Unreal Engine 4

veggiesaurus

A serious change from UDK... Unreal Engine 4 is available via a $19 / month subscription (https://www.unrealengine.com), with full source code included. I took the plunge, and must say it looks incredible.

Oh, and you can also simply subscribe for one month and cancel...whatever version is current at the time of your subscription cancellation is free for you to use :)

Anyone else interested in making something for futureproof mobile devices and decent PCs?

p.s. look at that image quality...

ffz

It's a bold move, great product set and it will be interesting to see who moves off unity/corona/etc and onto unreal.

I will be staying with unity for now ;)

Nitrogen

This is pretty freakin cool! I'll be trying it out shortly.

mattbenic

How is their device coverage looking? Can you build for Android and WP yet?

Elyaradine

Super stoked. With Unity, Unreal and CryEngine all going subscription with affordable prices, I can sample all three of them and add tools that I like from the one into the others! (Because, imo, outside of tools they'll do pretty much the same thing anyway...) :D

[edit] @mattbenic:

• Mac OS X support hasn't undergone serious developer testing yet
  
• Android support is rough and hasn't undergone compatibility testing
  
• iOS deployment currently requires a Mac
  
• C++ programming documentation is sparse

mattbenic

So short answer is no, for now. If the groundwork is there though, at least it seems they're working on it.

Elyaradine said:

all going subscription with affordable prices, I can sample all three of them

So cool. I remember not too long ago when you had to sign your life away in an NDA before you could even get access to the engines to try them out, and the cost of actually using them was just madness, $100k+ AND royalties. Market competition FTW.

watson

Hi, they say to check in 6 months , for a more polished product ,regarding ios and android, I am going to get mine tonight just to get use to the interface , and to check all the new features .

veggiesaurus

watson said:

Hi, they say to check in 6 months , for a more polished product ,regarding ios and android, I am going to get mine tonight just to get use to the interface , and to check all the new features .

My plan is to subscribe for a month or two, and then cancel, learn as much as possible and only re-subscribe when new must-have features show up.

MrNexy

This coupled with the Oculus DK 2 announcement is the best news of the year :)
Having gone through some of the documentation and videos , you will be able to build for all the platforms except the consoles from the IDE(because of NDA agreements with Sony and MS).
Windows,Mac,Linux,Android,iOS(If you're building on a Mac) and HTML5 ?

Thats pretty sweet for $19 per month and 5% revenue. I also read somewhere on their site that you can cancel your subscription at any time and still keep using the engine(for development of course). You won't receive any updated source through GitHub until you renew your subscription of course.

Looks like Unity has a battle on their hands with Epic and Crytek stomping on their toes so hard. I can't wait to see the things that people do now that there is source access for all :D

veggiesaurus

MrNexy said:

Looks like Unity has a battle on their hands with Epic and Crytek stomping on their toes so hard. I can't wait to see the things that people do now that there is source access for all

One thing someone's already working on is a wrapper for C# / Mono. That will make switching from Unity even easier for those who aren't comfortable with pointers :P

DarkCarnivour

Exciting stuff indeed.

I think we'll be keeping our current main project in UDK at this stage though.

As for future things, that could be quite another thing. The only downside here is that we'd have to say goodbye to the library of code that we built up in UDK which is currently supporting VCD as well as multiple prototypes... :(

Having access to the whole codebase in UE4 is definitely awesome! Instead of cursing the opaque API, now we'd be able to fix things that are causing problems for us within the engine (in theory at least).

I am glad to see UE making moves to keep up with Unity, that's great news for developers.

As for the massive technical and plus more graphics improvements of UE4, I'm a bit less excited, but that's not because it's bad in any way. It is nice to know that power is available. Personally, I just don't feel that engines make a game, it's the game design and art that matters. The engine is there to serve that. A massive tool like UE (with so many options for awesomeness) would be more of a hindrance to some game designs.

I notice they're providing the option to switch UDK licensing terms in favor of the same terms as UE4 for UDK projects. That's good news! :)

I can't help but expect the move to 100% C++ is going to annihilate the infamous modularity on Unreal scripting. I suppose modding hasn't been high on the UE agenda for years now, but it'll be interesting to see how that goes. I imagine right now there are at least four hundred and seventy three million enthusiastic coders embedding Lua, C#, Java, a new flavor of UnrealScript and every other language right now.

Kobusvdwalt9

This of course means that Unity will become even better in some way. They have to.

MrNexy

You have some very good points there :) I tend to agree with you, if you're deep into a udk project then you should finish off whats on your plate first.

The only downside here is that we'd have to say goodbye to the library of code that we built up in UDK which is currently supporting VCD as well as multiple prototypes... :(

Not necessarily hey , most of the functionality is the same just that you have to get used to making header files and doing things UE4 C++ style. You'll still be dealing with playercontrollers,pawns,Tick,PostBeginPlay etc.(minus what may have been deprecated of course ).

The major thing that has changed is the UI system, scaleform is no longer in the picture unless you integrate it yourself that is :P The new Slate system will take some getting used to , this coming just after I finished writing a drag drop inventory in ActionScript :_:

One thing someone's already working on is a wrapper for C# / Mono. That will make switching from Unity even easier for those who aren't comfortable with pointers :P

I'd love to see how Unity folks find the transition, there have been some awesome things put together in Unity :) Unity5 is looking pretty damn sweet too.

I can't help but expect the move to 100% C++ is going to annihilate the infamous modularity on Unreal scripting. I suppose modding hasn't been high on the UE agenda for years now, but it'll be interesting to see how that goes. I imagine right now there are at least four hundred and seventy three million enthusiastic coders embedding Lua, C#, Java, a new flavor of UnrealScript and every other language right now.

There have already been some rumblings online by folks saying that they feel abandoned by the release of UE4 and other melodramatic things.One great thing with the new system is that you won't have to wait 6+ months for an updated editor.Waiting on Oculus who was waiting on Epic to do a new release was a real nightmare.

I agree with you completely when you say that more powerful tools may get in the way of good game design. I expect to see a slew of games overusing the new lighting,post processing effects and physics.

DarkCarnivour

MrNexy said:

You'll still be dealing with playercontrollers,pawns,Tick,PostBeginPlay etc.(minus what may have been deprecated of course ).

That's good. The only trouble, of course, is that moving code over to a new system invalidates all the proven stability that comes from having it tested for a long period of time in that situation. That's all to be expected though, that's the nature of this game.

MrNexy said:

The major thing that has changed is the UI system, scaleform is no longer in the picture

Will be interesting to see the new UI system. Hoping it's more suitable to our MO than scaleform was. We actually liked Scaleform such that we didn't use it and made our own system instead...

MrNexy said:

I'd love to see how Unity folks find the transition, there have been some awesome things put together in Unity

I wonder how appealing UE4 is to Unity users. I would expect it to be more so to beginner developers than to veteran indie devs.
UE3 could produce very nice visuals, but if that's not where a game hinges, it makes more sense to stick to the tools that worked for that game. Especially so if it needs flexibility beyond UE which was clearly focused towards a certain kind of game. With UE4's entire codebase available, that may all change and it should be a lot more flexible (in theory - in practice, changing that much code might be a bit much for sanity).
I'm very glad to see UE4 competing with Unity. I was getting more and more interested in Unity myself with its greater flexibility and < 25% royalty.

MrNexy said:

One great thing with the new system is that you won't have to wait 6+ months for an updated editor.Waiting on Oculus who was waiting on Epic to do a new release was a real nightmare.

So much this! We've been having various battles, one of the recurring demons being Steam integration. The Steamworks API in UDK is implemented in native code. It would really help a lot if we could just trace that entire code path, find where the hell the thing is (not) doing and fix our code appropriately or fix their code... That's just one thing and there are others where I've wished I could get in there and fix it or just see what it's supposed to be doing. Some of the docs on UDK are a bit scant, so full source access would be nice to fill in the blanks (and also be more accurate than certain things in the docs)
I also hope this means we can ice (and shatter!) UnSetup.exe.

dislekcia

So... Is anyone making a game?

MrNexy

Getting Atajrubah's assets settled in, landscape material yet to be tackled :)

[Assets,Atmospherics and Landscape]

[Assets,Landscape,Land Boat :O ]

Kobusvdwalt9

That looks very good. Esp with that lighting.

dreampunchboy

Sick! Great news

DarkCarnivour

dislekcia said:

So... Is anyone making a game?

I'm working on 2, one of which is getting into crunch time and neither is UE4... So time... sob.
Soon. Hopefully I'll remember to post something this time :p

DarkCarnivour

On a related note, it appears Epic is giving UDK developers the option to move over to the same terms as UE4 for our UDK exiting games starting from 1 January this year.

I've done the maths and the point at where things tip in favor of UE4 terms is $100,000 gross assuming a store cut of 30%.

Gross           Store @ 30%     After Store     UE4         UDK         Net UE4     Net UDK
$300,000        $90,000         $210,000        $15,000     $40,000     $195,000    $170,000
$200,000        $60,000         $140,000        $10,000     $22,500     $130,000    $117,500
$100,000        $30,000         $70,000         $5,000      $5,000      $65,000     $65,000
$50,000         $15,000         $35,000         $2,500      $0          $32,500     $35,000

dislekcia

DarkCarnivour said:

Soon. Hopefully I'll remember to post something this time :p

Please do! I'm kinda tired of people going berserk over some random engine capability that isn't going to make their game creation any different at all. Maybe I just don't care about lighting, but I'd rather see it in something playable at least... Also, cool that you're looking at UE4 from a finance perspective. Smarts!

DarkCarnivour

dislekcia said:

Maybe I just don't care about lighting

To be completely honest, I'm feeling the same sentiment these days... which is maybe why UE4 is not super exciting to me at the moment. Right now, I'm stuck between heavy work on VCD and obsession with some much more left field (for us) stuff.

Elyaradine

The Blueprint system looks quite cool. And the BSP-type thing is something I've kind of missed in Unity, though for the most part we block our our levels in our art apps now as a workaround.

Fengol

I love the carve out function because it allows me (a dev without an artist) to create more complicated shapes and I like the ability to see code graphs executing for managing state.

garethf

Elyaradine said:

The Blueprint system looks quite cool. And the BSP-type thing is something I've kind of missed in Unity, though for the most part we block our our levels in our art apps now as a workaround.

Check out Probuilder. I picked it up a while ago, haven't got round to playing with it (finishing up SC first) so I can't give you any feedback on what it's like to use it (yet), but it looks like it fills that BSP gap for Unity projects.

Still, it's not out-of-the-box like UE4.

watson

Well for I am very excited about this engine, but Its definitely about creating something playable, alot of these next gen features will not be useful for games on mobile devices, for now.Atleast we now epic will keep updating, fixing bugs and creating new ones .

Crocopede

UE4 has matured somewhat. Do you guys feel its worth switching to?
Im switching to a new engine after XoiSan for a bigger project aimed at PC.

I loved the features... still i believe cryengine is a better choice for me as i know that engine. But UE4 looks so tempting

veggiesaurus

If it's aimed at PC, and going to be a big project, then UE4 is probably not a bad idea. It's got some very nice features and is pretty future-proof.

dislekcia

@veggiesaurus: That's always struck me as a strange argument... The best future proofing for games is through style, not tech. Style can be executed in anything and tech is generally going to return worse on the same investment.

Crocopede

True that. Engines are like golf clubs or golf balls. Buying the most expensive one with best features do not make a good golfer.

As fro UE4. I do not regret choosing this engine. For someone with no coding background the blueprints are pretty awesome.
Its been 2 months of pulling my hair out learning how to use them though.

Everything in it feels right. Animation tools, map tools, material tools, Menu widget tools etc.

It feels like working in Maya. My only regret is that i did not switch sooner.

There are some downfalls to it though. I think my biggest annoyance is the lack of volume fog on a map designer perspective.

Some of the upsides is the debugging available for mobile devices. Exporting and packaging directly from my windows machine to IOS, Android.

Some stuff can be very overwhelming.

I think that the biggest issue with UE4 is that it being so new... there aren't tons of resources available on how to do things. Most of what i needed to do wasn't in any tutorials. I had to figure stuff out scraping together bits n pieces of information and mostly trial and error.

But the staff over there return answers pretty quickly on the answer hub. This to me is amazing. Coming from an engine where a bug is reported and being told its not a bug its a 3rd party issue bug and waiting weeks for a resolution. And now having epic staff telling me... no its not a bug. What you did wrong was this n this and actually going through the effort of recreating my blueprints and showing me where i went wrong.

Perhaps you can call this free tutoring.

purpleOHM

Hello ALL!!!

I am a very straight forward person, so if i offend anyone sorry, but i know what i want.

So here goes...

My name is Nicholas aka purpleOHM, i have a background in Maya and a bit in UE4. I absolutely love theses programs, and have made them my choice for game development. I am currently looking for people interested in Developing Games. I am just starting out myself and the task is way to great for one person. I dont have time for politics, bitchyness, or any other sort of negative emotion or attitude. I am looking for a cool bunch of GOOOD people who are keen on potentially making something great, also somebody with solid UE4 understanding would be reaaaaal goood. You can call me anytime, or email me. Thanks for taking the time to check out my post.

Kind Regards

purpleohm1@gmail.com

072 474 4867