April 2010 Unreal Development Kit (UDK) Beta

Along with shipping the April 2010 UDK Beta, Epic has opened up its UDK licensing portal. Signing up as a commercial UDK developer is super easy, and anyone can buy a license through www.udk.com/licensing. 

Here are just a few noteworthy additions included with this month’s release, which is available at www.udk.com/download.

- Procedural building: Unreal Engine 3’s new procedural building system helps developers very quickly create and edit realistic urban structures.

- Genre-friendly example content: UTGame has fully transitioned to UDKGame, so all content included with UDK (except for skeletal meshes) can now be used by commercial UDK games and applications.

- Lighting system additions: Cascaded shadow maps, dynamically shadowed translucency, and improved unbuilt lighting previews are now available.

- New map: GDC_FeaturesDemo, now ships with UDK. This is the cool jungle level we showed off at GDC.

- Easier to read wireframes: The perspective viewport now supports depth dependent halos, making wireframe views much easier to read.

- Better content optimization: The new asset consolidation tool provides a simple way within the editor to consolidate multiple assets into one asset.

Also included are dozens of upgrades to the Unreal Editor, Unreal Matinee, Unreal Content Browser, and other Unreal Engine systems and tools.  For the full list of upgrades, hit up the build upgrade notes.