For the latest Unreal Engine news, visit www.unrealtechnology.com. or view the Unreal Engine FAQ.

Can you tell me more about licensing the Unreal Engine? 

We license the Unreal Engine to experienced professional game developers. Licensees receive full source code for our engine, tools and most recent games. Support is provided directly from the Unreal Engine development team, which has shipped multiple million-unit selling titles and won many Game of the Year awards; you can't get better support and real-world, success-backed, game development advice than that! Licensees receive access to upgrades and support 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 licensing@epicgames.com for more information. If you're looking for a way to evaluate what the Unreal Engine can do, you can start by picking up a copy of Gears of War or Unreal Tournament 3 (Unreal Engine 3); Unreal Tournament 2003 or 2004 (Unreal Engine 2.5); or Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict (Unreal Engine 2.X) at your local software retailer.

For content creators, the full Unreal Editor that we use to build our game environments is included with Unreal Tournament 2004. Other tools include a version of the Maya Personal Learning Edition with a plug-in that allows seamless export to the Unreal Engine; a character painting tool; and much more. For programmers, UT2004 includes UnrealScript source code for in-game objects, the UnrealScript compiler, the UnrealScript IDE and the UnrealScript Debugger. Read more here.

I'm confused, which engine is which?

The Unreal Engine encompasses three generations of technology, each focused on a major generation of console platforms and PC hardware.

Unreal Engine 1 powered Epic's original Unreal and Unreal Tournament games.

Unreal Engine 2 powered Unreal 2 and UT2003; Unreal Engine 2.5 – an enhanced version of Unreal Engine 2 – powered UT2004; and Unreal Engine 2.X – an Xbox-exclusive enhanced version of Unreal Engine 2 – powered Unreal Championship 2: The Liandri Conflict.

Unreal Engine 3 is the current technology, aimed at next-gen consoles such as Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, as well as DirectX 10-based PCs. UE3 powered Epic’s Gears of War, as well as Unreal Tournament 3.

For more information about the latest technology updates check out the Unreal Technology site.

The Unreal Developer Network!

The Unreal Developer Network (UDN) is a repository of knowledge, documentation and tutorials for the recent builds of the Unreal Engine, providing sections for public news, licensee news, and tutorials and guides for content creation and programming. UDN also includes a search engine covering the complete archives of our content and programming mailing lists which have thousands of entries on thousands of topics. The full slate of UDN content and functionality is only available to Unreal Engine licensees. However, a subset of the documentation and tutorials relevant to mod makers has been made available to the general public. You can visit UDN and see the public documentation by clicking here.

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