Unreal Development Kit Beta (August 2011)

Description
Epic Games, Inc. has released the August 2011 UDK Beta, the free edition of Unreal Engine 3 that provides access to the award-winning toolset used in blockbuster video games, 3D visualizations, digital films and more.August 2011 UDK Beta Upgrade Notes

New Movie Capture System

- Integrated Matinee and in game movie capture
- Matinees can be captured to AVI via a new button on the Matinee toolbar
- A running game can be captured to AVI via the console commands "StartMovieCapture" and "StopMovieCapture"

Material Functions

- Material Functions allow snippets of material graphs to be saved separately and shared between multiple materials
- Functions can be exposed to the function library, which is a new categorized window in the material editor
- Many new material functions have been added to the engine's function library

Material Editor Improvements

- An improved error display listing the error node type and highlighting the offending node in red
- Now supports marking by shift clicking connectors, which allows making connections across large materials without dragging
- Landscape shader compiler time improvements in the material editor. In a test case, compilation time was 2.25 times faster.

Culling Foliage Instances Based on Distance

- New "StartCullDistance" and "EndCullDistance" parameters for culling foliage instances based on distance
- At "EndCullDistance", entire clusters of instances are coarsely culled using "MaxDrawDistance"
- From "StartCullDistance" a per-instance opacity value from 1-0 is generated in vertex color alpha, for use by the material to fade out the foliage

Adaptive Tessellation

- Users can now dynamically tessellate meshes based on screen space size

Editor Improvements

- New slider for Alpha in the Mesh Paint dialog
- Improved Editor Startup
- Greatly improved editor startup times due to faster Game Asset Database downloads
- No longer steals keyboard focus when starting up
- Shows better status information while starting up
- New "Cancel" button to the Slow Tasks and progress dialogs
- You can now select all Actors referenced by Kismet in All Levels
- New ability to set and jump to bookmarks to the editor viewport and Kismet toolbar dropdowns.
- Improved foliage window scrolling behavior - only the mesh list scrolls, with the painting parameters fixed
- LOD UV settings in the Static Mesh Editor are now maintained after importing a new LOD
- SpeedTrees can now be placed while in StaticMesh mode
- "Undo" and "redo" are now supported for changes to the DrawScale boxes on the status bar below editor viewports
- New option in editor preferences menu that, when enabled, causes BSP to auto-update after modifying a brush
- This option is also togglable through the "Alt+Ctrl+U" keyboard shortcut
- Geometry should still be rebuilt prior to playing the level

Unreal Matinee Improvements

- Users can now name Matinee director tracks, and optionally display these names in the game viewport
- Now includes an Export Animation Track Info option. This exports the director track and animation sequences along with all keyframe data to a simple text file.

Other Improvements

- Unreal Cascade
- New "WarmupTickTime" member allows users to specify update time for the warmup ticks
- New Initial World Offset Particle Module includes seeded and not seeded versions
- Support for 'Color' instance parameters when retrieving particle parameters via "GetColorParameter"
- Auto-activated particles are no longer reset when resetting all particles in a level
- Set particle velocity from movement generated by the orbit module
- Mobile: Removed forcibly setting particle system LOD levels to the lowest detail
- AnimSet Viewer
- New FoV slider (fully settable range 5 - 170), FoV reset button, and FoV viewport info
- New drop-downs in toolbar enable viewing specific chunks and sections of a skeletal mesh
- Removing prefix from selected AnimSequence now supported
- iCloud document saving for iOS is now supported
- Using alternate bone weights in SkeletalMeshes simplified using Simplygon now supported
- Material vertex shaders now support local to world transform translation
- The SkinXX syntax for SkeletalMeshes is now supported in the FBX pipeline with or without materials