Epic's great support of UDK is mainly because that's what Epic does.
Epic is an engine company and that's mostly all they do. They make an
engine that's used by dozens of licensees. They release this same engine
in a stripped down format called UDK and apply some license restrictions
on what you can and can't do with it. Epic makes money by supporting
the UDK because it will be used by future licensees. The more Epic
supports UDK, the more licensees they get and the more money they make
when the people license the engine. This is what UDK is for. It is to
drive new business to Epic.
Valve, on the other hand, doesn't make a dime from the SDK. You can
argue that some mod team will create the next Counter-Strike and Valve
will buy them out and make billions off of the game, but to my
knowledge, that's only really happened once, with Counter-Strike (and
maybe Garry's Mod). :)
Valve releases SDK tools (however broken they may be) as sort of a bonus
for customers who've bought their games and want to fiddle around with
things themselves. I'm sure that the tools Valve uses internally are a
little better than what's released in the SDK, but I'm also sure that
the internal tools contain licensed code from 3rd parties that can't be
released to the public. So mod people are stuck with either using
Valve's SDK tools, or re-implementing the tools themselves.
Yeah, it sucks when you spend months and months re-implementing
something or trying to figure out a work around for some problem, only
to have Valve change things in the next engine release which breaks
everything you've spent months on trying to fix. I'm pretty sure Valve
isn't intentionally trying to break your mod and that's just one of the
things you have to deal with when you haven't licensed the engine source
code.
Like I said above, Valve doesn't make anything from the SDK, so there's
really not a whole lot of incentive for them to constantly run the SDK
tools through their QA people so that they can find and fix bugs. It's
just not cost effective for them to do this. If you were paying for the
SDK, you could probably expect a little better support and quality
control for it, but since it's free, you're actually getting more than
you paid for.
----
Jeffrey "botman" Broome
On 10/28/2010 2:14 PM, Tobias Kammersgaard wrote:
I hope to hear from other people on this list, that feels the same way, or
want to share their opinion on this matter.
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