Hello Everyone,

I have a choice to make and the choice ultimately was between D3D, OGL, or UDK. I have tons of programming experience so this is a non issue. Due to the very low level nature I think ultimately I will put D3D and OGL on the side even though I know I can learn them relatively quickly. If you can program for an embedded micro controller you can learn anything and I can program 2 different micro controllers in assembler and C.

So for my next project I decided to use UDK. The tools look amazing with so many features why should I write my own. As I said programming is my strong point so UnrealScript should be easy to pick up on. My real issue falls under learning to utilize all these tools they supply for the engine.

This leads to my question... Does anyone have any experience with the various books out there for UDK. I do understand quite a few of them are probably outdated. I am not looking for a book on Modding UT3. I am looking for a book that covers the tools in such a way that I can make a custom game. The book does not need to be hugely detailed as the documentation supplied by Epic can fill in the gaps. I saw one book that covers UnrealScript so with good reviews but I do not think it covers the rest of the system. Any suggestions?

UnrealScript is being discontinued in UE4... just a thought against learning it.

Not done any UnrealScript myself - so can't recommend any books.

Eat3D have a video tutorial on it: http://eat3d.com/unrealscript

Well it really does not matter if UDK 4 is going to remove UnrealScript because no one even knows yet when UDK 4 is going to be released to the public that I have seen yet. I am not particularly looking for a book on UnrealScript. That will be easy to pick up on just from the docs as I have been programing for 15 years now. What I am looking for is more a book on how to use the actual pipeline UDK provides which will carry over to a point to UDK 4 at some point anyway. I need to know how the various tools work together and how you string them together to get to a complete product. It is a complex beast but in reality learning it will still take less time then developing my own pipeline and engine.

Good point, + UE4 is more orientated at next gen features, I wonder how well it will support low end hardware.

Easiest way to get an overview of how UDK is used/functions is to flick through their video tutorials...

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VideoTutorials.html

The "3D Buzz Video Tutorials - Using UDK" were my intro, a lot of the game logic goes through Kismet.

Does not look like they cover it's Frontend though (used for cooking the exe/building scripts)

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UnrealFrontend.html