The Unreal Development Kit (UDK) was a free game engine based on Unreal Engine 3. It has now been deprecated and replaced by Unreal Engine 4, however there is one project that might make you interested in looking into the older UDK: Homebrew PS3 and Xbox 360 support!
This has been made possible thanks to Brazilian developer Nidal Nijm and his UDK ultimate project.
This blows the door wide open for much more advanced Homebrew games on both platforms and ports of many PC UDK games!
How is this possible? Let’s find out.
Unreal Engine 3 was a very popular game engine that was sold by Epic exclusively to professional game development studios.
This engine had support for exporting to PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 and many official games were developed for these platforms using this engine.
But due to the high cost and difficulty of obtaining a license, Homebrew developers could never build their own games with the engine. It would be too difficult to convince Epic games to let you develop your own game as a small team with no finance in place.
So the Unreal Development Kit was released as a free version of UE3 but many features were stripped out of it, including Xbox 360 and PS3 support.
As both UDK and the official version of UE3 are built from roughly the same codebase, would it be possible to re-enable features like Xbox 360 and PS3 support? It turns out that Yes it is possible and that is exactly what UDK ultimate has achieved.
This wouldn’t have been possible until source code was leaked of a console release of a UE3 game which targeted PS3 and Xbox 360.
Using this source code it was possible to merge the publicly available UDK source code with the newly leaked console equivalent.
However this was not as straightforward as you might imagine, the leak was missing multiple files and had many files that would be incompatible with UDK out of the box.
Thankfully a lot of hard work was put into this and it is now possible for anyone with a jailbroken PS3 or Xbox 360 to port their own UDK games over!
The developer has created an excellent youtube video showing off the process of using UDK to create a PS3/360 game:
The original website: https://sites.google.com/view/udkultimate/ previously had links to download a version of the SDK. However all links have since been removed because of a DMCA takedown request. The latest and full version of the SDK as since been archived here: https://archive.org/details/udk-engine-ps-3-xbox-360-pc.-7z
As this is a project with many interesting technical achievements, it would be great to find out the answers to a few questions:
