My name is Brandon Santos. I am a indie game developer specializing in the horror genre. I’m currently making an Outlast-style horror game and want to create a learning experience for myself by using the same game engine Red Barrels used to make Outlast (Unreal Engine 3). Is there any way that you guys could possibly make an archive for those who still want to use UE3 and other past versions of the engine? What I’m talking about is creating an area on the Unreal Engine website where people can access previous versions of the engine - an archive. Similar to how Unity Technologies made an archive for past versions of Unity3D on their site. I think it’s an interesting idea and will add more value to the Unreal Engine (not that it already has enough value). I’d also like to thank you for creating such a great game engine. Please consider my idea and thank you for your time.
Do you have any important reason while you’d like to use this ancient technology? Are you using their codebase and assets of Outlast?
If not, you simply gonna waste lot of them by working with tools from previous generation of software. And who would use this learning experience?
I also think you have to licence UE4. UE3 had the UDK which was free (but not the whole engine like UE4). You would probally have to contact epic to licence UE3. I know many games are still using it, with Injustice 2 the newest one I can think of. It may be ancient, but its upgradable and if thats what your company knows, you use it.
Mainly as a learning experience to understand how Red Barrels made Outlast. I’d also modify the engine to make it more compatible with the current generation of software. I have some experience with modifying old versions of Unity, and I wanted a bigger challenge. Also, I wouldn’t consider Unreal Engine 3 ancient, it was made only 7 years ago and a lot of success has come from using (ex. BioShock, Outlast, etc.)
UE3 itself would not be possible to make available. UDK maybe though that wouldn’t give you access to the source (which was one of the reasons they made UE4)
It’s possible that due to some of the integrated third-party components that they can’t make it available anymore which is why the UDK download link is removed.