Engines are Go

Having worked on UDK for several months for our group project has certainly taught me this: some engines can be a bitch and you'll just have to be patient with them. My experience with UDK was pretty unpleasant it really comes to show what it really takes to be a game developer.

Lets go through a list of some of things I had to deal with when working on UDK. Crashes, especially in the middle of saving the level and the packages is probably one of the worst things that has happened. It's understandable that an engine will crash once in a while but the number of time UDK has decided to crash on me and on the rest of my team is unbelievable. Working with BSP, I don't know... I reckon this is more of a personal issue. Having spent most of my time modeling with 3DS Max shaping the basic environment with geometry brushes on UDK just seems counter-intuitive. Lighting also became quite a problem. This is probably due to our unfamiliarity to the engine but getting light to cast definitive shadows, instead we had a bunch of murky soft shadows. Unusually when inserting a light the preview suggests that the light produces the desired shadows but after building everything it just bakes in the murky shadows. And then there's the decals... of all the things that went wrong why did it have to be these. First of all they use up way too much memory causing saving and loading times to dramatically increase. Then at times they behave awkwardly. Sometimes they appear black, other times they don't appear at all, they are unaffected by lighting so in poorly lit areas they appear as if they were glowing and resizing them isn't as simple compared to static meshes.

Despite all the nasty crap the team had to deal with, UDK is capable of doing some really neat stuff once someone manages to get to grips with all the tools it has to offer. Some of the interesting things we managed to pull off include falling snow and burning oil drums. Having followed a few tutorials online I have able to do some pretty cool things like build a mirror and floating dust particles. UDK Central is a particularly good place for simple and easy to follow tutorials for basic and somewhat advanced tricks.

Other than the Unreal Engine I have used another engine used for the free application called M.U.G.E.N which is basically a fully customisable 2D fighting game. While most people tend to rip playable characters and stages from other games to work on MUGEN it is entirely possible to build your own. While it is awesome to be able to build a character it is quite challenging and tiring work since it will involve drawing each animation frame, giving each frame a collision box, programme movesets and then programme the AI. I have attempted to build a couple of characters, but because I had problems programming the movesets and AI I ended borrowing an already built character's moveset and AI.

I guess for any of the first years who are to become second years I really suggest you visit some sites with tutorials for UDK such as UDK Central and then get familiar with the basics early. At least know how to import things from 3ds Max quickly and efficiently which will hopefully save a lot of time in the early stages of the group projects. And of course be patient and save often.