I searched, and I didn't see a thread about this, and while its probably not super new news, I'm finding it to be pretty awesome news.

I remember hearing a little while back that Epic had released a version of the Unreal 3 engine completely free for indie developers (minus the source code obviously), but at the time I guess I dismissed it figuring it'd just be a glorified version of the UnrealEd level editor. I mean, would they REALLY just give away Unreal Engine 3.

Apparently, yes.

Spent today reading up on it and trying it out, and I gotta say, holy f***. They really give you everything, the animation tools, the cut-scene director, the physics, the particle system/editor, Speedtree, AI, f***ing EVERYTHING. And the licensing terms are pretty fair too: its completely free to use until you want to sell something, then you pay a $99 licensing fee and 25% of anything you make over $5000.

So yeah, I guess this may only be interesting to only a limited number of people here, but if you've ever toyed with the idea of making your own game or doing something small or indy, definitely grab this and give it a bash.

http://www.udk.com/

25% + $99 licensing for a commercial game engine is pretty damn good. As a comparison, Apple take 30% and a $99 fee for developing and distributing iPhone applications.

I heard from a guy who was working with the full version on APB, that this version is totally gimped off all the good stuff though.

Looking at whats in it, I'm not sure what they could have gimped or left out of it, besides not giving you the source code (which I guess limits a little bit what you can do). Is this a guy you know? As in, know well enough to ask him some specifics about what they left out? I'm genuinely interested, cos I'm evaluating engines and stuff atm for something I'm working on.

Apple take 30% and a $99 fee for developing and distributing iPhone applications.

You left out the part about the arbitrary (and sometimes very long) approval process that pisses off developers.

Ahh yes but purely on the revenue side... The approval process sucks giant monkey testicles. I've had to go through it for the two apps I made. One of them never received the 1.2 update coz Apple were being picky pricks about a button icon "not being quite the right icon for its purpose". f*** off Apple, I can choose whatever the f*** icon I want.

I like the products but not Apple. In fact, I've sorta grown to hate Apple's attitude toward developers, their stubbornness with excluding extremely useful software features on the iPhone and other reasons.

last edited by 3dee at 20:19:03 25/Nov/09

Yep, say whatever you like about gumby Microsoft products, but their attitude towards developers (regardless of programming language) is a huge boost to the tech industry.

If every single company that wanted to sell software for Windows had to go through an app store like approval process it'd be a disaster.

Interesting, interesting. I have tried several times to make a complete 3D game from scratch by myself and as a team of three or four (with the other dudes being German modders I have met along the way and become friends with).

My interest at home has always been to develop using only completely free tools (since I get enough of the other side at work). My current toolset FYI is: Blender3D, Irrlicht Engine, IrrKlang, Code::Blocks, GCC/GDB, Light Map Maker which are supported on and off (depending on what I'm messing with) by RakNet, MySQL++, ODE and then when I'm really feeling energetic SWIG and Python for a scripting engine.

There are more holes than you can poke a stick at in this group of software, but it's a real challenge and fun.

Needless to say, I've never finished anything. Although, I have my handle on all of the above libs at a more than intermediate level, including my own modeling and animations (and I'm a programmer, so I'm happy with that).

So, yeah, if anyone else is into that s*** as a hobby, always interested to here/see any work.

and Microsoft get another tick for their good development environment and thorough documentation and user group support.

That being said, Apple have a good Mac OS X developer "attitude". Xcode and Interface Builder and all the tools and frameworks are available in the OS installation. Xcode isn't as good as Visual Studio but Interface Builder and the MVC pattern that Cocoa frameworks use is actually really nice (as evident in developing Cocoa Touch apps for the iPhone).

In fact, having used the Visual Studio Forms editor and the standard Windows controls, I can honestly say that, for OS X GUI apps, its actually a lot nicer to use. Every element on the GUI is a "Window" and you can customise just about everything in the standard GUI. As well, there's a lot more controls and variations to play with. But best of all is that all the controls are pristine (you've seen the OS X UI...)


But back on topic...

Irrlicht Engine

Wow, that's still around?



last edited by 3dee at 22:47:02 25/Nov/09

last edited by 3dee at 22:47:58 25/Nov/09

Have you checked out Bullet pinky? Its completely free and open source too, even for commercial use, and s***s on ODE in my experience. Cross platform too, works on PC, 360 and if you're a certified PS3 developer, even PS3. Used it at work for the last project I was on and it performed extremely well, put our previous efforts at a home-grown collision system to shame. Pretty well supported too and actively developed.

I honestly don't know why anyone would bother trying to develop their own engine anymore, when theres so many free, or incredibly cheap, sound libaries, physics/collision libraries, network libraries, renderers or even complete engines. 'Tis a good time to be an indy developer!

I honestly don't know why anyone would bother trying to develop their own engine anymore

I think most "smart" developers in the end realise that leveraging existing APIs and technologies is a much better idea than trying to "roll your own". Using an existing game engine is obviously the easiest way to get your game done but grabbing a bunch of libraries like Lua, Ogre, Bullet as you mentioned, FMOD Ex and everything else and whipping up a game framework/engine is going to help a lot when it comes to, again, getting things done.

The worst thing indie developers can do is try to roll their own graphics engine (for anything serious). 3D engines are a nightmare. Let the bigwigs (like Crytek) handle it.

Irrlicht Engine

Wow, that's still around?

Yeah, complete with pretty much the same dev team in varying degrees of input at times. Hasn't changed a huge amount in 3 years - most notably was addition of skeletal animation which is essential. It's ticking over. I really like Irrlicht. Of course there's better out there - even OGRE is probably better - but I still like Irrlicht :-P I'm a loyalist.

neoaxis is coming along nicely.

The thing I found in my limited exposure to Ogre itself (and CEGUI) was that it was Singletonland. They both pretty much abused the Singleton pattern like a bitch.

Then again, I'm a firm believer in low-coupling flexibly class hierarchies and generally never use Singletons... ever. They're unnecessary IMO.

last edited by 3dee at 23:13:22 25/Nov/09

Yeah, it's true, I don't like a lot of coding in any OSS engine (or many softwares in general) that I've looked at - including my own. But it's free. And Irrlicht is free as in beer. Who's complaining. It works mostly.

Irrlicht I see doesn't use Singletons :)

I've got nothing against Singletons, they have their uses. Not that I've used them excessively in the past, but for stuff like component managers and the like, they're pretty handy.

Sure you can probably code your way around it without using singletons, but if using singletons is going to let you develop the code faster, and its going to be simpler and more straight forward to use as an end result, why not use a singleton? Theres a lot of useful design patterns, but what I don't like is the people who believe EVERYTHING has to be a design pattern, and try and use them where they really don't belong. When it makes sense to use one, use one, when it doesn't, don't.

And this is going way off topic now, so I'm going to stop my rant there.

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned Unity yet.

Back in the day, Dynamix released the Torque engine (Tribes 2 engine) for I think it was ~$700. Pretty cheap all considered.

As for Apple taking 30%, I thought it was only 10%.

The only thing wrong with Singletons is that they're a little difficult to unit test: applying IoC patterns to classes in order to isolate them for unit testing is muddled by reference to static singleton instances.
Other than that it can be extremely useful to only allow a single instance of something.

Thread bump. This just popped up on Slashdot:

Often there's no better way to learn a tool than to watch it being used. So, our developers put together a series of video recordings on how to use different UE3 toolsets and typical workflows.

linkage to the 160+ videos