg for BSP, Kismet, Matinee, Cascade, the materials editor, and bot pathing, but there's only so much they can instruct on in even twenty four hours of video. To continue learning I've switched over to the Mastering Unreal Tech books (around 3,000 pages in three volumes) made by the same guys who did the videos. I'm about 200 pages in and it's already covered (briefly) almost everything the videos did.
Judith on 11/11/2009 at 18:32
Quote Posted by Volitions Advocate
Oh i didn't realize that, Are they free for use as well with UDK? that seems a bit weird.
Yes, they are, though they cannot be extracted outside the editor, as in original games. You can use them in your project, you also have a sort of FrontEnd ready, main menu and game HUD being a UT3 clone, so you don't have to write everything by yourself in the beginning, if you just want to see how your created world looks like.
As it goes for 3DBuzz, these guys are nice, but the level of insight they give you on the editor is pretty much introductory, as Digi mentioned. It's worth watching if you don't know where to start with the editor.
But, if you want to learn how the modern game modeling/level design/texturing pipeline looks like, Eat3d is a great way to go. I've learnt things I would never figure out by myself. The whole hi-poly -> low-poly modeling process, baking textures, normals and AO maps, making coherent texture sets, this is pretty advanced stuff. You don't need to have 3dsmax and Photoshop, you can use Blender and Gimp to achieve similar results. And it's very rewarding, you can learn to produce models/levels on par with modern games like Gears 2 :) Of course, it will take a lot of time to build everything by yourself, but still it's a great feeling :)
Silkworm on 18/11/2009 at 14:47
Quote Posted by Renzatic
...unless of course it literally takes DAYS to render one out.
There were MANY Doom and Doom II maps that people compiled for literally multiple days on their 486's - usually by people who had access to multiple computers but still.
Volitions Advocate on 18/11/2009 at 16:45
Bit of news that complete BS imho.
UE3 uses bink for all FMV, from what I understand it's the only supported format. So while other 3rd party stuff in the UDK like speedtree or whatever they use are fully available. Bink charges something like US$ 6000 to license their codec. Which means if you dont have a license you get the watermark in every instance of a bink fmv. Some guys on the UDK forum tried to make a brush and put the video on it as a surface rather than simple rendering the video to a screen, and the bloody watermark still appeared on the surface in game! So that means no animated computer screens, or anything like video logs ala: Dead Space without bink .. BINK BINK BINK... in your face. Immersion breaking. What a joke.
Quote Posted by Epic Games
Take it up with Bink.
The_Raven on 18/11/2009 at 17:53
I'm sure you could probably have animated computer screens by using render-to-texture features or an animated material.
P.S. I'm not that well versed on Unreal Engine 3, but I'm assuming that such things are possible.
Ulukai on 18/11/2009 at 17:58
Yep, animated textures are easy in the Unreal Engine.
It's a total non-issue, anyone releasing a game for free using this isn't going to have an army of artists cranking out FMV anyway. If your game needs FMV, your game sucks.
You can do some pretty damn impressive stuff using engine itself, should you feel the need to add some non-interactive narrative.
EvaUnit02 on 18/11/2009 at 18:12
Yes, whilst games like GoW2 and Batman: AA used engine rendering cutscenes for every thing, they'd have to rely upon FMVs for scenes that would've been too tasking for the ancient console hardware to do in real time. Eg blowing up the "final boss" in GoW2.
Anyway, the FMVs used for UE3 360 games would often be highly compressed and low res, largely distracting, immersion breaking stuff for some people (Especially when you're playing a PC port on a good machine at high resolutions.). I'd recommend avoiding them as much as possible.
