14 DAY TRIAL // Epic Games is releasing its September 2011 Unreal Development Kit (UDK) Beta, a new version of the software development kit (SDK) for making video games that take advantage of the company’s Unreal Engine, and other technologies.
“This month, we are thrilled to ship a new and improved UDK, now with Mac support,” the people behind the popular Unreal Tournament franchise have announced on udk.com.
The developer confirms that UDK games can now run on Mac OS X.
“Every UDK game's potential user base has increased dramatically yet again,” says Epic Games.
The September 2011 UDK contains a preview of Epic’s Mac OS support. Here, Epic Games explains that “Unreal Engine 3 supports developing for Apple's Macintosh platform for easy cross-platform distribution.”
“The development process is virtually identical for games to be run on the Mac platform, but the packaging and deployment process does require some additional steps.”
A noteworthy addition to the Mac-compatible UDK is Foliage Instance Selection and Editing.
According to the makers of Gears of War, developers can now employ two new tools to carry out their work: individual instance selection and paint selection. These have been added to the foliage edit mode.
Another change worth noting, “Selected instances can be moved, rotated and scaled with the widget, and also snapped to the floor, deleted and cloned with ALT-drag,” says Epic.
Foliage random yaw has become an optional setting to support camera-facing foliage sprites, while foliage painting behavior with very small brush sizes has been addressed, according to the changelog.
The updates extend all the way to Apple’s iOS platforms. UDK now handles Multi-Display. It works with either an HDMI cable or via AirPlay, Apple’s proprietary protocol stack/suite that allows wireless streaming of various kinds of media, together with related metadata, between devices.
For the rest of the changes and improvements listed by Epic Games, visit the official UDK site.