Alpha Footage of Ball Buster

So after several hours messing around with UnrealScript and trying to get the camera to look right, I finally have a result!

It’s really just a simple sphere you can control with the standard WSAD controls and a camera looking down on the object as it moves around the level. Good thing is, it’s all self coded and I’ve got to grips with the language. Hopefully I’ll be able to make the levels a bit more interesting now.

Anyway, check the video here.

Making waves in UDK

Well, not literally waves but more of a fluid surface!

Raven has kindly put a tutorial on YouTube here, which details creating a fluid surface, setting it up so you can swim in it and also touches on post processing effects.

It’s very well put together and the effects you can achieve are pretty effective!

The real “Ball Buster”

For lack of a better name, I chose “Ball Buster” for the name of this project. To view information related to this project make sure you check out the project page!

The general concept of the game is the player controls a ball and guides it around levels from start to finish, avoiding obstacles and overcoming puzzles. With this being my first project using UnrealScript and the newly released UDK, it will mainly be a learning excerise just to mess around with it and find what it can do. So far i’m pretty pleased with the UDK, its map editor is very intuitive and allows for fast map creation using BSP techniques and also includes a wide range of static meshes, useful for someone like me who can’t work a 3D artwork package into doing what I want, it also picks up on the scripts you’ve created to let the map editor literally drag and drop your custom elements into the map.

Just to keep track of my progress and hopefully help me better understand how the UDK works, i’ll be posting up a tutorial in the next few days detailing on how the scripts and map was created. In the meantime check out the tutorial section for some of the guides i’ve stumbled across while looking for information regarding the UDK.
Have a good holiday!

Programming Guide’s and References

Have just been looking over the NVIDIA site and found a link to a guide for programming for the NVIDIA GPU’s, it’s a pretty technical read but its got some good information in it!

Check it out here,  just think that the UDK does it all for us pretty much..

Also, some need to have references are here, The book “GPU Gems” is pretty much just that.

“This collection of articles is particularly impressive for its depth and breadth. The book includes product-oriented case studies, previously unpublished state-of-the-art research, comprehensive tutorials, and extensive code samples and demos throughout.” – Eric Haines, Author of Real-Time Rendering

Just take a look at the list of contributors and you’ll see why.

GPU Gems includes contributors from:

Alias Systems	Pixar Animation Studios
Brown University	Siemens Medical Solutions, USA
Croteam	Softimage Co.
Cyan Worlds	Softlab-NSK
Hochschule Bremen	Sony Pictures Imageworks
Industrial Light & Magic	Stanford University
iXBT.com	University of California Davis
Monolith Productions	UNC-Chapel Hill
New York University	Universitat Pompeu Fabra
NVIDIA	University of Utah
Paralelo Computação	University of Waterloo
Piranha Bytes

Whizzle Final Source Code

The game “Whizzle” created by Psyonix Studios from scratch using the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) has released the source code so you can review how its put together and possibly use the code to help your own developments.

You can download it from here (Direct Link)

Personally I’ll be looking over this code to hopefully develop something out of my own ideas. I’ll keep the site updated with my progress.

Dan.

Setting up Visual Studio 2008 with nFringe for UnrealScripting

Just found a pretty handy guide to setting up Visual Studio 2008 for developing UnrealScript code.

You can find it on the epic forums here.

In the tutorial it uses an add-on for Visual Studio 2005/8 called nFringe (Link to download), a guide for setting that up is found here.

The Unreal Development Kit

Hey,

My name is Danny Goodayle, I’m currently studying for a Computing with Game Development degree at Greenwich University. I’ve been a software developer for 2 years professionally aswell as many years tinkering around with code when I was growing up.

Anyway enough about me, Epic Games, the creator of the Unreal Engine has recently made the Unreal Development kit available to the public, for non-commercial use that is, the licence information is here. If you dont know what the Unreal Engine is you can check out its features here.

The software developed using the UDK ranges from Gears of War to Whizzle. So basically, It’s a very powerful kit with many features. Over the next few days I’ll be messing around with the UDK and posting up anything that I find.

Dan.