I found couple of good videos from the UDK wiki. I decided to download the UDK and try to make something with it. As I have used hammer before and I have experience on compiling source sdk, it wasn’t hard to learn with the videos.

Comparing to the hammer editor, UDK can be harder for first, but after while the UDK has many advantages over the Hammer editor.

Hammer editor is much easier to start with, because on UDK you need to use one special box to insert every brush. It is bit confusing at first.

But after I realized how the brush stuff worked, UDK became much easier. Inserting materials is awesome. Content browser is much better and faster than the Hammer browser. And lining materials automatically is just so useful feature.

Kismet is also much better way to create scripts/events to levels than the Hammers own I/O system. It is also very easy to make animations with Kismet+Matinee.

Only problems that I have with the Unreal editor is mostly just the amount of features. There is just so many options to setup

The play in editor feature is also nice, but it is not so awesome as it could be. It makes developing faster, but it won’t remove compiling…

On the code/mod side. UDK is MUCH easier to start with. With Source SDK you need to install Visual C++, extract the source, configure it and compile. With UDK you can code with unrealscript and compile that. Unrealscript is much easier than c++ and it won’t explode the whole game if you forget one variable somewhere.

Valve has to make some serious upgrades to Source to get more developers to use it. Unreal engine is very popular engine and there is only couple of non-valve source games.

I am going to play with the UDK some more. Maybe make my own mod or something. But only problem with UDK is that I don’t want to make maps for UT3 only I have to use Hammer if I want to make maps for my favorite games.