I'm glad it works with XP.
Does it work with Win 7 ?

thanks

Does it work with Win 7 ?
Yes
Does it produce standalone executables ?
Yes
Do the games have the 'Made with Unreal' logo at the start ?
yes. actually you'd prabably be proud to.

why not go check their page and ask every damn question here?

You can check their demos on every OS you would like to.

Actually it is a very stable technology and fast. The reason is, they are using some proven approaches like pre-rendering light maps from lots of static lights (like WED, Source engine and others). But they also add additional information like some light vectors to illuminate materials very real. This combination of lightmaps, shaders and light direction information makes it fast and good-looking at the same time.

In each indie engine you have to fake it. You can also render a lightmap in second uv-set and overlay it over the tiled textures. But then you have to add shaders and dynamic lights to illuminate shaders. But this approach will look worse and will render slower. You cannot use the same amount of dynamic lights, but you can use tons of static ones for a lightmap. And because of that the lighting direction will be wrong in most cases. Besides that the usage of many dynamic lights in a forward renderer will slow down rendering.

Currently the trend is: If they render every lighting in real-time, then they use deferred rendering. This is not very fast with a single light source, but it is much faster when you use tons of lights and shaders (CryEngine, Torque3D).
The other direction is what UDK and Source are doing: combine static lighting with additional normal mapping and lighting information.

Both solutions make lots of sense.

December update is out with lots of new features, but just take a look at this video:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/InteractiveFoliageActor/WalkingThroughFields.mp4

Man, what else can I say...

And for those that want to see other types of games with Unreal engine 3...
Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy2rz9Wtl4w

just found this thread and wanted to contribute



well thanks but airborn so far has neither big levels nor lightmaps generated in ut3, so the art will look the same in pretty much every environment as long as it support custom shaders to import our lightmaps that have been generated in maya
Now with the udk version we will start switching from premade lightmaps to the one udk generates with lightmass but this will take some time.

i just thaught i would post my view on UDK.
udk has some great features

Level Editor
Terrain Editor
Unreal Matinee (camera cinimatics)
Speedtree (fast tree modeling program)
Kismet (visual scripting system)

im using it at the moment and think if you wannt to make a good shooter
udk is the quickist and easyest way to do it. im loving the matinee system .it makes cinimatics fast and easy. the editor is solid with a nice gs subtracting.

one thing im not shure about is the scripting.
can you put scripts on to it? whithout kismet?

Thanx xonath

you can script in unrealscript. weird how all people start working with the udk (this includes me ^^).

what do people think about UNITY 3D?

is it as fast to get started on UNITY as it is UDK?

the udk has a really steep learning curve. i don't know about unity but guess it's easier. naturally, unity is not as powerful as the udk.