Recently I learned that the Unreal Developement Kit (or UDK) is a free toolset for developing non-commercial games or simulations and it also comes without restrictions.
„What is UDK?“ quoted from the UDK website:
„UDK is Unreal Engine 3 – a complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations on the PC and iOS.“
Furthermore UDK is frequently updated. I find this kit much more sophisticated than Unity, because it contains more professional tools for creating scripts, materials, terrain, animations and so on, although some of these tools require a lot more learning time due to their higher complexity.
Unity on the other hand is great for quick prototyping by plugging game objects together. But as soon as a project grows, it tends to be more and more messed up. So I found myself using Unity only for placing objects and visual feedback. For all the other stuff I was using scripts without the Unity editor at all. Well, I could extend the Unity Editor and make my own toolsets, but this takes a lot of extra effort.
UDK tutorials for beginners can be found on 3DBuzz. And here is a tutorial showing how to make a basic mod with UnrealScript.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6UkNN-LRi0
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