Valve released an updated version of Alien Swarm, a popular Unreal Tournament 2004 total conversion mod. The creators of the mod were hired by Valve, and they’ve helped turn it into a stand-alone game running on the Source engine. Valve is also releasing the code base for Alien Swarm and an SDK. The game is available for free on Steam.
There is probably some nice stuff to learn that can still be applicable to UDK here !
This tutorial will cover most of the things that was seen in the basic Isometric tutorial. What is new is that a lot of people have asked me how to include those modifications in respect to the basic unreal tournament code included in UDK. We will cover how to modify the camera in a isometric view. The basics of inventory will be explained as well as how to make a gun work. This again will all be in the context of the UT code folder that is standard with each UDK install. I will refer the UT code base as UT code through this tutorial for sake of simplicity.
Here is a list of the classes we will implement, please note that these files have been supplied by Yorg Kuijis, so most of the credit goes to him, as I only supplemented the tutorials and explanation. Of worthy note, I added steps to add a 2d textured cursor instead of the 3d cursor you might have seen before.
Classes that are going to be in this project :
- CustomUTGameInfo
- CustomCamera
- CustomHUD
- CustomLinkGun
- CustomPawn
- CustomPlayerController
Follow it here
I have received lots of questions on how to integrate the Isometric tutorial with the UT code base. With the help of Yorg Kujis, I will concoct some nice tutorial with explanations of the Inventory system and how to give a default custom gun to a pawn. This should prove to be a basic tutorial and has some code taken from the isometric tutorial. Stay tuned, it should come out pretty soon. I have been pretty much taken by university these last weeks so the tutorial on rotation is still in the making. I would like to add some notions of how you can work with vectors in UDK and explain how some basic trig can help you achieve concrete results.
Stay tunned for moar !
Quoting from the forum here
Until we work out the final licensing terms this summer (after I’m out of school), we’ve made a special UDK product key for nFringe that will enable the debugger for UDK-based games. The key will work until June 18, during which time we are allowing all UDK development (we aren’t distinguishing commercial/non-commercial for UDK development until that date).
Studio Name: UDK
Product Key: DB8K-6JF6-7TCW-DVMG-BBBB
To access it go to Help Menu – nFringe Licence Manager
Some things to note:
- Make sure to build your scripts with at least the following flags or debugging won’t work: UDK make -debug -full
- Set your launch executable to Binaries\Win32\UDK.exe.
After announcing this tutorial a few weeks back, I finally put in online for your learning pleasure. I do not know if I will be adding more chapters to this long tutorial, if any of you have some leads, you can always post a comment and I will look into it when the time permits me to indulge in UDK. I want to take the time to thanks again all my readers, some of you are really helpful in finding bugs that I miss. I have made some leaps and bounds in UDK thanks to everybody that shares their knowledge of this beautiful platform.
I added my test map and the source code for chapter 6 and 7 merged together, so you can look it out as a reference. Remember to support me with my annoying ads 
Without further comments, here are the quick links