Today's post, I had an interview with UTDallas
professor, Phill Johnson. Prof. Johnson teaches the Virtual Environments
classes in the Arts and Technology program at UTDallas, and he is an expert on
the Unreal Engine. I interviewed him to get his professional opinion on UDK and
UE3 as modding tools. Here is how the interview went:
1. How long have you been using
Unreal?
I
have been using Unreal since 2007.
2. What would you say would be the
main differences nowadays between Unreal and UDK?
Well
Unreal and UDK are the same thing at their core. If we are talking about Unreal
Tournament 3, some of the significant differences between that and a
freshly installed development kit nowadays , the interface is actually more reliable.
They have re-done the gizmo. The rendering engine has been improved. The Material
editor and all of the underlying systems have had some massive cosmetic changes.
The Material Instance Interface works better now too, much more reliable. They
have added a whole bunch of Kismet expressions. The mobile support is actually
non-existent for Unreal Tournament 3. For UDK the Iphone support is there now, and
DirectX 11 support was added in about a year ago.
You
would be surprised how little has changed, really it's just stability and
quality of life improvements. They have added systems like landscapes, I was
really looking forward to that for about a year after they announced it. Direct
Vertex Painting was a really nice feature they added. Mainly it's features
added that is the big difference, at its core it hasn't changed all that much.
3. Would you be able to create a mod
for Unreal Tournament 3 using UDK?
No.
The reason for that is because they have package dependency issues. For
example, if you were to go and make a level in UDK it would be a .udk file, not
a .ut3 file, and that's most obvious thing. Even though they are basically the
same file format, the problem is you have version dependencies. You can go
forwards in versions but you can very rarely go backwards, and that's because
they put a check in there. Any time they add a new feature, the UDK, its brain
seizes up when it sees something it doesn't expect, so anything you put into
UDK would not translate back to Unreal Tournament 3.
There
is really no reason to try and code in UDK and then try and transfer that to UT3.
You might as well just do it all in UT3. The animation pipeline has
changed a bit, the FBX support was a really big thing for UDK. Unreal
Tournament 3 doesn't have support for FBX, you still have to download
the tools that Epic made for Maya and 3DS Max to export an animation set as
well as a skeletal mesh. So it wouldn't make any sense to do any work in UDK
and then try and pull backwards. However, if you already had a map you made in UT3
and the assets are yours, they weren't cooked, you could bring that map into
UDK. However, if you had guns, the Ripper for example, it would say it can't
find it. That's not such a big problem, you can just delete that actor and
reset it to be something else.
4. Would you encourage someone to mod
in UT3, or would you suggest that
someone create their own level in UDK?
It
depends on the scale of the work. If you are going to do something that is
fundamentally Unreal Tournament 3, work in Unreal Tournament 3. If
you want to do something that is fundamentally different, use all custom files,
all custom animation, I would say go and work in UDK. With Unreal Tournament 3 you
are trying to make it into a different game on top of this existing game. With
UDK, you can tell it just as easily "I want to start this new
project", and it gives you a blank tile. You don't have to tear anything
out and start building over it.
So for a mod, in the fundamental sense of the
word, modifying a game, Unreal Tournament 3 will be fine. If
you want to start something that is yours, new, and novel, you are actually better
suited for UDK because you have better software and you have a better work
pipeline. The code is about the same, not much has changed there. If you want
to do a new interface it is a lot easier to do it in UDK then it is with Unreal
Tournament 3's old interface system, which was trash. You would much
rather do it in Flash then in Unreal Tournament 3. They actually
removed the health system. It is possible to turn it back on, but you don't
want it.
5. Would you call Unreal Tournament 3 completely out of date, or is there still some
purpose left in it?
It
doesn't make much sense to work with it, mainly from the perspective that the
people who already have it are probably bored with it. There are people who
still play it. If you were to start a PS3 version and play it, you could find
someone playing it. Same thing is true with the PC version. You could probably
find people who plays it, but as far as your audience goes, it's not a new
game. Not many people are gonna go out and buy it. If you were gonna make a
game and start drumming up interest, you're gonna find its very difficult to
get people to go out and buy a game that they are not going to play otherwise, aside
from your mod. You're inadvertently asking people for a monetary investment. If
you use UDK, which is a free download, whatever build you put out you can have
it as a screen installation, so you are
not limiting your audience except for people who can't download it, install it,
and run it on a computer. The monetary thing is a big issue.
I
don't think it is technically out of date, I still think you can make a pretty
interesting game out of it. You could probably make something very interesting
in terms of modding, you could make it look totally different, and it would
probably be up to today's standards. The difference is the tools would be
improved, the time it would take you to do it would be reduced, and the barrier
to audience is reduced with UDK. You can also export your own installers,
making it much easier to work with. You could probably make the same product
with both of them, but you'll have a much easier time with UDK. In that
capacity, yes it is out of date. It's like taking the silver package versus the
gold package, and the gold package is free. Much more people will be interested
in playing it because they can get a hold of it. It's an availability issue.
That is all for the
interview. Basically if you want to create a mod specifically for UT3
then use that. Otherwise, UDK is clearly the better choice. I will have the
link to the UDK website posted at the end of this post. I would like to thank
Prof. Phill Johnson for doing the interview. The next post will go over UDK a
bit and I will post examples of good UDK created games. I will also have some
examples of 2D game mods as well.
Sources
Phill Johnson. Professor in the Arts and Technology program at The University of Texas at Dallas.
Unreal Development Kit, Epic. Found: Jan 11, 2013. Retrieved from: http://www.unrealengine.com/udk/
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