UDK, can you add your own effects?

Question

I'm new to game development and am curious to know if you can add your own cg effects? Like if I wanted to add fog to my game and UDK didn't support that, is that possible?

What kind of coding does one do, in a engine like UDK?

Answer 1

What you ask is possible. There are a variety of nice tutorials on the UDN and on the UDK forum that shows you how to do exactly what you ask.

UDK, Like Unreal Engine uses the UnrealScript scripting language. Inspired by C++ and Java it's fairly easy to come to grips with. You don't have access to source code using the UDK.

Also, there is a visual scripting language called Kismet And it is usually how people accomplish what you may be looking to do from your question.

I also recommend Raven67854's Tutorial Series on Youtube. It's an excellent primer for getting started.

Answer 2

I'd advise that you start out making some small 2D games, it takes a lot of time and skill to get 3D stuff looking good, and as a beginner you are better off waiting with those worries.

To answer your question, yes you can add your own effects in UDK, primarily using shaders. But I'd guess it ships with a bunch of effects, a fog effect would probably be very easy to include in a game, whereas some other shader effects would require some specific instructions in order to only apply where they should.

UDK has some C branch language included, I guess it's not very different from common programming languages, there is also some visual code editor, but I guess the former is preferable.

Answer 3

If I understand correctly, and you're asking specifically about adding your own Cg/HLSL, the short answer is, no, you cannot write your own shader code. I've been down that path, and eventually had an Epic employee tell me that everything I wanted to do is impossible in UDK.

Question here: Questions about rendering access in UDK

Epic forum thread: http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=741801