February 8, 2010 – Epic Games has released a free, updated version of the Unreal Development Kit (UDK).

The February 2010 UDK Beta upgrade notes are as follows.

New UDK Features and Tools

• New color picker
• Update in real time, e.g., change color and see level lighting update as you drag!
• Properly deal with HDR colors
• Capture from the entire screen – even your desktop!
• http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ColorPicker.html

• Screen door fades
• New screen door dissolve effect for fading primitives (SM3+ only)
• Actors can fade in/out based on their MaxDrawDistance
• Static meshes, ProcBuildings, Skeletal Meshes and SpeedTrees are supported
• Static Mesh LODs can and Massive LODs can cross-dissolve between each other
• To enable this feature:
• Set 'bAllowScreenDoorFade' to True in [Engine.Engine] .ini file
• Set 'bUsedWithScreenDoorFade' on materials that should fade

• New package backup system to prevent lost work due to a crash
• Snap to recovery feature for post process overrides allows you to choose a snap directly to the level pp settings instead of a gradual recovery
• Whole scene dynamic shadow for dominant directional lights around the camera which blends out to precomputed shadows based on distance

UDK Improvements

• Dramatically improved Navigation Mesh simplification
• 50-60% reduction in polygon counts, with corresponding 50-60% reduction in memory footprint
• Faster at runtime due to less nodes to traverse, etc.
• Makeup of mesh is much improved with edges that span obstacle to obstacle and provide more accurate width representation of the geometry
• Matinee improvements
• Multi-select support for Matinee groups and tracks
• Users can now copy and paste many tracks at once in Matinee
• Multiple Matinee groups can now be moved into a folder in a single action
• Curve Editor new feature: Movement axis locking
• Hold down the Shift key before dragging a key to lock to an axis
• Kismet improvements
• Added Kismet "And" gate
• Fires its output once, only after every linked input has fired at least once
• Ctrl + Enter now adds line breaks to Kismet comment boxes
• http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/KismetReference.html
• CameraAnim Improvements
• Greatly improved CameraAnim handling and blending of post-process values
• Static mesh LOD improvements
• Screendoor fade between static mesh LODs for supporting materials based on time
• Static meshes are forced down the dynamic rendering path while transitioning
• Static mesh dynamic rendering path now uses the same LOD heuristic as the static path
• Screendoor fade even works on dynamic shadows from the static mesh
• Necessary to avoid popping due to LODs shadowing each other
• Lightmap resolution is now halved for each static mesh LOD level
• Moving UTGame native code to UDKBase native package
• Volumes, static meshes and triggers now have more apparent collision hull wires

Optimizations, Upgrades, and Fixes

• Bink update fixes the #3 most common UDK crash
• SpeedTree applications upgrade from 5.0.0 to 5.0.2
• Fixes an incompatibility with tablet drivers
• Exports the G channel of normal maps correctly for use with UE3
• A few other minor fixes
• Static mesh component vertex color memory savings
• Painted vertex colors now use half as much memory
• Save System overhaul to unify map and content package code paths and enhance usability for content creators.

New UDK training videos from Eat3D

• http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Eat3D.html

Updated UDN Documentation

• http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VisibilityCulling.html
• http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LitTranslucency.html
• http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CustomLighting.html
• http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentCooking.html
• http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ContentBlog.html

Additional documentation, code samples and more are available at the Unreal Developer Network (UDN):
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitHome.html

UDK community links:
LinkedIn user group: www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2493123
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/UDK/183744733429