Wow. Unreal Development Kit. Free. Or at least free for free content. I've always wondered how developers create content for the big game engines, id and Unreal. And now I know and I have it installed on my laptop. For free. Can you tell I'm beside myself here. Check it out: http://www.udk.com.
At any rate, Epic has released their development kit for free. It's a great gesture and a great way to get hobbyists and students and even small start-up shops using their engine. It seems to be complete, including their famous editor, amongst a plethora of other tools that help you create full games that you can distribute (for free, of course, otherwise you'll need to pay for a license as you should).
Looking back at the archives, my second blog entry after saying "Hi", was on digital content creation tools for Eclipse. I conjectured that having such tools would be very cool. And I think it still would be.
And playing with the UDK, I don't see any technical reason why such tools couldn't be created using Eclipse technologies. With integrations with the various programming language and domain modeling frameworks and tools, and being able to run on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and target those and game consoles and mobile devices, what a great game development environment that would be.
That was my dream for Eclipse back in 2005, and it's still a dream I have for it today. All it takes is a community of like minded dreamers to make it happen. Oh, and some money to pay for the dreamers. Thus the dream...
This sounds great but it is only for windows! I am a Linux only person and have given up completely on windows. About your second blog entry that you mentioned, I have long thought that Eclipse is the RIGHT platform to build ontop of for these types of applications, just like MonkeyWorld3D, an editor for the jMonkeyEngine (jme) java game engine. On a side note about CDT I would love to see Vala support included. Vala is compiled to plain C and then compiled as normal and is availible on Linux, OSX, and Windows. It does require GTK+ though.
ReplyDeleteYes, the UDK is Windows only, and given it installed .Net on my old XP machine and seems to depend on DirectX, I'd bet it'll stay that way.
ReplyDeleteThat's why Eclipse with SWT's OpenGL support is an exciting alternative for running on all three of the major host platforms.
And Vala looks interesting. This might be something for the Linux Tools project.
Digging deeper I see they rely on 3ds max or maya for editing the meshes and animation.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the integrations between the various tools look weak, something we could do way better in Eclipse.
Yes we could do it better. There is already a Eclipse RCP app that integrates a mesh/scene editor for game development, MonkeyWorld 3D! It is geared toward java game development using jMonkey Engine, but I don't see why it could not be extended to support game development in C/C++.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking the same thing when I first started toying with Vala. I would love to see this included in the Linux Tools Project. That would definitely help aid in gnome based development, so maybe you, as a CDT contributor and Linux user could pass it along to the Linux Tools Project?
Cool. Thanks for the pointer. With MonkeyWorld 3D's BSD license, we could use it as a starting point if we can get the code through the Eclipse IP review.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, the project seems dead with no checkin since Feb and a message about the leader joining the Pirate Party...
Hi Doug,
ReplyDeleteI'm also interested in eclipse/udk integration. I'm thinking of taking a much more modest approach at first, following the tutorials on dltk and building a simple unreal script editor.
At some point, I'd love to see build and debug integration as well, but that seems beyond my needs currently. I just want to be able to work on my udk projects without having to install some other IDE/editor.
Hehe, I say "some other", because I already use eclipse for python, php, javascript, and java development. If eclipse truly is a one stop shop - then why shouldn't it be the platform of choice for unreal development? Although I'd love to be able to build a udk based project on my linux box, I'll settle for being able to develop it where ever I like then shipping the source over to windows at compile time.
ReplyDelete