News Roundup 5 – 8th November 2009

Welcome to the Games Modding News Roundups for the week preceding the 8th of November 2009.
I’m on time this week – and blimey it’s been a big one. Epic Games took a rather unusual step this week and released their, frankly genre-defining, Unreal Engine 3 for absolutely free to non-commercial projects and with a very reasonable licensing deal should you wish to make some money from your endeavours – more about this in the Unreal Development Kit section of this week’s roundup.
You might also notice I’m trialling the use of images in the roundups this week – fortunately there’s plenty of eye candy on tap – and I’m interested in what people think about it.
- Darren

General

• ModDB European Download Servers Live
  The EU based servers ModDB announced at the end of October have announced that Noesis Interactive will be handling educational material for the Unity engine.
• John Cleese on Creativitiy
  Webcomics.com linked to a video in which John Cleese gives a talk about creativity. It’s worth a watch.

Half-Life 2

• Gamasutra interview with Marc Laidlaw and Eric Wolpaw
  Two of Valve’s “writing lynchpins” discuss the writing of Half-Life 2, Portal, and Left 4 Dead 2.
• Podcast 17 Episode #55
  This week’s Podcast 17 predominantly covers the Left 4 Dead 2 demo release and Eurogamer Expo 2009.

Unreal Development Kit

• Unreal Development Kit Release
  A little company called Epic Games who’re responsible for a fairly low-key series of game engines carrying the Unreal name have released a free version of their latest effort, Unreal Engine 3. This means you can use the engine that powers Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War (one and two), Bioshock (one and two), Arkham Asylum, Borderlands, Mass Effect (one and two) and Mirror’s Edge (among others) for free to make your own game. Oh and you can release it as a commercial product too, and not pay anything unless you make over $5000 (check the licensing information). This isn’t some old version they had laid around either – it’s the newest version with Lightmass, Swarm, Ambient Occlusion and the new Content Browser.



• The Ball UDK Demo
  As shown on the UDK website The Ball team have released a UDK version of their mod, dubbed as “The Ball UDK Demo”, and have announced the project is going commercial. I haven’t had chance to compare yet but it sounds like it’s had a bunch of content stripped out of the UT3 version (hence the demo moniker) but you don’t need UT3 to play it. If you’ve been drooling at their screenshots and not had chance to play yet then what are you waiting for?



• Prometheus 4.0 UDK Release
  Not to be outdone, the Prometheus team have put out a standalone release of Prometheus, though this is a full-fat version with more content than their last UT3 release, and they’re also going to be going commercial. They’ve got a rather unusual gameplay mechanic involving multiple versions of yourself playing back actions to solve puzzles, but their well-voiced tutorial level will explain it better than I can so get clicking!

Unreal Tournament 3

• The Ball Cahua Announcement
  Toltec Studios have announced the next release of The Ball for UT3, which will be the final mod release of the project and will be landing next week.



• The Haunted Pre-release 3.0
  The Haunted are sticking with UT3 for just a tad longer and have released a pre-3.0 version version of the mod. They’re aiming to get all of the final bugs ironed out before the full 3.0 version of the mod is submitted for the Make Something Unreal Grand Finals next week. After 3.0 the mod will be ported to the UDK version of the engine though they haven’t confirmed whether it’ll be commercial or free (unless I’ve missed something).

Feedback on GM’s series of news roundups is always greatly appreciated, particularly about the images this week.
If you’ve got news or views you want to share, post on the forums or email: david@gamesmodding.com