UDK - UNREAL Dev. Kit is now free!

[jph_wacheski]

It never rains it pours,. just days after Unity goes free, so does Unreal!

http://www.udk.com

The whole suit of tools is now free for non-commercial useage,. and they have a back-end type deal, that amounts to them getting 25 percent of the gross with the first 5k being free for commercial stuff,. .

I guess Virtools will be next? Is this all due to the global banker scam being run on the economy, the so called 'down turn' ? Or did they all just realise that if you give away to tools more ppl will try to build games, some will succeed, and then pay the licence fees.

Anyway I will have a look, the visual scripting looks fun. However nothing else made by humans comes close the our belived ZGE for efficent file size, mad-fast lunching, etc., etc. I wil keep using ZGE for the forseable future.

[Kjell]

There have been some rumors going around that Virtools might go with a percentage scheme as well .. but no idea when, whether that will be only regarding publishing licenses ( the app itself is a separate fee ), and which of the two products ( Dev / MP ).

The visual scripting ( Kismet ) in Unreal is kind of similar to Virtools, so it'll be interesting to hear what you think of that. Pretty hefty system requirements though ..

K

[y offs et]

I have to warn you guys.

I installed it last night and it was OK (deathmatch ho -hum), anything higher than 800x600 and things would get jerky.

Anyway, today I was doing my usual, and I put this rig to sleep for a couple of hours. When I woke it up, it took an unreal crash. Both firewalls down, offline, lot of my progs wouldn't boot, snail like progress. I thought it was because of the windstorm outside.

Anyway, I had to go out, so later in the day I looked again, still crashed. No one else had problems, couldn't get any troubleshooting help from the system, so I did a system restore, which was back to just before I installed Unreal.

Problem solved.