Which will win the battle of the game engines ??
The Game Engines….
Our original intension was too create the game using UDK and I so progressed on to looking into how to make a custom character within the UDK engine. After spending many hours reading and watching tutorials on how to import your own character, changing the camera to 3rd person POV and setting up the correct coding it began to become very time consuming and a lot more difficult then the Unity engine.
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( Kind of what my PC screen looked like at times! )
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Even though digging around the websites and finding out how to set up a working 3rd person camera for UDK was challenging and time consuming. I did manage to produce some progress with camera system and also looked into how to set up a cut scene within the game play.
Some of the first problem that began to arise was when I started to bring in a custom character into game. I made a “test dummy” model in 3D Max and used the free UDK character rigged model bones to apply it to my model. At the time I was unaware that 3D Max’s CAT (Character Animation Toolkit) was able to be used for each of the animations needed to create a custom character for UDK.
Once I had finally rigged it to the UDK model I them exported it from max and imported the model into UDK with very interesting results. Even more research needed to be done to find the problem.
After more research and lack of sleep reading throughout tutorials and walkthroughs, I now realize how the UDK can be one of the best game engines around. UDK has some of the most unique and very complex tools for a game engine and once learned can lead too some amazing results.
But giving our situation for self Initiated project and the time scale were giving, UDK in my opinion and for someone that does not know the engine that well is to find a quicker alternative game engine. UDK has some great features and beautiful graphics but at the cost of time consumption learning its key elements and learning a overwhelming amount of scripting/programming just to edit a simple game mechanic. Its now taken myself over a month and half to make a custom playable character and also cost me time that I could have had spent on making more game characters/NPC’s /ect. Although I will still research and learn the UDK engine as my study’s continue as i would like too maybe use it in future projects but for progression and the amount of time we have left on the project we have decided to go with Unity3D.
Due to the change from UDK to Unity I have also changed the ordinal site page name from UDK development to Unity Development.
