The Unreal Engine was first introduced to the gaming landscape in 1998 through Epic's first-person shooter, Unreal. While the core of it is written in C++, Epic managed to craft a language of their own, called Unreal Script, which is similar to Java in a number of ways.
In November 2009, Epic released the Unreal Development Kit, an SDK utilizing the Unreal Engine, which allows developers to write and release games of their own.
Many of this generation's leading AAA titles utilize the Unreal Engine, including the Mass Effect, BioShock, and Gears of War franchises.
My plan with this book is to allow you to have the ability to craft worlds of your own, by teaching you how to program for the industry's leading 3D engine for AAA development.
In this chapter, we will be covering the following recipes:
Introduction
Working with UnrealScript can be a daunting task at first glance, especially because it has years' worth of extensive improvements and iterations, in spite of being a language only used for this application. To make things worse, UDK does not include a development environment out of the box, so we're forced to find one that best suits our needs. Fortunately there are several out there, each of which bears many pros and cons.
In this chapter, we will look at several development environments which can handle UnrealScript, define some of the perks and pitfalls of each, and highlight the benefits of understanding the source code, through UnCodeX and the Dungeon Defenders Development Kit.
So with that, let's talk about integrated development environments.
