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Final Steamworks is now available to Unreal Engine 3 licensees for free
Epic and Valve are teaming up to deliver Valve’s Steamworks collection of services to anyone who has licensed Unreal Engine 3 for use in its products, free of any additional fees.
Everybody knows what an awesome distribution network Valve has created with Steam. The Steamworks suite provides developers with the tools to make their games closely integrated with the cool features offered on Steam. We’re excited to be able to offer Steamworks integration to our customers as a standard part of Unreal Engine 3, free of charge. We’re big fans of Steam and our games have been very successful on the platform so it was a no-brainer to bring Steamworks and Unreal together.
“Unreal is one of the most widely used engines in the industry, period, and it’s been behind the scenes on some of the very best games created over the past 10 years, on all kinds of platforms,” said Gabe Newell, co-founder and president of Valve. “It’s an honour to have Steamworks included in the technology offered to all Unreal Engine 3 licensees. It’s hard to think of any community of developers who could get more from all the services that come with Steamworks.”
Steamworks is a complete suite of publishing and development tools that offers PC game developers and publishers access to the game features and services available through Steam. These include product key authentication, copy protection, auto-updating, social networking, matchmaking, anti-cheat technology and more. The features and services available in Steamworks are offered free of charge and may be used for both electronic and tangible versions of games. For more information on Steam, please visit www.steamgames.com.
Autodesk’s FBX makes importing 3D content into Unreal ENGINE 3 a one-click process
Importing 3D content is now just one click away. Autodesk and Epic are now providing greater connectivity between Autodesk’s art creation and animation tools and Epic’s Unreal Engine 3, using Autodesk FBX data interchange technology. Autodesk FBX 2011 offers a faster, more streamlined workflow for transferring content created in Autodesk Maya 2011 and Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 software into Unreal Engine 3 – boosting production efficiency and preserving creative intent.
The streamlined interchange of 3D assets between Autodesk art creation tools and Unreal Engine 3 is the result of a long-standing, productive relationship between Autodesk
and Epic.
The Autodesk FBX file format is a robust standard for rich 3D data exchange within the games community. With this streamlined workflow, FBX should be the first choice for developers using our powerful Unreal Engine 3 when it comes to transferring art from Autodesk software.
New for Unreal Engine 3 licensees and Unreal Development Kit (UDK) users is an FBX importer that enables game developers to upload FBX files created in Maya or 3ds Max directly into the Unreal Editor. The importer automatically breaks files down into assets in the Unreal Editor, such as level of detail (LOD) information, animations, character meshes, character rigs and models. In addition, if a
3D model is updated in 3ds Max or Maya, a new FBX file can simply be imported into the Unreal Editor where the assets will be automatically refreshed.
Marc Stevens, vice president of Autodesk Games, said: “We’re really excited about our collaboration with Epic Games. We’ve teamed up to provide greater connectivity between art creation tools, animation tools and middleware from Autodesk, and Epic’s Unreal Engine. This is made possible through advances in Autodesk FBX data interchange technology and better integration of our middleware into the Unreal Engine. In short, our combined efforts are aimed at giving game developers a faster, easier, more streamlined workflow that boosts production efficiency and preserves their creative intent.”
Mark Rein is vice president of Epic Games based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Since 1992 Mark has worked on Epic’s licensing and publishing deals, business development, public relations, academic relations, marketing and business operations.
