Unreal Engine 3 Free (or Not) for Game Developers

Nov 09, 2009

So unreal the name, so real the news: Epic Games is providing its Unreal Engine 3 free to developers. It isn't open source, but game developers can implement it for noncommercial games and applications.

The udk.com website has the so-called Unreal Development Kit (UDK) ready for download and includes licensing details. Students, teachers, researchers, artists and other users can employ UDK free for their projects so long as they don't profit commercially from it, including income from advertising, sponsorship and the like. Under these terms, the Unreal Engine is intended for learning purposes and developing free games and modules.

Yet Epic Games still wants to profit from independent game developers, who will pay a $99 annual license fee for the privilege of implementing the engine for commercial purposes. If earnings from the resulting game are less than $5,000, developers have no further royalty to pay; anything over that amount incurs a 25% royalty.

Initially UDK is implemented for PC game development. Epic Games cooperates with NVIDIA, because Unreal Engine 3 has its PhysX physics engine on board. The Unreal engine supports high dynamic range rendering, dynamic shading, pixel-based lighting, EAX 5.0 and many other modern features. Unreal-developed games include Unreal Tournament 3 and Batman: Arkham Asylum among quite a few.

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Comments

  • NOT LINUX, but I think UT 3 runs on linux or you could just use wine to run it

    Don't no why this is here on linux magazine online website, but for a random note maybe myst online will open source and make a linux port or wait it's says it's open source but theirs no linux port of it, I still have the offline version of it and realmyst which are just as fun, maybe the next myst or uru game will run on Unreal 3, that would be fun, Hint Hint Cyan make a new myst online game and use unreal 3, I think the people would like it that way, or not. from what I saw of the rain effects for ipod only 3rd and 4th versions, that app that has to do with development , or even porting uru to unreal , like the maps and adding effects and more nature would be cool too, or porting realmyst to unreal3 engine, like the whole game and update it standards to that of unreal 3 engine would be cool, like more natural and any other thing it could do, but I would prefer either xbox 360 games of them or just pc games of realmyst with unreal 3 engine or uru in unreal 3 engine online or offline ports of the games with updated stuff if cyan could do so, I don't no if they have what it takes to get this done, also I would not play in on ipod or ipad , I own a 2nd gen but it will not even transfer to such a ipod, so I can't even run their so called demo but my pc and xbox have the hardware to do these games I have 8gb in the pc its anuff power to handle that engine I think , with a nvidia card , I plan to play with it's develment pack to see what I can do with it

  • huh?

    Indeed, this is news not related to Linux (or *nix for that matter). Could the author explain why this is posted?

  • What about me?

    No Amiga version? This is a capital offense!

  • Huh?

    What does this have to do with Linux?

  • Why care?

    Forgot to mention there isn't a Linux version. Was there a point to this article?
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