UDK Wish List

[westclif]

@deliverance6 mhm i dont get black shadows even without a skylight all of my shadows are colored semi transparent,... but i use dynamic lightning

[ambershee]

Global Illumination
Adding an option to the World Properties for overall level brightness would be nice. im sick of adding in a low-lvl skylight to every frigging level just to avoid totally black areas

This already exists. It's called EnvironmentColour.

[Wyldhunt]

"var config"

I'm probably missing something since I'm still on a steep learning curve with UScript, but I've only ever seen Var Config used to reference ini config files. That's what I was refering to when I said that it could be hacked with Notepad. Is there some way to write to a proprietary or encrypted file format or database that isn't laggy and/or so cumbersome that it'd bloat the entire game with code to make a save system out of it? Other than DLLBind. That actually works fairly well, I think. The DLL's required are just not part of the UDK.

The problem isn't in the ability to create a way to save games with what we have. We can create save systems in several ways.
The problem is doing it in a professional way that won't damage your game companies image. Seriously... If I tried to get funding for my game and sent it off to one of the gaming gurus to see how uber I was and convince them that my UDK game was worth funding... And they noticed that my save game system was composed of a bunch of notes in a config file?
I'd get no money.

[Mr Evil]

I'm probably missing something since I'm still on a steep learning curve with UScript, but I've only ever seen Var Config used to reference ini config files. That's what I was refering to when I said that it could be hacked with Notepad. Is there some way to write to a proprietary or encrypted file format or database that isn't laggy and/or so cumbersome that it'd bloat the entire game with code to make a save system out of it? Other than DLLBind. That actually works fairly well, I think. The DLL's required are just not part of the UDK.

The problem isn't in the ability to create a way to save games with what we have. We can create save systems in several ways.
The problem is doing it in a professional way that won't damage your game companies image. Seriously... If I tried to get funding for my game and sent it off to one of the gaming gurus to see how uber I was and convince them that my UDK game was worth funding... And they noticed that my save game system was composed of a bunch of notes in a config file?
I'd get no money.

What's wrong with text files? I've seen plenty of games that save games like that. If you don't want plain text because you're trying to make it impossible to cheat, then you will fail for the same reason that DRM always fails.

And why are you discounting DDLBind when it does what you want?

[Wyldhunt]

What's wrong with text files? I've seen plenty of games that save games like that. If you don't want plain text because you're trying to make it impossible to cheat, then you will fail for the same reason that DRM always fails.

And why are you discounting DDLBind when it does what you want?

Saying that you'll just give your game away since it'll be torrented is a bad marketing decision. If your logic were sound, Autodesk would have released 3ds Max to OpenGL long ago. Of course games will be hacked. That's not the point. There's a difference between having to hack a binary and having to hack a txt file. Either way works, but only one of them works for the average customer.

And, I'm not discounting DLLBind. In fact, it's what I use and I've mentioned a couple of times that it works fine. The issue with it is that the UDK doesn't come with a DLL that allows us to save. We have to make the DLL ourselves. A couple of community members were kind enough to share their DLL code and save everyone else the headache... But, this is a UDK Wishlist. It is a list of things that should be included with the UDK that are not. The required DLL is not currently included with the UDK. Nor is any other means of semi-secure data logging.

Why is this concept so difficult to grasp?
Do you guys really think that the shelf life of the average game would be as long as it is if every customer could open an ini file and max their character before they ever began playing? No. You can argue all day that the only people who would do that are the same ones who would hack it anyway, but you're wrong. Very wrong. And people would tire of the game considerably faster because they would unballance the game by overpowering themselves and the game company would suffer for it.

Basic marketing fact.


My Wish List is for the UDK to have some native system to log data in a form which can not be accessed by Notepad because of the many reasons I have listed. Preferably an internal database such as those used in most other dynamic games.

[Mr Evil]

Saying that you'll just give your game away since it'll be torrented is a bad marketing decision...

Not using DRM is not the same as giving the game away. Take the example of a game like Spore - filled to the brim with DRM, and it ended up the most pirated game ever (not a coincidence either). Compare that to something like Sins of a Solar Empire, which managed to sell plenty with no DRM at all (it has plain text save games too).

...Do you guys really think that the shelf life of the average game would be as long as it is if every customer could open an ini file and max their character before they ever began playing?..

How many games don't have cheats available? For the few that don't, you can go to a site like MegaGames and download a trainer. Anyway, there's nothing stopping you from encrypting what you write to a text file if you want to make it a bit less trivial to cheat.

[Crusha K. Rool]

The reasons are irrelevant, fact is that Wyldhunt is right with his wish to have an "official" save game system.
And Kismet variables should allow to be saved as well.

Take an RPG as an example: You're on map A, a village, where you get the quest to kill a monster in the near cave which is actually map B (just assume that there would be no level streaming but a real transition, although I don't think that you could access Kismet variables from a streamed level either).
The quest is enabled by using a boolean in Kismet, for example. The LevelLoadedEvent on map B checks at the beginning if that boolean is true and if that's the case, then it will spawn a monster that the player should kill or could enable some other script sequences.
After the player killed the monster, the boolean is set to false so that the monster wouldn't spawn again if the player would try to enter the cave again and it would set another boolean to true to log that the quest was completed successfully so that the player can get his reward back in A.

So the Kismet variables should be somewhere stored globally in your savegame with unique names so that you can access them on any map (but only in games that belong to that savegame).

[Blade[UG]]

Considering that the vast majority of computer users don't know how to edit a file that is not within "My Documents", let alone find a file that is not within "My Documents", I think your arguments are generally invalid. Plain text data storage is fine for most things.

[ambershee]

It's also relatively easy to read and write data to a binary format.

[Wyldhunt]

*Sigh*
Never get jobs in marketing. This isn't a thread for pages of 'why' so I'm dropping it here.
If you want to keep debating this, we can do it in a new thread or PM me.

@Crusha
Thats a good example of why I'd prefer an actual internal database for it all. I could organize it in a similar way that I used to waaay back in my Never Winter Nights days...
Which was made to be almost entirely modifiable via 2da's and which were editable with notepad... Except for the character stats(Bic) and internal database...

[Kasigawa]

Wow, if I knew this post exhisted I would have wrote all my ideas in it! haha!
Anyhoo this is the link with the posts filled with crazy ideas. It's worth reading the whole thing. I think it's full of futuristic ideas for UDK and ideas that others would look forward to see as well.

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=741115

[Independentsoul]

Acces to the sources to make rtt´s of Shaders during a shader for advanced blur methods and writing functions in the udk custom material node e.g

(float3 calcfloat3(ScreenUV)
{
return tex2D(SceneColorTexture,ScreenUV)*(float3(1,0,1)/2);
}

and HLSL c++ highlights

All those functions would me alow to make Bokeh DoF for the comunity... I would share it !!!

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh

[notliekthis]

Only two requests at the moment:

1. Mac OS X deployment.
2. Mac OS X editor.

While I'd love to develop on the Mac, I really want to be able to build Mac executables even more.

[Xendance]

I have one suggestion regarding lightmass:

Right now when a light ray hits a surface, lightmass successfully takes the possible texture mask into account etc. That's all nice and dandy. But what I'd like to see is that if the material has a transmission mask applied to it, the light ray would actually go through the face and continue into the direction it was going in the first place. Of course the light intensity would be reduced based on the amount of transmission the face had. And this would be for double sided materials (tree leaves etc).

This would help lighting relatively dense trees and forests, because currently really dense canopy forests tend to be pitch black, while in real life the light would scatter from all the leaves, letting light into the whole forest.

[rebb]

Suggestion #1 :

Suggestion for the Material-Editor Preview Windows.

The ability to load some mesh into the background like it is possible in the Particle-Editor, and the ability to adjust it's XYZ Position.

This would be really handy when tweaking materials that use DepthBiasedAlpha for example.

Suggestion #2 :

A Forum for Suggestions with Threads for each suggestion, so people don't have to scour through a single thread. Not that important tho.