Here's some good news for those who want to hone their chops on professional-level game development tools. Epic Games is offering a free version of the Unreal Engine 3 devkit for non-commercial purposes.

The free edition, called the Unreal Development Kit, is available to anyone and everyone. The free UDK is limited to non-commercial projects only, though, so those who want to use what they learn on it for a commercial game will still have to pay licensing fees.

Epic says the UDK is not a gimped version of the commercial UE3 but an up to date version that has the commercial version's latest upgrades and features. The company will also support the UDK with free updated builds.

The devkit is for PC users only for now, although console support is reportedly under consideration.

Via Gamasutra