How to use Dropbox to Share a UDK Map Folder

Our team was having trouble sharing our work-in-progress UDK map files with each other over the popular file sharing software Dropbox. Dropbox by default creates a single destination folder on your hard drive to store all the files on your account. However saving our map files outside of the UDK Content directories cause some significant problems with finding references and level streaming just plain didn’t work.

There is a way, however, to make both Dropbox and UDK happy by using a symbolic link between two folders in Windows. Follow this great write up and tutorial by Alex Castle to learn more about how these work. The short version is that a simple command line utility will let you create a brand new folder within the UDK Maps folder which is bound to one of your local Dropbox folders. Here’s the command to run from your command prompt…

mklink /J "C:\UDK\UDK-2011-09\UDKGame\Content\Maps\MyTeamFolder\" "C:\Users\MyUsersFolder\Dropbox\MyTeamShareFolder"

The breakdown: mlink.exe is the utility which creates the link, /J says make a hard link between the two folders, the first path is where you would like a new folder to be created (it should be inside your UDK maps directory) and the second path is the path for your already existing Dropbox folder for sharing.