The December update to the UDK has brought us Epic's latest engine updates as always, but this time it's including support for iOS and the entire code and content for their Epic Citadel game and an additional castle map for it.
The entire update focuses on the mobile support as you might imagine, but there is more updates in there for the more traditional user too. Here's some cut and pastes from the update page in case you are still hanging out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b6ZryDdcgw
NEW! iOS Support
Brand new features and content that users will immediately notice are:
- Build levels, visually script gameplay events and add visual effects for mobile applications using the Unreal Editor and its major tools, including Unreal Kismet, Unreal Cascade and Unreal Matinee.
- Superior rendering features for mobile development, including Unreal Lightmass global illumination accelerated by Unreal Swarm distributed computing.
- The full source and content for the “Epic Citadel” App, plus an additional castle demo map.
- UDK Remote: A handy tool that enables iOS devices to serve as wireless controllers with full touch and tilt functionality for testing games on the computer.
- New Unreal Frontend system compiles scripts and deploys builds for multiple platforms with the simple click of a button.
- Mobile Previewer: Preview your application locally using a fully feature OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer with mobile input simulated.
- One-click Deployment: Easily deploy your application from the Unreal Editor to your iOS device with only one click.
- Next-gen Mobile Graphics: UDK's highly optimized mobile renderer has support for per-pixel lighting, environment mapping, precomputed visibility and more! And of course, Unreal Lightmass computes stunning light and shadows to bring your scene to life.
- Unreal Kismet Visual Scripting: Artists and level designers can string together actions, inputs and events in Unreal Kismet to dictate how the world flows and how the player interacts without having to touch a single line of code.
iOS Feature List
- Base UE3 Features
- Highly shippable, proven engine core
- Unreal Editor: Almost entire editor is supported
- Unreal Lightmass: Global illumination, ambient occlusion and more
- Unreal Swarm for distributed lighting builds
- UnrealScript dynamic scripting language
- Unreal Kismet visual scripting
- Pathfinding and navigation meshes
- Unreal Matinee cinematics tools
- Unreal Cascade particle designer
- Mesh painting tools
- Canvas-based UI rendering
- Unreal Content Browser asset manager
- Full support for Autodesk FBX file format
- Unreal animation system (AnimTrees, additive animations, blending, etc.)
- Play In Editor, one-click game preview
- Real-time inverse kinematics
- BSP level construction system
- Crowd system
- Level-Of-Detail systems, including Massive LOD
- Performance and memory profiling tools
- Mesh simplification tool
- Texture unwrapping and LOD generation tools
- Perforce source control support
- Physics and collision systems
- Unreal Frontend tool for launching/packaging your game
- Unreal Console lets you connect to mobile apps, issue commands and view logs
- 64-bit tools allow for huge data sets
- Mobile
- Portrait and landscape modes fully supported
- Multi-touch control support including tilt/gyroscope
- Touch-based look controls, gesture support
- New mobile "input zone" system
- Unreal Kismet and UnrealScript support for mobile input
- Mobile input emulation on PC
- Basic UI system based on canvas, with simple buttons/sliders
- Movie playback
- Engine
- Fast performing iOS game engine
- Level streaming with asynchronous loading
- Share assets between multiple platforms
- Mobile shader precaching/warming for hitch-free gameplay
- Unreal Lightmass normal map baking
- Precomputed Visibility system with Unreal Matinee path support
- Cooker generates optimized minimum set of shaders based on game usage
- Sound and music playback using OpenAL
- 3D sound spatialization (stereo output)
- Asynchronous music streaming
- Tools
- Mobile Previewer for PC with nearly 1:1 graphics preview
- UDK Remote for previewing mobile input on PC using iOS device
- Movie generation tools with authentic mobile-style graphics
- Capture screenshots and movies from device
- Preview iOS device resolutions, system settings and landscape/portrait from editor
- Graphics
- State of the art graphics features on mobile
- Flexible material system generates highly optimized OpenGL ES2 shaders
- Real-time shadows (planar)
- Particle systems
- Bump offset mapping
- Skeletal animation
- Shading
- Real-time per-pixel lighting
- Normal mapping
- Specular lighting, including per-pixel specular
- Dynamic lighting (movable, animated lights)
- Animated materials
- Translucency, opacity masks
- Rim lighting
- Fresnel effects
- Texture blending
- Vertex coloring (paintable meshes)
- Emissive lighting
- Vertex deformation (foliage, cloth rendering)
- Environment mapping
- Baked ambient occlusion (skeletal meshes)
- Water surface effects
- Masking for emissive, environment maps, rim lights and more
- Decals
- Static mesh rendering
- Non-uniformly scaled objects
- Automatic Texture Flattening tool
- Atmospheric fog
Tools
New Unreal Frontend UI
Unreal Editor
Unreal Kismet
- A new Kismet action, ProjectileFactory, was added. It allows spawning projectiles w/ muzzle flashes from a skeletal mesh socket or bone in Kismet.
Note: This build only supports 2 bones per vertex for mobile games. The next build will remove this limitation.
UDN Pages
New:
Updated:
Replies
Testing
Testing out maps for iOS games can be done directly from within UnrealEd, either using the Mobile Previewer which simulates a mobile device or by deploying to a connected iOS device to test out the map natively.
You still need to buy the Dev license from Apple, but you can apparently develop the whole game on your PC which I think is great news For submissions you need to access a Mac.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/GettingStartediOSDevelopment.html
Come on android support.