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Can you tell me more about licensing the Unreal Engine? 

We license the Unreal Engine to experienced professional game developers. 

The engine is currently supported on PC,PlayStation2 and Xbox. Source code is also available for any Epic-owned port including Macintosh, Linux and Dreamcast. Licensees receive full source code for our engine, tools and most recent game. Support is provided directly from the team that actually develops the engine and whose last two game titles sold over a million units and both won Game of the Year awards! We also have the experience of shipping a successful PlayStation2 title under our belt and working closely with partner Digital Extremes on an Unreal Xbox title as well. You can't get better support and real-world, success-backed, game development advice than that. Licensees receive access to upgrades and support for for up to one year from the first public release of their game. 

If you're an experienced professional game developer and you're interested in finding out more about licensing the Unreal Engine please contact us at the email address below for more information. If you're looking for a way to evaluate what the engine can do you should pick up a copy of UT2003 at your local software retailer. For content creators there's the full Unreal Editor we used to put the game together, a version of the Maya Personal Learning Edition with a plug-in that allows seamless loading/saving from/to the Unreal Engine, a character painting tool and more. For programmers it includes UnrealScript source code for in-game objects, the UnrealScript compiler, an UnrealScript IDE and the UnrealScript Debugger. Additional updates will be released at the Unreal Tech site.

I'm confused is it the Unreal II Engine, the UT2003 Engine, the Unreal Warfare Engine, the Unreal Championship Engine or the Unreal Tournament Engine? 

It is neither. It is simply the "Unreal Engine". You'll sometimes hear it referred to as any one of these but as far as what licensees get there is really no distinction. During development licensees get continued access to all of Epic's technology updates and licensees are the ones to decide when they're going to stop using new updates and ship their game. For more information about the latest technology updates check out the Unreal Engine News page.

Announcing the Unreal Developer Network!

UDN is a repository of knowledge, documentation andtutorials for the recent builds of the Unreal Engine. 

UDN provides sections for public news, licensee news, content creation and programming information. UDN also provide licensees with the ability to search the complete archives thousands of entries on thousands of topics dating back as far as September 1997! 

The full slate of UDN content and functionality is only available to registered Unreal Engine licensees but now that Unreal Tournament 2003 is nearing release we are opening up a lot of the documentation and tutorials relevant to mod makers and the general public who will soon have the power of the latest version of the Unreal Engine in their own hands!. Click here to visit UDN.

Mark Rein,
Vice-President, Epic Games Inc.
email: mrein@epicgames.com