So a discussion on the chat room about which engines are good for making mods made me interested in getting back into editing. My only experience is with JO/JA and I wanted to upgrade to the source engine. What are some good help resources? I am a complete noob so I need all the help I can get.

I'm not going for Unreal because my computer can't handle it. Half Life 2 barely runs on my laptop with medium settings.

Steam comes with a whole bunch of tutorials and reference stuff in the source sdk.

UDK > Hl2

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Is UDK for games using the Unreal 3 engine? If so, I don't think my computer is capable of running Unreal 3.

That doesn't make sense. Unreal 3 is just the engine. The games themselves are what are so graphically intensive.

Unreal, to me, is more difficult to edit. I haven't tried it in the last couple years, but the editor always seemed more complicated than it needed to be. I enjoy using the source tools, but there are a lot of features it lacks as well to cut down on time.

If they can run the Unreal 3 engine on an iPhone and a Pre, I think you can manage it on your PC.

Then again, the iPhone and Pre have decent little chips in them, not to mention they are running at very small resolutions/framerates. What do those things max at? 30fps?

Decent little chips for a phone maybe. A crappy-ass Intel GMA will run circles around them regardless of performance.

To clarify: A list titles that use Unreal 3 are graphically intense because they have incredibly detailed environments. But these are artistic choices. If you ported the levels of JK to Unreal 3, they would run MUCH faster than they do in JK.

UDK (Gears of War 1 & 2) doesn't really scratch the surface of unreal except get a basic understanding of how the editor works. It isn't packaged with any sort of AI except multiplayer bots, so you can't make any sort of single player experience. Don't use BSP in Unreal unless you absolutely have to, it really sucks. I don't recommend the Gears editor either as it is extremely prone to crashing. Kismet is relatively easy to learn to script events. UnrealScript is not since there's little documentation anywhere.

Hammer (HL2, Source) - Great built in AI, great brush editor, kind of frusterating not being able to scale objects but it teaches you scale so I'm ok with it

Radient (CoD4) - Great brush editor, has some sweet prefab tools that I really wish unreal had

I really wish they had released the frostbite editor with bad company 2 otherwise I would recommend that