Unreal Development Kit Updated With Steamworks
Epic notes that "Steam now handles friends, matchmaking and server browsing in the UDK," the same systems that are used in Valve's Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead.
Other new features include support for Scaleform's Flash-based user interfaces, attractive new light shafts and fog, performance improvements, tweaks and fixes. The full changelog for the May 2010 Unreal Development Kit beta follows below.
Scaleform GFx
- Scaleform is now supported in UnrealEd and in-game! (watch video)
- Supports
- UI screens
- Dynamic interaction via UnrealScript or Kismet
- SWFs playing into dynamic render targets
- GFx version of UDK HUD, scoreboard and pause menu now fully functional
- Added example Adobe Flash Studio files to UDKGame/Flash/example/...
- Controller input setup for GFx movies
- Basic scene using Scaleform CLIK components to create a UI
- Files
- New GFx import path
- Textures used by SWF movies imported from original art
- Current import path is not final; subject to change!
- More details.
- Started implementing localization for GFx menus
- Additional documentation.
Steam
- Steam is now the default OnlineSubsystem for UDKGame Win32
- Steam now handles friends, matchmaking and server browsing in the UDK
Light Shafts
- Point Lights are now supported
- Added Bloom Threshold and BloomTint properties
- Documentation.
Exponential Height Fog
- New kind of global fog with density that decreases with height
- Never creates a hard line (unlike standard fog); supports one layer
- Can specify both "towards the light" and "away from the light" colors
- Rendering cost similar to two layers of constant density height fog
- Can now use different colors for the hemisphere facing the light and vice versa
Color Grading Blending
- Can now blend between different color LUTs on different post process volumes!
- Documentation.
Editor
- UDK now supports running 64-bit binaries for the editor
- Added 'search by object' type to Kismet
- New mesh emitter camera facing option: "Apply Particle Rotation As Spin"
- Editor now shows up in system tray while starting up (and Alt+Tab works!)
- Can now capture content browser thumbnails from PIE viewports
- Added ability to tint editor icons similar to Point Lights
- PNGs can now be imported as textures; RGB and RGBA formats are supported
- Viewports
- New Alt+F/G/H/J shortcuts to switch between viewport types
- Greatly reduced the time it takes for volume visibility updates
Installer
- Now being localized for
- INT - English
- FRA - French
- ITA - Italian
- DEU - German
- ESN - European Spanish
- ESM - Latin American Spanish
- RUS - Russian
- HUN - Hungarian
- CZE - Czech
- SLO - Slovakian
- POL - Polish
- JPN - Japanese
- CHN - Simplified Chinese
- KOR - Korean
Editor Fixes
- Materials can no longer be placed as decals unless the decal usage flag is set
- Fixed fog volumes being created when dropping materials sometimes
- Fixed support for non-standard languages
FBX Importer
- Added support for rigid animation!
- FBX import settings are now remembered between sessions
- Importer will detect the type of asset to import by peeking at the FBX file
- New import option to override naming of imported assets
- Textures can now be imported (with or without a material being created)
- The FBX import dialog has been improved
- Updated to the latest FBX SDK (2011.2)
- Can now re-import skeletal meshes from FBX files
- Fixed smoothing group warning dialog spam on mesh import
UDKGame
- Scaleform / UI
- Added (prototype) Scaleform-based front end and HUD to UDKGame
- Added GFx example content to ExampleMap
- Scaleform implementations of HUD, Pause Menu, Scoreboard
- Code clean-up
- Moved UT-specific functionality from Weapon to UTWeapon.
- Moved HUDIcons and HUDCoords properties from UDKVehicleBase to UTVehicle
- Cleaned up UDK default engine.inis down to two
- Moved DeathTime from UDKPawn to UTPawn
- Removed unused UDKPawn property LookYaw
- Removed PlayFiringSound() call from Weapon.FireAmmunition() (not implemented for any game except UTGame)
- Moved bio death material effect system from UDKPawn to UTPawn
- Enabled tone mapping and color grading support to UDK
- Enabled by default now so all scenes will receive contrast-enhancing tone mapping
- Misc
- Changed input handling of controller demo to not recurse, therefore stopping the CLIK button from swallowing the GAMEPAD_A event
- Spawn player as spectator if ?causeevent=flythrough is passed on the commandline
- Set bFixedPlayerStart=true, bForceRespawn=true, and bQuickStat=true if ?causeevent=flythrough is passed on the commandline
Swarm
- Fixed several issues related to version numbers and matching Agents to Jobs
- Change usage of "localhost" to using the localhost IP address (127.0.0.1) instead
Gameplay Profiler
- Replacing old UE2 ueScriptProfiler
- Adds ability to drill into actor and component tick
- Documentation.
Attachment Editor
- Draw bone/socket label on connector for actors attached to skeletal meshes
- Allow nodes to be manually moved around
- Allow attachments to be made in a more 'Kismet like' way
NavMesh
- Lots of runtime navmesh optimizations (mostly related to dynamic submesh builds)
- Huge speed gains
AnimSet Viewer
- Added copy and paste animations to the AnimSet browser
- New options for calculating Bone Break
- Default: Both meshes have to influence to use rigid
- Auto Detect Rigid: Detects rigid when soft body misses the weight
- Alternate weight preferred: Second weight has more priority
- Added "Delete selected bone weighting" option
- "Toggle Mesh Weights" option
- Displayed if there is a valid set of weights for the current LOD
- Otherwise, the option is disabled
- Added info to display chunks/sections when swapping vertex weights
Max Quality Mode
- Added MaxQualityMode option for taking high-resolution screenshots
- Increases texture res and shadow quality regardless of performance
Property Multi-Select and Cut-Paste
- Control-Click on properties to add to selection
- Control-C, Control-V or right click to copy and paste!
Lighting Changes
- Improved unbuilt lighting performance
- Changed bUseBooleanEnvironmentShadowing to default to TRUE for best performance
- Light environments will not receive dynamic shadows from the static environment unless bUseBooleanEnvironmentShadowing is changed back to false!
- Primitives with bShadowIndirectOnly=true no longer cast dynamic shadows
- Added bForceNoPrecomputedLighting to WorldInfo, allowing maps with fully dynamic lighting to skip time-consuming light building during a full rebuild
- Hid light environment settings that are rarely used, edge cases, or only set by gameplay code to simplify the interface
Scene Capture Optimizations
- 'Max View Distance Override': Set a culling distance for objects rendered into the reflection
- 'Skip Update If Owner Occluded': Skip rendering to the scene capture entirely if it's not going to be visible
- 'Skip Rendering Depth Prepass': Controls whether a depth prepass is performed when rendering the scene capture
- Capture will be culled if last-bound time of the render target texture is more than a second ago
Rendering
- Added map check warning for large shadow casters unless they have bAcceptsDynamicDominantLightShadows=false
- New mesh emitter camera facing option: bApplyParticleRotationAsSpin
- Changed bRenderAsVelocity to default to TRUE for RadialBlurComponents as they are much faster to render this way
- Mesh area lights now affect dynamic objects!
- UE3 creates a spotlight at the center of the emissive area which is applied to dynamic objects
- Added a new volume type: LightmassCharacterIndirectDetailVolume
- Lightmass generates higher density indirect character lighting samples inside these volumes
- Useful for sections where characters are not over static ground, e.g., elevators
- Using down-sampled scene texture for depth of field, bloom and motion blur Documentation.
Warnings
- Exporting TGAs is temporarily broken and results in weird interlaced images
Upcoming changes (as of the next UDK build)
- SM2 support will be removed
From The Chatty
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Permission to clone monster hunter in this.