Recently Epic Games, makers of the Unreal Engine used in AAA game titles (Unreal, Unreal Tournament, XIII, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex 2) has released a stripped-down version of their game engine for educational, non-profit use. This is also releated to a commercial edition of their engine with similar structure intended to compete with other engines of a similar license such as Lithtech's line of engines or Jet3d engine editions. If you want to develop a commercial game using their runtime, they have a special pricing system (versus the $350,000+ they charge) for just the runetime itself, with source code headers being an extra fee.
What does this mean to you?
You can now develop your own title game as a mod to the Unreal engine and release it free for anyone to use (your fans dont have to have UT2k3 to play the game you make with this runtime) so you could easily make your game dreams come true with this engine, free of chrage too! If you think your game has market profitability then you can license the runtime commercially for a fee, assuming Epic "approves" you to commercially license the engine.
The UDN link can be found here:
http://udn.epicgames.com/pub/Powered/Un ... e22261903/
Here are some resources you might want to check out if you wish to develop for this engine.
Unreal Developer Network (UDN):
Unreal Wiki Documentation Project (Best place for info):
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki
BeyondUnreal Forums (Good for questions, etc.):
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/
BeyondUnreal (Good news and info place):
Many many links (including IRC channels):
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/External_Links
Mastering Unreal (amongst other programs, Video Tutorials Resource!):
http://www.masteringunreal.com/
Architectonic (Unreal level editing site):
http://www.planetunreal.com/architectonic
PlanetUnreal (Gamespys site dedicated to Unreal, many good hosted sites):
CHiMERiC - UnrealScript coding resource (Pretty good code snippets)
WOTgreal - A Kick ass UnrealScript IDE (And its free!)
If you find any new information to post here, make a post in the forums or PM the forum moderators for assistance.