A few questions about "my game" and if it is suitable for UDK

[Keyframe]

Hi,

I am currently in planning/art mode (aren't we all :D ) for a game and I have a few questions. My game is some sort of a wipeout/starfox (old school) shooter hybrid and these are the things that I don't have answers to yet. Mind you that I am only two days old with UEditor and I have not played UT nor GoW before (true story :o ).

- How large can the levels be with UDK? Precisely, can I fit a level the size of an average wipeout stage or an old school starfox level regarding the speed with which vehicles move in those respected games? Levels could be both linear and open arena types.

- This bothers me a lot. I would like to block out my levels with terrain and BSP's first and later I'll retain terrain and would like to rebuild BSP blocks with Maya - so I can concentrate on prototyping the gameplay first. I understand this is "static meshes" I import in from maya and replace BSP's with them. I see demo levels with UDK have a lot of static meshes, but is it feasible to have a whole level (see above what kind of levels) out of UDK terrain and static meshes littered around?

- If I go the route of static meshes all around, I would also like to build my own lightmaps in maya - I guess this is not an issue, I'll look around for docs, but if someone knows - please point me to a right direction.

- Can UDK show static images full screen in lieu of video? I'd like to have a series of images between levels.

I think this is it for now... back to learning and dabbling with UEditor. Thanks.

[Crozz]

- This bothers me a lot. I would like to block out my levels with terrain and BSP's first and later I'll retain terrain and would like to rebuild BSP blocks with Maya - so I can concentrate on prototyping the gameplay first. I understand this is "static meshes" I import in from maya and replace BSP's with them. I see demo levels with UDK have a lot of static meshes, but is it feasible to have a whole level (see above what kind of levels) out of UDK terrain and static meshes littered around?

Lots of levels don't have any BSP in them. In fact, BSP is very performance expensive compared to static meshes. So you can pretty much have a ton of detailed meshes around - however, what the engine is good at is instances of meshes, so depending on your memory requirements there are a limited number of unique meshes you should have in your package.
edit: The backside of having a lot of copies is that you need to think about the number of materials on those meshes that are going to have a lot of instances, because that will add up for every instance, in contrast to the mesh itself which is nearly free to copy.