Eve: Valkyrie moves from Unity to Unreal Engine 4.

Indeed, but that would be rather big news if Unity does not support PS4 anymore, even if it is for a specific ammount of time

I wonder if there is any official word on this

 

Well, i suppose those devs here who are working or running studios with large teams and big money mean skyscrapers falling over when they say good graphics, there's a lot of money in skyscrapers falling over i'm certainly aware of that, but its just not to my taste. In terms of brute skyscraper toppling ability Unreal is far ahead, and if you like that then it's just a plain fact Unreal can make buildings fall over beautifully, it can probably make so many things explode incredibly with demons everywhere that you'll think it's actually real, but that's the thing, its hard to say its good graphics. Its as good as the artist who made them.

Well, Unreal is without doubt the go to guy for intricate pyrotechnics with not even reflections with pixels in them, no argument i guess, they just dont tend to be the kind of games i want to play. I think the last Epic game i played was Gears of War 3, i did it coop with some mates and we spent the entire game tearing every aspect of it to pieces (We're the denizens of a particularly hard to find internet hole that resulted from Edge (Well regarded UK games magazine aimed at the enthusiast) magazine forum's fall from grace).

They're so far from the type of games I want to MAKE it beggars belief. I will admit my current stepping stone project, there's going to be a lot of things blowing up if the player (or i) get that far and choose that path, but you know

And yes, the kind of games I want to make can be made using unity and a handful of assets, and even some free stuff from the community, intending to use Skyshop's tools but Lux to actually shade everything because everything i've done with Lux so far has been goddamn beautiful and I just think it should be given some nice exposure. There'll be more on that soon I hope

It's just stuff like achieving a few things with Lux and and rtp and doing it in such a nice environment, i'm making what I want to make the way i want to make it, i'm making my games as an artist not a production line peon, kinda the bottom line isnt it. I dont care if i dont make money because i dont have to, obviously some people have to make money, thats fine, but why in the world are you making videogames, particularly if its a game you think is S***e, if youre so fussed about money. If i cared about money i'd like a life to enjoy it with, i'd like to think i wasnt willfully damaging my greatest passion

 

Seems they have heavy use of particles so its a no brainier for them to use UE4, its beautiful.

 

I started my game as a hobby and with the passion to make the RPG i always dreamed of. So this is the first priority, to give a game that will provide the feeling of adventure i want and a big part of that is in the environments design.

I have a normal job and now starting doing some assets for the store (the particle system i used for the game for example) to further support its development.

Unity is just about perfect for my case, since my time is limited and i can do an actual game with assets in my schedule. It has been an incredible experience so far and going much better than i ever though it would really, when i transitioned from XNA to Unity. The fact that i have managed to get so stunning graphics out of Unity also helps keep the moral high, since at least one of the aspects is finilized to a big extend and when i upgrade to Pro, the game will be ready to be shown.

Generally i dont know if the other engines offer anything similar to the quality and ammount of ready assets for smaller teams like mine (i am the programmer and artist of the team for example), that makes all the difference to me, and i still get to have some mind blowing visuals.

Any missing link of that chain would have simply stopped me from making the game.

 

Yeah, once I saw the ue4 version.. that's what I was I was wondering. Are those the same assets? and I don't see why it couldn't look the same in unity 4... let alone unity 5. And won't unity suppprt ps4 export?
Either way.. is it such a huge concern for 90% of small indie gamedevs?

 

Well that's it too, if I hadn't found Unity and found it so entertaining and pleasant to use i probably would still be doing 3D stills or moved onto one of my other arty hobbies, and not learning nearly as much about the universe, strangely enough. Researching stuff like shaders takes you some funny places and the stuff i've read just to get my vision of a water shader nailed has been a massive education in physics, programming and the mentality that gets you happily double clicking them in-editor instead of being slightly wary of them. Thats something Unity did. Ive made games all my life with one thing or another but my flirtation with whatever language or middleware i was using was usually brief - udk got noped to hell and back, so the fact i've been with Unity quite some time now says a lot about it's strengths, and maybe its dickish to say it, but if your game looks bad its cause your art is crappy, you can't blame your engine if that engine has already established itself as competent, in fact if you're loving a new engine because it's helping you cover up for crappy art then thats a sad thing

 

Ehh, CCP are not exactly the best studio to follow in terms of development practises, just read any post from an ex-CCP dev and you'll see why.
Unity is not a barrier to visuals when used correctly either, take a look at The Forest's most recent trailer on Youtube and you'll notice everyone commenting thinks it's made in CryEngine. Just because U4 has better Anti-aliasing, it doesn't mean it's a better engine.

 

I just watched both videos. Okay sure, there's a slight difference to notice by just looking at it.
Yet in the rather dark scenery you'd only notice most of it if you really focus on the details.
Also you should remember two things:

1st and most obvious: This is UE4 vs Unity 4 (Not Unity 5), right? It's almost like comparing ps4 with xbox 360.
2nd: The alpha video with unreal engine was made like 8 months later. People get more skilled at what they do if they work for more time on the same kind of project and get the hang of it and make progress.

And speaking of progress, i feel like in this 8 month there was not much progress happening in terms of overall project development, but only porting and having a slight graphics overhaul.

So for me this is not really a big surprise screaming "uuhhh unity is bad compared to ue4".
I wonder more about what could have been if Unity 5 was already out for a while and they were moving their project progress this way and comparing that to the U4 version in a parallel timeline.

 

wow, The Forest looks really good.
The only thing I have to say about this, is that if we compare, The forest is using unity with many extras and addons (Right?), I think including products such as Amplify Creations. I do not want to talk about costs .. but it could compare it to a UE in beta out of the box.

 

I find it an amusing irony of developers complaining about gamers wanting everything for free, wanting everything for free. That's not to say you folk don't have a point but it is pertinent.

As i've said quite a few times, if they are serious about their games they cant really come at me for laughing at them complaining about the cost of unity, its a drop in the ocean compared to the full budget of even a moderately well funded indie title expecting to get any marketing or traction at all.

 

EXACTLY! The cost to run an actual game company, with employees and stuff, is huge! Taxes,bills, salaries, other software licenses. How much can you really bargain out of unity licenses? That's more important as productivity? The core of such productivity is the game engine, get what you pay for!

And if you're only starting and alone, don't pay anything... that's the great thing about unity. Use pro features in your second game.

Yeah, plus I think there's a lot of hype with UE4, and their flashy marketing (as always, because they can) with best of the best assets to show off graphic features that will also be available in Unity 5 (and many already in Unity 4), plus their "too good to be true" license fees... yeah, you can say it 'sounds' amazing, but is it? Will you be super productive with UE4? I know with Unity you can be very productive.

But I say give it some time, let pioneers use their time and prowess to really test drive UE4, and wit until the smoke clears, and also Unity 5 is out... and lets see what's what. My money is in Unity atm.

 

And that's the whole point everyone keeps making about Unity. We have to buy third party assets (of which Unity makes a profit from) to get Unity even CLOSE to what UE4 offers out of the box, without even taking THEIR 3rd party asset store into the equation. Some of these assets aren't even improvements, but straight up *fixes* that Unity should have implemented. The asset store is full of fixes, and the worst part is that Unity is not only skating by and ignoring these issues, they are profiting from it

Someone mentioned developers wanting everything for free comparing them to gamers. Have you considered that *because* gamers want everything for free, devs need to find other ways to keep money in their pockets? UE4 is such a good value for your money compared to Unity right now, it's not even close.

UE4 is not a "too good to be true" engine. This isn't some startup announcing a new product, this is Epic and the Unreal engine that has been powering games long before Unity even existed. Why anyone would be skeptical of it's capabilities at this point, specially compared to Unity (which has not proven itself with major AAA titles), is beyond me.

 

Don't worry guys I've been working on my own VR space shooter - Space War!

Unity is saved!

 

Well, Daylight looks pretty average, and that isn't a hobbyist project. What's up with that?

 

It's almost as if the engine doesn't automatically make the game look good, but the people working on the game make the game look good!

 

I don't know. People are saying Unreal Engine 4 automatically makes there game look better from what I hear. I havn't personally seen UE4 though, just going by what other people are claiming.

So, in a way, I'm getting the sense that UE4 does automatically make the game look good. I can't personally vouch for it though.

 

Well previous UE4 version was UDK, and that didn't work for me.

To me it's irrelevant what AAA titles UDK released, because I'm not going to make an AAA game, I don't have the budget nor brute force. I need an easy going engine, not a big machine that's hard to operate.

If UE4 is an easy going engine, or not? I don't know. When a couple of years have passed, if I see enough people in the small leagues making good things in UE4, and I have the misfortune of finding all these Unity bugs... then even I might switch engines. But it's not the current situation.

 

Yeah, unreal seems to add tons of postprocessing, chromatic abberations, contrasty shadows and lots of lens glow and dirt and reflections by default. That makes everything look like as if it were shot with real camera (bad camera actually, since some of artifacts we as cg artists are so fond of, professional movie DOP would rarely allow to happen in his shot)

I am not bashing UE4, can't wait to play with it - area reflections and proper PB shading are something I am really excited about. However, excessive postprocessing is nothing new and I am sure this trend will become bad taste after a year or two.

 

If you want to use Unreal, and think its super duper, and much better than Unity, go and do it! I live of fecking welfare (admittedly a particular and more generous case than most) and I still find whining about what is in the 'real' industry a piddling amount of money laughable. If you cant make back over one hundred times the cost of unity in the sale of a game that took a year to produce you can't employ more than 5 people and thats paying them in dogfood and not factoring in all the other costs of the setup. You're being absurd, basically. Plenty of ways to get pro if you really want it, pirate it, get a loan, get a credit card, do something altruistic for your community and get a council grant, arowx just demonstrated a good way, get an oculus rift, 4 months of pro there, plus your regular trial, that's 5 months, thats enough to save (does maths) fifty quid a week (i did very rough maths) out of your income to save up. 50 pounds is 37465847 in american money (Actually it's about 70-80 dollars).

It's also a very small amount of money if you are an adult and understand expensive things. And why Unity WOULDNT profit from the asset store boggles my mind, 'you know Steam, man those guys, they make all these games that people buy and play and they distribute all these other games and theyre PROFITING from it'. As far as I know Unity Technologies is a regular company, not a charity and not staffed by volunteers.

Your point about AAA games well, therein lies the rub and you can have a think about this, although firstly as far as i'm aware its behind a good few AAA games but with a pro or, at that level (serious money) a full source license, they dont have to put the unity splash screen as a license stipulation. And if you dont have to yell about your middleware you just dont. But anyways - Unreal has a lot of proven AAA games, well known, it's also not just a coincidence that many of those games come from Epic themselves, and the Unreal technology is not developed solely for licensing to third parties, it's going to be developed anyway because Epic are not just a technology company, they make games, packaging the engine to look pretty is fairly trivial for technology they were developing anyways for their own incredibly profitable well known games.

Epic aren't being Gamedev Jesus at the moment, they don't RELY on Unreal distribution to fund their operation, the goodwill and love from the indie community is kind of being bought for free. And then they take 5% of your gross takings from a published game.

Unless you've found out that UT have uncovered the secret of alchemy and are taking us for a ride on a whim while they sit on thrones forged in gold, you'll need to figure out how they pay their staff and keep making this stuff we can make games on

Anyways, physically based rendering, Quixel Studio, everything's going to look amazing on everything soon, so I think we may be getting over the explosions and over-realism soon, also Oculus Rift doesnt really suit the skyscraper falling down experience (Trying to rift call of duty was a bad day for my nausea)

 

I'll be using COTS and a bit of my own modeling art in Unity and UE4 in the next month. I already know it can look good because that's why I bought the COTS but those renders that got me to buy the COTS were done by a professional modeler in 3DS Max. I don't even want it to look good in the sense of the sales render looks.

So it will be interesting to see how the same scenes compare in Unity UE4 as plain Jane imports. Although I have to use Unity to publish regardless of the behavior trees and post-processing included for $20 in UE4. Most mobile can't do most PP anyway. Unity publishes to 4 mobile and 2 desktop platforms for free.

 

Paying $19 and using whatever features you want is also pretty good. Not saying UE4 is necessarily better for a beginner, but the over all value for money is simply fantastic.

 

I'm almost to this point and have found that the less I rely on the Unity way of doing things (scenes, massive number of MonoBehaviours on the update cycle, SendMessage, the horribly misnamed "callbacks", messing around in the editor) and the more I do things in code and use the good parts of C# (constructors, interfaces, generics, events, etc) to do the work for me, the more maintainable and predictable my code base becomes and the more productive I am. Like, way more productive. And this is as a single person who is only coordinating my own code.

Basically I've found that the only thing that should be MBs are colliders and bling (ie: graphics and sound). Spreading game logic around in GOs is a recipe for fail once you reach a certain level of complexity unless you don't care about predictability, ordering, and well defined interactions. Which is probably fine for some times of games, but falls apart when you're doing something like multiplayer where you need a fine level of control.

Of course, even if you go this route there are that many components are not fully exposed to scripting, so lots of things that would be better managed in code have to be prefabs set up in the editor and need to be able to be found by your game controller.

 

This is where behavior trees should help me.

 

I literally can't comprehend or visualize how exactly you are doing anything without scenes, at all.

 

I fully intend to moving my team and company to UE4 if Unity doesn't change their licensing. We're stuck with Unity because we're in the middle of a project but yes, we fully plan of voting with our wallets with the next project. We're sadly past that point in the current one.

And you seem to have completely missed the point here. Unity is making a profit with their incompetence, that's the point. Why fix a bug for free when someone else could do it for you AND make you money? And you not only seem ok with that, but even seem to like it and defend it. As a serious developer and person who cares about where my money is going, you clearly have some sort of agenda here as nobody in their right mind could say that they would not go with the cheapest, best option, available to them.

Companies do not get my loyalty. They get my money if they make a product I want, for the best price on the market. UE4 is the best price and product on the market right now, hence the people who are waiting for Unity to respond, to see if they will do anything to keep what used to be their clear advantage.


But regardless, you are being childish with the personal attacks with clearly no understanding of who I am, what I do, or anything for that matter. I don't really care, but you have shown yourself to be anything but a mature individual wanting to actual discuss the topic at hand. I don't care if YOU agree or not, I gain nothing with you agreeing with me and are completely irrelevant to me. I'm here to support the other people like us, who want to avoid having to go through porting my code to another engine later on. If Unity doesn't respond with something appealing to me, that's what we'll do. Period.

PS: No, WE don't have to care about how their staff gets paid. They don't care how our staff gets paid. Unity is a product and as with all products, lives and dies based on whether they can compete in their market. Nobody's handing me checks if my game doesn't do well, does Unity provide a welfare program for devs who use their engine and lose money? No? I thought so.

Sounds like you need to grow up and understand how the world works.

 

UE4 is not UDK. UE4 is the successor to UE3, the AAA engine that studios used to have to license out for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It comes with full source code in C++ and all the tools for their pipeline.

UDK and UE4 are completely different animals. It's like the difference between Game Maker and Unity, I'd think.

 

Yes, it's indeed very nice value for your money, I know what you mean.

But I'd rather call it "potential value". In reality you get no value for your money right after you pay the $19.

Of the top of my head... a sextant is an instrument for navigation (or something), but it has no value to me... but it has great potential value for other people, doesn't mean it's the tool I need for my situation... I get seasick. Game engines, like a tool, hold the real value in what each developer can do with them.

I rather wait and see if UE4 is the right tool for small teams, based on what small teams do with it. What big AAA teams do with it, is as relevant to me, as what nautical navigators do with sextants.

 

Cheaper doesn't always mean better (not applicable in this situation). Also epic doesn't care either. They have your money too. As long as you keep paying, they keep working.
Don't forget, epic didnt have to do this. They want in on the market so they took out all 3rd part licensed produxts and filled it in with their own stuff or other software that they didn't have to license. Not to mention they use it themselves for their own games. Unity doesn't make games, they just supply a open game engine to do whatever you want with.
Not even touching about issues/problems/this asset or that asset. Been all said before.
Either things change or people go elsewhere. Simple as that. Best tool for the job.

 

Sounds interesting. I'm sure Unreal will look better out of the box even without postprocessing, simply because it's lighting and shading model is lot more advanced whereas in Unity you have barebones tools and you have to build your look from ground up.

I'm all for building up look from scratch actually - more interesting, better learning experience and more flexible when it comes to heavily art-directed titles (which most of successful indie titles are)

 

Maybe I did something wrong, but the precomputed lightmaps work only if you have the right UVs. I imported one model with UVs in 0,1 range and one repeating, the one with repeating Textures got almost black after lightmapbaking.

The model with unique UVs looked okay.
http://www.mn-solutions.net/div/unreal.png

 

I think a better comparison is UDK is Unity version 3 and UE4 is Unity version 5.

UDK had Kismet, UE4 has Blueprint.
UDK had scripting, UE4 has C++.
UE4 has lots of improved tools

Pricing is different. UDK was free for non-commercial use, or $99 a year if you made less than $50,000 a year. If you made more than $50,000 you had to pay $99 plus a 25% royalty.

So, UDK was free for hobbyists. Now, hobbyists have to cough up $20 a month or $240 per year.

UE4 will cost more than double what UDK cost for the average indie developer. But it's a massive price reduction for successful game developers. They are shifting the burden onto the masses to reduce prices for the top developers.

 

On the left, is that Unreal? - the building looks to be a 2D texture it's so photographic looking in contrast to the robot. On the right, the UMA character you're using has better textures. The building looks good but the perspective is all wrong. The character would need to appear to be much nearer the building for that perspective. And that's an odd 1st floor for that building, almost as if the 1st floor is missing.

 

Yes, left is unreal. Both buildings have the same mesh, diffuse and normal. The perspective is based on a very narrow fov, I didn't change it in unreal because I just wanted to compare rendering. The first floor appears to be missing because it is

 

Hmm...so interesting that the Unreal building looks like a photograph to me, not that I particularly want that look. It will be interesting when I try it.

 

You're right i don't know about you, except what you just said, you're saying you don't like their ineptitude so they should change their pricing? So if they were cheaper the cost of their ineptitude would be covered by saving a small percentage off your licensing? Are you criticising that they are making money or that they are inept?

You're talking about a team of people, yourself and your team, how does a change in pricing even nearly relate to the cost of moving engines, retraining, taking people on to fill holes, maybe losing people, what unity charge should be, to you, completely irrelevant. How long have you been making games? When was the time before Unity came along that licensing middleware was anything other than a massive amount of money, has hundreds of thousands of *insert currency here* been more affordable but now in times of recession people are living and dying over a fraction of that?

How do you feel 'stuck'? Did you feel stuck prior to the U4 announcement? If you're criticising plain ineptitude then fine, i apologise, you're in a better position than me to make that call, but if you're relating it to a financial matter attached to licensing then im incredulous

 

PostFX have become a lot more subtle since the days of over-the-top HDR bloom. UE4 isn't a realistic renderer - and neither are many commercial high-end CG renderers such as Renderman -- they product a recognisable look and feel with an artistic feel (character).

UE4's advantage out of the box is that you don't have to fiddle with post filters or spend all your time worrying over shaders - the FX are in the scene as an object, and shading is covered by the PBR material, which is very, very nice.

UE4 is a demanding platform, and I can't imagine UT suddenly releasing a Unity 5 that suddenly half the userbase can't run... so it'll be interesting seeing what rendering options are in U5, and how Enlighten performs in real world terms... I have high hopes. Mainly because I want to be able to use it for real stuff, not just look at pretty demos.

 

I kind of have to beg to differ there, although i'll be kind of regurgitating a conversation i had not long ago with an artist, renderman's pretty much anything you want it to be with Monsters University and the accompanying short, The Blue Umbrella both championing pbr techniques and rendering strange things with extreme realism. The conversation I had that could explain why you could consider renderman non-realistic is pixar's own development through obsessing over one particular aspect of computer graphics as each film they released went by. Renderman has now proven itself as incredibly flexible, the days of prman and brman are probably over now, but yes by Pixar's own statement in their recent output, it's a realistic renderer. As far as I know, Unreal 4 is the first Unreal technology to have PBR as standard? Understandable they've adopted it, much like Unity have, pbr is absolutely beautiful at times and obsessively fixated on realism, the idea generally that without any post effects other than a tonemapper you get a fairly 'honest' image

Unity 5 I can imagine won't look that different to Unreal 4 when it comes to PBR, it'll look fantastic on both engines, exciting times really, i've been putting a lot of time into trying to catch up on exactly this, with the release of Quixel Suite so near (do a search on youtube, be blown away) computer game graphics are going special places

 

Pardon my ignorance, but what is PBR?

 

Physically Based Rendering. Instead of specifying spec, intensity etc, you specify material parameters (albedo, roughness, metalness) etc. and let the shaders figure out the correct spec and intensity based on the current lighting.

There's a framework for it here on Unity 4 (Lux by larsbertram):
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/221985-Lux-%96-an-open-source-physically-based-shading-framework

 

Makes sense. Glass is shiny. Bread is not.

 

On a chilly saturday morning reflection, maybe Renderman wasn't the best example because it's so flexible in the right hands, but you can get what I'm aiming at - many 'instant beauty' renderers have a recognisable default look and feel.

Yeah I've been looking at Quixel - it's a tough time to choose tools there are so many now. Quixel or Allegorithmic Substances Painter? But I like Mari, too! But... but... ! Hah. The only downside to so much choice is not having an infinitely deep wallet and an extra 24 hours in the day!

 

This is the true beauty of the upcoming Quixel Suite, it's by FAR the cheaper of all the other options, assuming you already own photoshop. I'd argue that all those tools had their own very particular place, one of my fave adages pops up again, 'The right tool for the right job'. Theyre all superb and exactly what you want for their particular strength - so you made a good list! It would be quite perfect to have licenses from them all wouldn't it? Think of a problem and bam, there's your solution - Substance Designer for large environments with repeating textures (typically), Mari, a wonderful program, perfect for fine detailing on any objects and proven best of the best for painting large datasets, and especially interiors or games using virtual texturing, and even things that aren't classically visible 'texturing' - masks and flowmaps and wotnot - it would also be perfect for fine modification of id colour editing for the upcoming Quixel ps plugins or post-Quxiel dDo texturing

However! The Quixel Suite is only 99 dollars! That is completely mad! I can see that transforming not only studios but game artists everywhere using the PBR approach. Marvellous. I'll quickly add Knald to the mix too, I love Knald like the other brother I never had, although I do wonder if the new dDo will supply much of the functionality. I bet it won't do transmission maps though, and the speed at which Knald produces mesh-based AO and transmission maps i reckon makes it worth it on its own, not to mention i was really doubtful about its ability to get a full set of maps out of a colour image then I tried and was so impressed i think it's better to give it a colour image than a normal map sometimes to get a set of maps, sometimes for special nuance

Knald is also 99 dollars, yes xNormal is free and I love it, sometimes it gets better results, but Quixel Suite and Knald are no brainers to me. You can prepare a model for dDo in blender if you want if you're on the cheap