UDK question

hi

I have not tried UDK yet, because it seems to be a very complex tool, not really suited for one person development, and as I see it requires advanced programming and 3d art skills.

does anybody has here some experience with it? I'm interested in your opinion mainly about the programming side, i.e. how handy/complicated is unrealscript, and how easy/difficult is to manage a complex project and its system requirements. is it worthy to try it, or is it better to use a more simple engine, like 3DGS or Unity or Neoaxis or Esetnhel? (currently 3DGS Commercial is okay for me, but in future Esenthel seems to be more powerful for my purposes, taking into account its price compared to 3DGS Pro)

thanks.

I'm in same case as you !

For UDK , it has mobile support also.
If you are interested in program side , i'm not sure it's the best ??
It has now some visual programming language also for 3D artists to make games.
And for shaders system, managing complex scenes, lightening system, yes it's the best !

check some links :

wiki tutorials

programming samples

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A simple player following AI tutorial :
Ai follow code example


What is your goal Sivan ? only programming or make a game ?

You can use it for free, the day your game is ok ready to sell, you just pay some 99$ to use it.
And royalties are ok, until you get rich you pay nothing


I don't know if it is Royalties on all the titles you sell, or if royalties are taken individually for each title ?
But this question is only for people that reach to create mobile or little PC games in a year

indie RPG video
The dark RPG video
UDK apprentice RPG indie video

ScaleForm is a big addition to the Kit also :
ScaleForm video tut

Simple Mobile example :
Simple mobile RPG test

And it has an amount of great visual tools to adjust great visual stuff :
cloud shadow editor
Some other are even more impressive :
Dynamic weather system editor
Particle editor :
particle editor video
udk terrain editor

etc ...

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There is so much potential, features, visual editors in the engine, if you target some RPG, yes you will be able to quickly make a terrain with normal maps, cloud shadows passing on it, great rain effects etc ...
after that you'll need great characters and 3D assets artist ...

But it just works top for little games also :
shadow complex game video

No more shaders and lightening, advanced effects problems, you just choose them.

thanks for the many links, I'll check them!

my purpose is to make a simple RTS game (or a turn based with real time battles, which is easier) after I finish my RTS AI system in 3DGS, but only as a hobby development, so I have no certain time frame. it's about creativity probably I will need to team up with some 3D artists...

in 3DGS Commercial I have performance problems, because GPU animation and terrain LOD are Pro only, and quality problems of pssm shadows (maybe I can solve it if its parameters tweaked together with the actual camera distance, which can be very different in a RTS game scene). sprite instancing of 3DGS Pro is not a big help in this genre, I would like to utilize the benefits of model instancing for making forests, what is unavailable in 3DGS and Esenthel, but UDK has this feature. some of performance and quality improvements require directX10, which will never be available in 3DGS in my opinion.

ny pathfinder is heavily dependent on my editor, but I have the concept to change its terrain analysis, and entity updates in another programming language like C++, where I can customize entity classes, or alternatively assign property structs to entities, and create entity group structs, like in lite-c.

I just found a RTS starter kit for UDK. as I see UDK also has a navmesh pathfinder and a crowd system that could be more effective than my own system, and maybe easier to use together with physX... but its learning time cannot be too short...

Well for forest, you should use a a group of lot of trees and under your modeler, group them as one mesh
You can make different group number of trees to put on your terrain and use individual trees also !

This tip is heavily used in some AAA engines, a very good trick.
Caus individual mesh entity indeed costs to diaply and manage by the engine.

Yes for detailled terrain, solid shaders, clouds on terrain etc ... UDK indeed is lot more appropriate.

There is so much RTS style games, i hope you'll have original ideas ? gameplay ?

tree grouping can result in vertex shader animation problems, and not so nice LOD changes, but I'm planning to try that. I use separate collider entities for them, so collision cannot be a problem.

I have a couple of game concepts, I will see what can I do...

Or use less trees ?
For animation you should only animate nearest ones, od depending on your RTS view, don't animate them or use some trick (shader on vertex instead of bones).

Like i said , you'll need some great design and idea ... (RTS are a lot :))

on 3dgs commercial bona animation is slow, so I must use vertex, with model lod its performance can be improved remarkably. earlier when I dealt with this optimization area, there were some engine bugs with setting clipped or far entities to non-animated, but I reported and it's now correct, so I'll deal with it after finishing my editor update.
in contrary, in Esenthel engine only bone animation is available, but it's done on the GPU (like in 3dgs pro), so it is fast as hell beside smoothly working very-very high quality pssm shadows with nice self-shadows, and very fast in deferred rendering mode. in 3DGS deferred rendering user contributions are unfortunately so slow...

using less trees and decrease poly count is a possibility but means lower quality.

you target also scenes with big amount of entities, so this si for powerfull optimized engines for that purpose or some that uses like you said :
- bones animations on GPU
- Very Optimized shader system with deferred shading.

In fact you target some RTS using deferred shading ? i don't think it's the way to go ?
And massive entities like trees wihtout optimization you'll need some real instancing system :

Even on very old console : 2005 game Kameo ... WE ARE ON 2012 : 7 YEARS AFTER ... 3DGS should have a REAL INSTANCING ENTITY SYSTEM FOR ALL VERSIONS .... It's a VRY OLD FEATURE !!!







Just to push 3DGS further and improve

Well indeed :
- LOD on trees
- Distance shadow activation (character and trees)
- Distance Shaders activation
- Distanec animation for trees activation
- LOD Characters (distant oens with very less bones)
- Character sprites for far away entities ...
- sprites for trees also (far cry engine style)

There is so much amount of tricks, for optimisation ...

Yes 3DGS is not the best for complex scenes, shaders and lot of entities ... so you are making a complex game and would need some more appropriate 3D engine

I use all the things of your list above, I'm using lod for all my entities and shaders, distance clipping of several entities, and use pssm only for dynamic entities.
but I plan to use user adjustable settings for shadows and quality (decal or pssm shadows for units etc.). I will decrease further poly count of vertex aniated units, only lod0 will look nice, that will probably have a great effect on performance.

the purpose of 3DGS is mainly to make simply simple 2d-3d games, so it can be understood that some features requiring more experienced programmers are not included, or only in the pro version, we have to live with it, beside its easy programming language.

Sivan i shall join your explorations into udk next year .one of the engines i always wanted to try out. Good luck with it

thanks, but it's quite complex even to setup the programming environment. but sooner or later I will get in it to do some simple tests...