Unreal Development Kit

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UDK is a free game development kit by Epic Games. The very same development kit used by professional game developers, now free for non-commercial use. You can now create programs using the Unreal Engine 3, for free. You can even develop programs for future commercial use (so long as you purchase a license). This is not a mod kit either, the games you can develop are full stand-alone programs.

Features

Powered by award-winning Unreal Engine 3 technology, UDK’s feature set is packed with power and ease of use.
These are just a few of the top-level features used by many of the world’s best game developers to create outstanding games.
Build better, build faster, build more dynamically.
Build with UDK.

Complete Editing Environment

Unreal Engine 3 offers a fully integrated editing environment through the renowned Unreal Editor. All of the engine’s key tools are accessible through UnrealEd. The new Unreal Content Browser makes managing assets like meshes, materials, sounds, and animations easier than ever.

Pure Rendering Power

UDK’s multi-threaded rendering system, Gemini, gives you a 64-bit HDR rendering pipeline. The raw power behind UDK’s rendering system will push your creations to new levels. Your work has never seemed as alive as it is with UDK.

State-of-the-Art Animation

UDK gives you complete animation flexibility. Organize animations and meshes with the AnimSet Viewer. Create AnimTrees to play within Unreal Matinee. UDK’s skeletal animation system gives support for up to four bones per vertex and allows for blending dozens of animations at once.

Powerful Scripting

UnrealScript is a simple, high-level programming language that gives complete scripting control. Scripts can be connected via Unreal Kismet, an intuitive visual editor that requires no programming knowledge. UnrealScript lets you build prototypes and add new gameplay elements quickly and easily.

Real World Physics

UDK’s physics engine is powered by NVIDIA’s PhysX, giving you unparalleled control over character movement, dynamic fluid simulation and even soft body physics. Tweak and modify your physics using the Unreal PhAT visual modeling tool. Impose your will on your world via detailed physics modeling.

Eye-dropping Lighting, Shadows and Effects

Illuminate your world with UDK’s advanced lighting and shadowing system, screen space ambient occlusion and Unreal Lightmass, the global illumination solver yielding high-quality static lighting and effects. UDK supports all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques as well as custom, artist-controlled per-material lighting models.

Gorgeous Cinematics

UDK provides mature tools for creating visually stunning in-game cinematics and cut scenes. Unreal Matinee provides movie director-class control over all of the objects in a scene, as well as cameras and cuts, plus it includes an in-engine, real-time preview feature that plays back all the visual effects of a cinematic.

Terrain

Work with a dynamically deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly blended materials. Then layer on procedural weathering, such as grass and vegetation or the snow on mountain peaks.

Built-in Networking

UDK currently offers full LAN and direct IP connectivity. Fire up a battle between your buddies and steal the flag from your favorite co-workers!

Real-time Shaders

Experience a powerful visual interface comparable to the non-real time functionality of XSI and Maya, enabling artists to create complex real-time shaders on the fly.

Broad Audio Support

Immerse your users with 3D location-based sound. UDK supports all the latest audio compression schemes, including Ogg Vorbis, and gives you complete control over pitch, levels, looping, filtering, modulation and randomization.

Particle Effects

Whether you want fire, smoke, rain or dust, UDK can make it happen with the help of Unreal Cascade, the particle effects system.

Artificial Intelligence

Give AI-controlled characters increased spatial awareness of the world around them and enable them to make smarter movements with UDK’s gameplay framework and artificial intelligence system. Add life to your game world by using UDK's crowd system with flocking technology, which can simulate hundreds of characters within a scene in real time.

Distributed Computing

Take advantage of UDK’s multi-core support with Unreal Swarm, a distributed computing system that harnesses computational power and automatically allocates tasks on the fly for dramatically increased performance. Unreal Swarm works in tandem with Unreal Lightmass, the global illumination solver.

Destructible Environments

Build a gorgeous world and then let your players crush it to pieces. UDK’s fracturing tool and runtime enable you to take virtually any existing mesh, slice it up into as many fragments as desired, and destroy structures. UDK supports the destruction of everything from metal to cloth, bringing more realism and interaction to your environment.

Bink Video Codec

Configure game videos quickly and effortlessly with Bink Video, the widely used codec for many of today’s bestselling computer and video games. Bink lets you scale data rate and adjust sound playback for an optimal user experience.

SpeedTree Foliage Editor

Model and render beautiful, realistic, animated trees and plants in real-time with SpeedTree, the game and simulation industry’s premier tool for creating foliage. UDK features a full integration with SpeedTree, which includes powerful rendering features and numerous terrain and grass engines.

FaceFX Facial Animation

Create realistic facial animation from audio files with the FaceFX tools included with UDK. Batch process thousands of sound files, add expressions to a single animation without ruining lip-synchronization, and tweak animations to perfection.