Of course, the best feature of the island is the 88 Temple Pilgrimage route. One day, one day... 

but Iya valley is great and the Naruto whirlpools near Tokushima are a sigh too.

Just returned from Ebino Kogen (north of Kagoshima) and its now my equal favorite spot on the trip along with Kamikochi. Well worth checking out! 

negke is back! 

Not sure if this is news worthy or not but thanks surely to Willem's push of free software for everyone, Epic has released a free version of the UE3 for people to use.

http://kotaku.com/5397808/epic-sets-the-unreal-engine-free

Hurrah! Free UE3! 

Yeah, that's entirely because of me. You're welcome! 

That sounds pretty huge. 

Now you can spend countless hours making your own death match game and then spend 500 hours on a map for THAT!

Also, yeah, I thought that was a pretty huge fucking deal, not sure if it's news worthy or not, but still a huge fucking deal. I will be downloading it and toying with it tonight probably. 

Fucking AWESOME stuff. AWESOME. Willem, do we seriously have you to thank for this? If so, you are a fucking ginormous behemoth among men. 

 

This SDK is actually a newer, more recent version of the engine tech than UT3, here is a list of "new since UT3" features: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitBuildUpgradeNotes.html 

Yeah, it's the absolute latest engine and we're going to update it every time we update the version we give out to our licensees. It's pretty bad ass! 

Willem have I told you how I've always liked Epic? :) 

This is annoying, I wish I was 17 again so I could dedicate like 6 hours of every day of my life to developing some small but cool game with a bunch of people. 

DUDE LET'S TOTALLY DO THAT JAGO 

It crashes on install. I am sad, cuz it installs at work :( 

Wait hold on, I think I figured it out.

Willem: Are you offering complete online UDK classes for us? This is practically your home now! 

I've been looking at the pages and have a question - What if one wanted to release a game built using UDK on XBLA? Is that possible? 

starbuck

I'm unsure. I don't think UDK will build for XBox but then again Shadow Complex uses Unreal Engine 3 so ... who knows?

Zwiffle

Heh. Well, I can answer questions as I wrote a lot of the editor at one time or another. Let me know if you have tech questions or 'how to' or whatever... 

that could result in some very cool things. 

This is great news to hear, but doesn't this make the MakeSomethingUnreal contest (grand prize: UE3 license) somewhat obsolete? 

I am now excpecting a quake update in the UE3 engine :) 

Oh, I am sure there will be one. It will look like the typical misinterpreted retexturing with curves, play like Half-Life and work like Painkiller.


onetruepurple: I think that prize allows any commercial exploitation without you having to pay for it. 

Yes, the UDK download is very different from a UE3 License. No C++ source code, very different licensing terms, no direct support from the Epic team, etc. 

I was just looking at the editor now, was running a full-screen fully lit preview of DM Sanctuary on a average specced, 2 year old laptop... how did you do that? Nicely optimised for sure.

Regarding the xbla licencing, say you prototype your game using UDK. If that prototype got you through the xbla approval process, what would happen when you went to make that game? Would you then need the full
Unreal3 license? Live arcade sounds like the way to go, considering the amount of piracy on PC games / iPhone / etc, and I really hope that's gonna be an option someday! 

"I was just looking at the editor now, was running a full-screen fully lit preview of DM Sanctuary on a average specced, 2 year old laptop... how did you do that? Nicely optimised for sure."

I, personally, did nothing. The engine team kicks all kinds of ass.

As for the licensing stuff, I'm really the wrong guy to ask - sorry. I don't know the ins-and-outs or the plans the future.