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Please take note! For mod developers working with Unreal Tournament 2003, this documentation is meant to be a starting point for your own explorations into UT2003, not a definitive guide. There will be differences between the documentation here and the product in your hands, and you may have to figure out quite a bit for yourself. Check out the Unreal Tournament 2003 page in the Unreal Powered area for links to community sites if you're having problems. UDN is a licensee support site, and cannot provide technical support or game-specific assistance to end users.
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WhatToReadFirst |
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Licensees can log in.
Interested in the Unreal engine? Check out the licensing page.
Questions about UDN itself? Contact the UDN Staff.
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Last updated by Vito Miliano (UdnStaff), for document creation. Various original authors.
- What To Read First
- Overview
- Check Yourself
- Getting the Engine
- Subscribing to UnEdit
- Joining the Party
- Navigating the Web Sites
- Reading the Documentation
- For Texture Artists
- For Modelers
- For Level Designers
- If You Find a Problem
- If You Have a Problem
Welcome to the main Unreal Developer Network web site, UDN @ Epic Games. Most general-purpose Unreal engine documentation resides here, including specifics on the Windows and Xbox platforms.
This area of the site, Content Creation, is focused on the audio and visual aspects of producing Unreal engine content. Everything from level design to textures, music to modeling, will be covered here, in both a practical, hands-on, "how-to" format, as well as a more formal, comprehensive, reference format.
Before you get started, you should go through the RecommendedSoftware and RecommendedHardware pages and make sure your drivers and other software and hardware are up to snuff. It's rather annoying to get all geared up to play with the latest Unreal technologies, only to find you need to spend an hour downloading and upgrading half the drivers on your system.
Most content creation teams are provided engine builds tailored to their product by their programming and development teams. But when you're just starting out, you may find yourself using the stock, basic engine build provided by Epic Games.
Check with your development lead to be sure, but if this is the case, check out the DownloadWithFTP article on how to get the latest binary release from the UDN FTP site. You may also want to check with other members of your team first, and see if someone's downloaded it already.
Your development lead may have signed you up for the UnEdit mailing list already, but if not, you can also subscribe yourself using your company email address.
Check out the UnEdit page for details, including links to the archives, which are invaluable for trying to find answers. There are also weekly summaries of list goings-on, on the UnEditTraffic page.
If you're looking for a little more personal (but not necessarily any faster) assistance, a private IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server is maintained for licensees to chat amongst themselves in a relatively secure environment.
Check out UnDevIRC for details on connecting to the UDN IRC server, as well as RecommendedSoftware for lists of other IRC clients you might find suitable. For general information on IRC, check out http://www.irchelp.org/.
This UDN web site is your first line of support, providing you with detailed documentation, tutorials and example content to get you on your way. If you're going to be developing a Sony PlayStation 2 or Nintendo GameCube console game, you should also keep the UDN @ Secret Level site close at hand, as there you'll find specific details on working with the engine builds for those two systems.
UDN web sites share a common layout:
- Site Areas is the toolbar across the top of the site, showing the different areas of UDN.
- Area Features is the toolbox at the left, with links to special, area-specific areas, like search, email notifications, and a master index.
- Area Contents is immediately below the area features box, and has a sorted table of contents for the area. It's pretty much in reading order, so you should be able to start with the first document and go straight down and get pretty familiar with the engine.
- Page Contents takes up the majority of the screen, and is where the current document is actually displayed.
- Page Functions is the toolbox on the right, and contains page-specific features, like Editing the page, Attaching files, or displaying a Printable version.
The table of contents is organized mostly in read-in-this-order order, so you can pretty much start at the top and work your way down.
For 2D artists, TextureSpecifications and TextureComparison are good starting points, followed by MaterialTutorial, since level designers aren't going to be using your raw textures directly; they're going to be using them in materials (like shaders).
Modelers can head straight for the bottom of the page, in the Tools area, where most of the skeletal animation documentation currently resides.
Level designers and level artists get the rest. I'd suggest beginning with UnrealEdInterface, and then starting to work through the docs in Primitives, in order. Then go back up and review the rest of the docs in the Basics section, because they make more sense if you already know how to build basic brushes and things.
As you go through the available documentation, if you come across something that's incorrect or poorly worded, please fix it! Each page has an "Edit" button in the page functions toolbox on the right, allowing you to make changes to update and improve UDN, in plain text, without having to worry about complex formatting or uploading new documents.
Creating new documents is just as easy; just follow the links at the bottom of the table of contents.
If you can't find the documentation you need on UDN, the "asking a question" process has three steps:
- Check the UnEdit archives. You can search them using the search button in the area features toolbox on the left, or by going through the links on the UnEdit page. Chances are, someone's asked the same question already.
- Ask on #UnDev IRC. Sometimes everyone's busy or asleep, but sometimes you get lucky and get an answer almost immediately. And if you're really lucky, it's even a correct answer.
- Post a question to UnEdit. Another licensee or someone from Epic will respond as soon as possible. If it's something that should be covered in a document of it's own, please post a request on the UdnStaff page. If it's just something that was missing from an existing document, you can also make a note of it on the UdnStaff page, or simply add it into the document yourself, using the Edit button in the page toolbox on the right.
Please don't email Epic Games employees directly, if at all possible. It's never faster than asking on IRC or emailing the lists, because another licensee or the UDN staff may know the answer and be able to respond faster than Epic is able to. Questions asked on the list go into the archives for everyone to benefit from in the future. The less time spent answering the same questions over and over again in private, the more time can be spent working on the engine. Thanks!
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