Unreal Development Kit June Release
The June build of the Unreal Development Kit Beta has been released!
With this release comes a new foliage editor, complete with altitude-based painting, map templates, which provide default lighting setups for afternoon, midday, and morning light (or create your own), a single editor for both mobile and PC platforms, improved mobile lighting, Symplygon, a mesh optimizer built into UDK, decal support for terrain, various debugging and performance profiling tools, and major performance and memory optimizations!
Sadly, the Gamma Correction for mobile comes at a high performance cost, so be weary of implementing it. Epic points out that these are forward looking features which "currently only has acceptable performance on iPad 2." So don't try using Gamma Correction on earlier iOS hardware, because it probably wont go over well.
The performance profiling tools, in combination with views, such as the texture density view, should help identify areas where performance may suffer in your UDK game.
I'm excited to check out the foliage editor and poke around with the new Unreal's Landscape system features.
UDK for Mobile
If you're working on an iOS project with the UDK Mobile editor, you may want to read the UDN documentation, "Migrating Mobile Projects to June 2011 UDK Beta." As mentioned previously, the workflow has changed in the latest release and the PC and mobile UDK editors have been merged.
Download the latest release, here (1.5 GB).