The past few weeks have been filled with scouring the web for useful UDK tutorials. Everyone seems to think that they can create a tutorial. Most are without structure and has the tutor uhming most of the time, obviously in the video tutorials. Found quite a few where the tutor is even coughing and sniffing, as if he didn’t even think of cutting it out and rerecording it; just pathetic, if you ask me. Written ones take more effort to make, are usually a lot more structured and, in my opinion, a lot more useful.
So I thought I’d make a short list of the ones I found most useful:
Mougli’s Portfolio UnrealScript Tutorials
Mougli’s tutorials are very clean and structured; a very good starting point. They are only available in written form.
He sometimes refers back to code from he’s other tutorials, without a link to it, which were a little irritating because then you have to search for it. But at least it’s not too difficult to find.
Allar’s UnrealScript Tutorials
Allar’s tutorials are almost like a walkthrough into scripting your own custom game. These are all available in video form. It seems that he wanted to create a written version of each video but only did it for the first few and then probably got lazy. The good thing is he made the full source code available for download, which I ended up downloading and looking through myself rather than following the videos.
He does cover a lot of different topics which helps to get you familiarized with UnrealScript and the UDK classes. Unfortunately the tutorials were never completed or some topics are left out, like the DamageType class for your custom weapon.
He also has some other tutorials listed on the same page that I have not been through which includes a ScaleForm tutorial.
3D Buzz Video Tutorials - Using UDK
The 3D Buzz tutorials are obviously of very good quality and very helpful. Only problem was that they are very extensive and created for complete newbs. I often set the play speed to 2x just to get through the videos faster because of the fact that the tutor repeats instructions quite often. I’ve only gone through some of the Simple Level, Terrain, Lighting and Materials tutorials, often just scanning through to find the info that I require; probably the reason why I like written tutorials more.
There’s a whole lot more video tutorials listed on this page that I have not been through.
Wraiyth's AnimTree crash course
This had to have been one of the best community-made video tutorials that I’ve gone through. They are well recorded, properly structured and the tutor speaks clearly and understandably. If you are creating a custom character with a customized skeleton you’ll have to go through these when it comes to the custom AnimTree. He even covers the scripting required for certain aspects of a custom AnimTree.
I did find some things unnecessary, like going prone, but that’s only specific to the type of game that you are creating.
After a few years of silence and a very neglected website, we are getting things back together again.
"What have we been up to?" Well, we've actually been doing contract work, so to speak, on a fairly big project and I'll tell a bit more about it in a next post.
"What are you doing now?" We are putting our efforts into the re-development of Nordick the Treasure Hunter, this time it's going to be 3D and built with Epic's UDK. So keep your eyes pealed for some media.
"We thought you were faders!" Never!