Full Unreal Engine 4 Developer Kit $19/MO + 5% / Why can't Unity Offer the same!

Absolutely agree. There can be a difference between giving feedback and having a whinge, though.

 

You mean on unreleased hardware? cool! well.... a couple of high end phones at least. I don't think that wouldn't run well on Unity though. What's stopping it?

If you know someone on these forums (or epic's forums that isn't epic) that is currently spending that kind of money for those graphics - let me know

 

I have not looked through this entire thread currently at 9 pages now...

I guess the main question is why cant unity do the same?

They want to open game development up to everyone. I am not sure if that is still there motto...

 

That is the thing. You probably can get Unity to that level (or pretty close) but most people do not understand how to do it. I sure as hell can't (including getting whatever assets, etc you might need). The same goes for UE4. New people see it and go "ohh, ahhh" without any knowledge on how to go about doing it. Then you get people saying "Well in UE4 it just works out of the box!" Great.. but HOW? yes you can apply anything but without knowing how to optimize it and make it actually work then you are screwed.
The people doing the UE4 demos are people that work at Epic that know the software inside and out so of course they will make it look beautiful. It is selling it isn't it?
Since I like Hell's Kitchen - getting Chef Ramsay's knife set isn't going to make you cook like him simply because you have his knives. But damn it is going to be one hell of a set of knives!

 

Let's see: Physically based shading with G-buffers, image based lighting, HDR tone mapping, realtime reflections, tessellation, geometry shaders, GPU particles, post processing?

What's stopping unity to create the same scene on mobile? That some of these features are not even available on desktops in Unity. That the rendering pipeline must be very efficient to render this at a reasonable frame rate.

There are other demos that look absolutly awesome for mobile and that run on most top phones available.

 

Not to mention that it was all cut together using UE4's utterly fantastic built-in cutscene editor which would either have to be recreated for Unity or completely ignored in favour of manually building everything, which would be a pain.

Actually, if you have the assets? Everything in that scene is exposed to the developer in the engine itself pretty transparently. UE4 has been the easiest engine I've picked up so far and the only downside is that since it's all forward, I'm still having to implement special hacks to have analogues to things like the old light vector node from UE3/UDK.

 

The next version of UE4 gets also Metal support for iOS8.
Didn't hear anything about that for Unity so far. And iOS8 is around the corner.

Now you can see how fast they adapt new technologies.

Also, if you follow their twitch streams, these guys are totally honest with their roadmap. Something I have yet to see from UT, where you get teased with stuff, but it's uncertain when it will eventually ship, if ever.

 

Actually, there was a pretty big blog post about Metal a few days back.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/03/metal-a-new-graphics-api-for-ios-8/

 

It would be kind of nice to get some official UT response on pricing.

(unless that already appears in this 9-page thread, and I missed it!)

I don't think UT "has" to do anything, though. It would just be encouraging as a UT user to know where they're at and where they hope to go.

 

Now if you don't follow the blog posts, how are people going to know?
Making a BIG post in Announcements or something would draw attention to it instead of people not knowing what is going on.
Aurore!!! that would be your job to inform us about cool stuff like that!!! lol

 

Ok I stand corrected. Apologies I don't read that blog frequently.

But once again

So vague as always, while Epic cuts the bait. What "soon" means for UT, is something we know since the GUI..

Edit: Ok in the FAQ they write maybe in Unity 5.0 When will that ship? Next year, maybe?

I really wonder how UT will keep Unity on pace.

 

It makes more sense to put it on the blog section because that is quite literally what a blog is for. It was even mentioned in the thread about Metal in this forum by Aras.

 

Maybe I'm just blind, or the direct link to the blog is well hidden. Because I can't find one to the blog in the main menu of this site.

Edit: I found a tiny link in the footer... Wow that's the way to announce major news.

 

Didn't look very hard, did you? It's right on the home page.

 

Nah was not talking about that mainly about pricing. Sorry for the confusion.

Guess I should have worded it like -

Why doesn't unity offer a similar low priced subscription model?

Honestly I have seen some awesome stuff done in Unity3D. I personally thing that Unity is loosing out here.

EPIC games has found a way to make people come to work every day and work on their engine. That 19.00 USD is just a measure to ensure that people do not run off with the code and use it on their in products (Game Engines/Game Makers/etc.)

Personally - I think Unity 5 will bring things allot closer to EPIC standards in terms of visuals - In terms of Workflow we will see.

 

I don't know, I find that not really obvious.
And it is apparently only approachable from the very first start page and the footer. There is still no link in the main menu.
Not everyone visits the homepage regularly. At least I don't do this.

 

There used to be, under Company, but that section has gone now and split into sections at the bottom.

*sorry not sorry about the off-topic

The blog does have RSS, but I get how not everyone uses that, how would you like to be notified form the forums? A thread in announcements that you can subscribe to listing a link and title to the latest blogs as a forum post?

The main reason they are not often put on the forums is because it's not that great creating a new thread for every new blog post that just has a link and a title (to avoid double writing of the post itself).

 

How about one thread that is a sticky so new blog postings could be noticed.

Aurore thanks and isn't it very late for you?

 

We have too damn many sticky threads as it is.

 

Then your suggestion?

 

I'd rather keep it in announcements than having another sticky thread.

 

Step one: delete all the excess stickies
Step two: merge the download and buy icons



Honestly, user blogs shouldn't be in there either. Just put your blogs/twitter in your signature.

 

Anyway, back to the thread topic of "Full Unreal Engine 4 Developer Kit $19/MO + 5% / Why can't Unity Offer the same?" Can anybody from Unity please explain why Unity has not already matched Epic's offer? Unity could add another licensing option for Unity Pro that matched the price and terms of Epic's UE4 deal. Thousands of Unity Free users would happily go that route, and it would bring in more revenues for Unity.

 

Yes, I know that. And I was used to this. Now it is hard to find, if you use mainly the forums like me. (Ok, now I know it is in the footer)
But something like notifications in the forum sounds like a nice idea. I'm not much of a RSS guy.

 

Maybe because they are not interested in matching the offer, as long as they don't see a significant drop in customers.

 

Why they don't offer something similar? Because Unity Free exists. Unity Free is Unity's response. Unity Free is less than $20 a month because it's free and no royalties. The question therefore isn't whether Unity can beat Unreal's price, it's about what features UT offers in Unity Free.
For all the people who keep asking "why", they often seem to dismiss Unity Free as though it's not a consideration or worth comparing. Yet they forget or ignore the fact that UT has NOT announced what new features will be added to Unity 5 Free.

But if you realize that the main complaint against Unity Free (and the reason why people dismiss it) is basically that it's too outdated to be compared to Unreal then the solution is extremely obvious. In order to "compete" with Unreal's deal, all UT has to do is add new features to Unity Free (which they will).

It doesn't necessarily have to be too many new features...just enough to undercut Unreal while still keeping enough features restricted to Pro to give people reason to upgrade. For example, simply adding full real-time shadow support and render to texture would go a huge way since it opens the door to a lot of the shiny stuff Unreal has and even stuff Unreal doesn't have. For example, if Free supported render to texture, the real-time GI packages on the asset store would now work in free (and real-time GI is a feature that to my knowledge UE4 still doesn't have). But even with that, there's still nothing saying UT can't also give Free physically-based shading and some of the other features assumed to be in Pro. All UT has to do is find the right balance of features to add to Free.

It would also be unwise for UT to announce right now what features they're planning on adding to Unity Free. Epic is adding features and stuff to Unreal at a relatively fast pace and they've admitted in interviews that they see Unity as their primary competitor. If UT announced what new features were going to be in Free, it gives Epic a checklist to see exactly what they're up against. It gives Epic enough time to make sure that when Unity Free is released, the feature delta between UE4 and Unity 5 Free is large enough to not significantly hurt UE4 when Free is released. By not revealing yet, UT has the advantage since they know what they're up against and can adjust Free's new features accordingly.

 

UE4 is getting real-time GI in the next version. You can even enable an early version of it right now if you tweak an INI file.

 

I don't think it it realistic to expect Unity 5 Free to become a parity product to UE4 and still somehow have more features left behind a paywall for Unity 5 Pro. At this point, it takes Unity 4 Pro plus a bunch of 3rd party add-ons to get Unity relatively toe to toe with UE4.

 

Unity Free is not Good enough...

Not because it is Free but because it is a watered down version of Unity. Allot of the "advanced" features you need to pay for are behind a pay wall. Stuff like render to texture, Occlusion Culling and Level Streaming to name a few.

I would rather pay a low monthly sub and get the latest version of Unity3D and Bug fixes opposed to be limited in what I can do.

Further more - If unity keeps things "behind closed doors" how are we to provide feedback apart from the OFFICIAL threads?

Not everyone uses these forums or reads the blogs. Allot of awesome stuff happens on r/gamedev and other sites.

 

Because I think constructive criticism is a must. I am realist, not a fan boy, not a hater.

I can understand why you "kindly" ask me to leave this forum. I can understand that you defend Unity as moderator. If you only like threads and posts with "omg Unity is awesome" then I think you make a BIG anti-service to Unity, and you should re-evaluate yourself. Not everybody is doing what games types you do, also everybody needs are different. Maybe you are to subjective.

 

Just as an side: this demo isn't as much about the engine or the hardware as it is about Google's new graphical extensions for Android. The important thing here is that they are using the full desktop rendering pipeline on an Android chipset.

In the past Nvidia has used a desktop power supply/cooling to show off their Tegra chips so naturally they can squeeze a lot of extra performance out of them. So take the apparent visual quality here with a grain of salt as it may not look the same in an actual production phone. It's just a tech demo, and has no bearing on the Unity vs. UE4 argument.

Anyway, don't let me interrupt the thread. Back to your regularly scheduled tomfoolery...

 

thousands of Unity Free users would happily go that route, and it would bring in more revenues for Unity.

One again Unity free users should not be so much considered in race to good physic shader and other lightening systems. Unity Free users are very varied from 2D games, to hand painted 3D games, simple lightening, games for older PC and laptop so a lot more PC target range hardware. Some only do 2D mobile or simple and fast 3D on mobile to target large Android devices range.
Take a look at some indie sites where indie people make games to see what games they do, the majority target interesting gameplay or system and are not searching physic shaders or other fancy graphics.
Easy to understand editor, C# or Javascript, multi component system is what they needed.

Another point is making a realistic good looking game withy physic shader and all lightening system will require or one super talented guy that can work fast and good or a skilled team.
Main UE4 amateur people just drop models in the scene and put some minimum gameplay , they will never make characters and 3D scenes as good as The Order for PS4 for example.

Does Unity need to speed up to bring physic shaders to pure toying and no real game project amateurs ? I don't think.
But for Pro Unity users, yes as majority target games and great graphics.

It's just a tech demo, and has no bearing on the Unity vs. UE4 argument.
Like many tech demo, people are deceived when the real games come.
A real game is AI , world management, visibility systems, tree terrain water systems, HUD , collisions handling etc .... put that in large world and that's already really heavy compared to some super shaders running in a room with some interactive camera.

 

I don't think that's realistic either, but I wasn't suggesting that. Unity 5 Free does not need to become a parity product to UE4. It only needs enough features to be good enough. Unity has it's own advantages over Unreal (ease of use, good community/documentation, one-click exporting to all the platforms, asset store, etc.) and these are also part of the equation.
But consider your very own example of Unity 4 Pro + 3rd Party plugins. Suppose UT decided to make Unity 5 Free comparable in terms of features to Unity 4 Pro by adding shadows and RTT and stuff like that. That literally means that with Unity 5 Free plus 3rd party addons, you'd be able to get "relatively toe to toe with UE4" as you say. Think about that for a second.
The fact that you'd be able to do that with a free product, plus the cost of whatever optional addons you need (I emphasize optional because not everyone needs all of the features, heck you could add them after release if you wanted) is what would be dangerous for UE4. Unity Free doesn't have to match Unreal to be competitive, it just has to get closer. UE4 is a paid product, I would always expect it to have more features.

Unity Free isn't good enough?

OK, I can tell you didn't read my post because that's almost literally what I said. Apparently you didn't even read the first bolded sentence. The entire purpose of my post was literally addressing the fact that the main complaint is that Unity Free isn't good enough anymore. And that therefore all UT has to do to "respond" to Unreal is give Free an upgrade, to make Unity Free "good enough". See here:

UT addresses that issue, and that complaint becomes null. We don't know what features will be added to Unity 5 Free and if Unity decided to add RTT (for example) and a few other features, that could make Free competitive again. All UT has to do is add enough features to make it good enough.

But the other part of your post bothers me because you complain about the fact that Free is a watered down version of Pro, that you have to pay for certain features. Well you know what? That argument reeks of entitlement. By that argument, you still wouldn't be happy if Free was missing even just one feature from Pro. Free is Free, of course certain features have to be behind the paywall, otherwise UT would be out of business. There will always be certain features behind the paywall, that's how it works. Or are you also going to complain that you have to pay to get updates with Unreal as well? You don't get to complain about one and not the other, not if the complaint is that you have to pay for certain features anyway.

Also, there's one last thing. Unity Free isn't a watered down version of Unity Pro. Unity Free is the $199 product called Unity Indie, which had its price reduced to $0 and was renamed Unity Free. Keep that in mind.

 

Unity Free doesn't have to match Unreal to be competitive, it just has to get closer.
Again all depends on what are the users behind Unity free, as majority of amateur and indies will just use what offers a really simple and easy to use engine as Unity. Lot of indie games go 2D or 3D with simple shaders , i doubt they would got talent to produce textures for Roughness and metalness as they choose the simple 3D way or stylized 3D.
(There is Lux framework for Free version that is not bad from what i tested)

There is pure amateur toying that will pay to play with UE4 , there is also simple indie guys trying to make a game that are happy with Unity Free and don't taget last gen graphics. Some game like Rime on PS4 could be done wit Unity free.

And there is Indies using Unity free that making games and prototypes, that don't have money and would want some Pro features on Free version like render to texture and Deffered lightening, without needind physic shaders and other stuff.

It's really varied hopefully in amateur and indie people field in terms of graphics needs , this is not a very delimited perimeter like you find with company or people choosing realistic looking games with best graphics possible.

 

Allow me to interject.

I believe the real issue here is that Unity users want Unity 5 to emulate CryEngine 3 & Unreal Engine 4 (in almost every aspect except complexity of pipeline). Secretly I believe that Unity users do not want to "jump ship", they'd much rather continue using Unity because of it's familiarity and it's simple pipeline.

Henceforth, the infinite threads about Unity 4/5 vs CryEgine 3 or Unity 4/5 vs Unreal Engine 4. The developers are well aware of the capabilities of CryEngine and Unreal Engine 4. I would wager some of them use and or own copies of CryEngine/Unreal Engine 4.

Money is a strong motivator. If purchasing a Ferrari only required $4,000, a majority of people would own one. Money often is used to divide the "have and the have not's," in this case Unity's current pricing model has it in a class all it's own. Especially when it's competitors are much cheaper (up front). In contrast Unity seems to be lacking many of the features its competitors bring to the table. Yet Unity is priced as if it's the Ferrari of the Game engine world, Unreal Engine is the Mercades-Benz of the Game engine world and CryEngine is the Honda of the Game Engine world.

That is why these threads continue to populate this forum.

 

Let's put graphics aside for a moment.

I would like to bring up a few of my concerns at the moment with the Unreal Engine 4 and that's licensing, tools, plugins and extendability.

this is from the faq

So to use any modifications, plugins, tools or extensions your users would need to own a ue4 license to use it. This is quite limiting. That's a $240/yr extra price tag for the user discounting Epic's royalties if you plan on profiting on it. AND it's not like they aren't planning on also taking a cut of their own marketplace That's a double royalty smackdown for Epic.

Another very big issue you&users are limited to: same versions. err what?

here is a forum post on modding but brought "tools" in the discussion:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?83-Does-this-mean-that-games-cant-be-moddable

Am I the only one who actually gets worried reading this? So Epic is playing as the House in this game.

Basically everything must be done through Epic. Sure it's only $19/month upfront but you are legally bound to a single company and marketplace with royalty at every turn. I don't know why but the human centipede comes to my mind here.

Now as for UT there are already many developers making freely and/or profiting from their tools & extensions(*plugins are a pro feature) today without forcing their users to buy a Unity Pro license just to use them or forcing the developers to sell said tools and extensions through the asset store.

So in this case Unity free & pro and UT overall do have a major bonus side.

As for modding with Unity here is my recent thread on the forum:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/unity-modding-legal-questions.255624/

I agree that UT needs to step up their game on the graphics end which is what they are doing with Unity5 . The thing is Epic played first and Unity 5 is still in the making. This is all new and UT is a pretty established company worldwide, if they just reacted it would affect not only image but company stability.

As others have said: No one knows yet what is going to be in Unity 5 free. I also believe this is where they will play their cards. Not that Unity Free will directly compete with ue4 though. Unity is about Free&Pro options.

I think we all need to just evaluate which product is best for our purpose. There's nothing wrong with some healthy competition.

 

I think you just threw out any credibility you had with the comments I've bolded for you.

None of which is true, I've a perpetual evaluation license for Unreal 4, and will happily use it if the correct project aligns with it. Nuff said.

However your comments are far from unbiased and I merely assumed that you were still here because you prefer unity. Which I said further up.

 

You should still be technically licensed to whichever versions you had access to during your subscription should you cancel your subscription. So the only way I could see being forced to pay $240/yr is if the modifications, plugins, tools or extensions are continuously updated to the newest available UE4 release.

 

That's correct. @SememeS: Also, nothing is stopping you from building your own mod tools instead of using the Editor itself, which would obviously incur no additional cost for the user. That clause simply exists to avoid giving the $19 (if paid once) tools away for free, which makes sense to me.

 

@angrypenguin

Continuing here, I have to say that is the most obvious statement possibly ever made. Nobody in there right mind would procrastinate until the manufacturer pulled their finger out when you're near release, then again if you're paying for a product you shouldn't be in that situation either.

You need experienced engineers to tackle engines and the issue maybe deeper seated than originally scoped, so you end up paying to fix somebody else's work.

Point being if you need source code to fix all these issues with an engine, you might of been better served making the engine yourself (or using all the pre-libs). If said people have the skill to fix all these super advanced engines in the first place, they should have the knowledge to put one together suited for their needs.

Now source code comes in handy for custom addons / core rendering / lighting upgrades, also if there is a quick bug sure go for it. But I'll be damned if I'm going to tackle anything beyond a glance in any other engine but my own.

Personally I don't have time for any of the above.

 

Well, prior to having available source at this level, UE has classically had consultants who would solve engine problems, and these guys were very expensive to hire. So there's that. Unity is under more pressure to fix bugs than Epic is as epic knows that the community can find workarounds and fixes.

I kind of prefer Unity under that pressure as this consistency is important if you require a functional asset store among other things.

 

I really would like to share the experiences I had on the both sides, with Epic Games and Unity (since we can speak a word about another engine in our friendly Epic Games forum. No sarcasm, it's really friendly).

The first engine I touched was Unity 3 free version, about years ago. As this engine asked so much programming knowledge and I was a game designer with artistic base in that time, I tried other options aside. I tried Cryengine and found UDK after that.

Yes, I found UDK harder to learn than Unity, steep learning curve, but with all resources AND a slight possibility to do something simple without programming skills in that remote time, I stayed with UDK because of Kismet (Visual programming... limited, but do simple level things). Nowadays, programming isn't that big deal, phew. Still, I stayed in touch with Unity to follow its progress and see how the things come along with the years.

When I finish and release my first project in UDK (license purchased), I will migrate to UE4. I play around with my Unity free version sometimes, because Unity is still easier and fun to understand than Unreal. But with Blueprint (new Kismet) and C++ in U4, reaching game developers with many sizes and shapes (programmers, non-programmers etc.), I don't see why I would need to back "full-time" with Unity. Of course, there are a lot of many factors for someone to choose an engine, mainly if it's suitable for your game project, or if your computer doesn't have the specs required to run another engine etc. I'm sharing the impressions I had with these engines with my own eyes. I'm sure there are a lot of other users with different experiences with Unreal X Unity X insert-your-favorite-engine-here

If Unity had more tools, more resources and the same price than Unreal, of course I would think about come back totally in this engine. Unity has a very supportive community, which is very important. But with what they are offering with Unity with this price now, I'm still with Unreal as my "main" engine for some years, at least.
I'm babbling all this chit-chat because I really like Unity and I care about it. I'd like to use it, but there is no condition for it by now.

 

Many people will not go C++ , like 3D artist can learn easy Javascript or C#, Unity remains very easy to learn quickly , and you can easyly extend it to your needs writing some plugin what is easy compared to UE4. And Unity have also playmaker and other visual programming systems for pure 3D artists

Some downsides :
- UE4 is very demanding on PC hardware to use it, and a game produced with it will not target as large PC and laptop range as Unity.
- Royalties are to consider if you plan making a real game , not only tech visual prototypes.
- UE4 is not dedicaced to low/mid hardware PC, your game will need last and really good PC (if your game is more complex than some simple pac man game)
- For 2D games forget UE4

This is whay some people enjoy Unity, and others enjoy using UE4.

I would ask you some simple questions :
Will you plan to make a real game someday ? In that case what about Royalties , are you ok with that ?
Have you ever made a real game with good with gameplay in UDK to show ?
(Many UDK users just used FPS template as it was so complicated to make custom game styles, but that's changing with UE4)

 

Artists and designers can use Blueprint instead of C++. You can make entire games in Blueprint.

As a dev tool, it runs pretty well perfectly on midrange consumer hardware.

Unless your game is going to make less than $30,000 (very likely), at which point it costs less than a Unity Pro license. Increase that to $90,000 if you're releasing on PC, iOS, and Android.

UE4 actually scales really well and games will run fine on the lower end of midrange hardware.

They're working on this and, considering the rate at which they're updating their feature set, I imagine it'll have more full-featured native 2D support than Unity by this time next year.

 

"Will you plan to make a real game someday ? In that case what about Royalties , are you ok with that ?
Have you ever made a real game with good with gameplay in UDK to show ?
(Many UDK users just used FPS template as it was so complicated to make custom game styles, but that's changing with UE4)"

What do you mean with real game? (my first project is a simple stealth game for the PC platform. Everything is working but I'm polishing the graphics, substituting my placeholders and re-coding some pieces because the new animations. No big deal). Anyway, sorry if I sounded rude before... Repeating, I don't think my choice is the right, but it fits better to me right now, even after reading all the appointments. I just wanted to share this experience here.

About royalties from UDK, I'm pretty sure my first project won't reach $50,000, so I will not to pay much in royalty terms (almost 100% sure of it, you know, how much indies reaches this number with their first games? Not being pessimistic, but realistic. My project is a game niche genre, so it tends to be lower numbers). And if I reach this number, I really don't care to pay the royalty. I'm starting very small . But you're right to put like that when we are talking about a mid company with more money to invest.

For other question. What do you mean with real game with good ? And what do you mean with good gameplay? A fun gameplay? A polished and tested gameplay? (I'm not complaining, I just want to understand what you're saying with that. We're all game devs here, independent what engine we choose, right? So I didn't understand why gameplay and other aspects came here in the tech discussion. Again, not being rude, I want just to understand).
Nope, I didn't use the FPS template for my current project because there were some pieces I preferred to programming in a different way. For example, I didn't extended my AI class from their source named UDKBot and UTBot.
And sorry, I won't show my project for an open public now, just for tester. I'll wait for more polishing for it.

I really hope doesn't sound rude, it wasn't my intention. And I wish the Unity Pro price falls a little more.
That's just it
thanks!

P.S.: Murgilod is 100% right with the info.
P.S.2.: Being ruthless with my engine choice,UDK, if I'm going to eye candy, I would go to CryEngine. Man, every single mesh imported in that engine loos so nice!

 

Well if any announcement will get made it'll probably be at Unite, so best wait and see. Failing that, don't forget there's Unity free, and that's well, free. Probably only needs a couple of perks to satisfy most people.

 

Well honestly, after trying the Unity Pro trial I no longer care if UT lowers the price. The biggest improvements were the dark skin and the profiler.

Demanding 1500$ is in regards to the competition overpriced. The sad truth is that for this price you still get a stupid Input Manager which you must overcome with solutions from the asset store since 5 years. I'm really glad that UT created the [Official] threads and thus we can thank Epic, that UT suddenly notices that something is wrong or old with some of their systems.

I have deep respect for the programmers of any engine but sometimes I'm wondering what UT is doing. There are so many old systems, which should be replaced or integrated (GUI, no Strumpy Shader Editor integration, Mecanim not fully accessible) .

Unity has Beast and will have Enlighten. Doesn't the licencing cost tons of money? Epic created Lightmass on his own. Maybe it is not as good as Enlighten, but Epic saved money and could concentrate on other things, e.g. own TXAA solution.

Unity is a good tool and I'm looking forward how it will improve, as is UE4. UT just behaves since some time a bit slow. I strongly believe that the source for this tardiness is the asset store and no competition.

Maybe it could also be that Unity evolved over the time and got bigger and bigger and thus extremly difficult to manage, while UE4 was written from scratch.

 

I know a few people who are really into artwork, both 2D and 3D, that are also capable of working with C++. They may not be quite at the same level as someone who is completely dedicated to programming, but they are capable of getting the job done.

I think most people who do not go into C++ either have not given it a fair chance or just gave up after their first attempt to learn it didn't work out so well. Even as someone who really enjoys programming, it took me multiple attempts to finally pick up pointers. The key for me was trying to learn from multiple sources and not giving up after the first attempt failed.

Weirdly enough I picked them up after listening to a Java professor describe how references functioned. Once I got pointers down, pretty much everything else about C++ fell right into place.

 

@0tacun

You are right. "dark skin" money well spent on pro /sarcasm off

And for Enlighten, peoples think that's the killer feature what's missing in UE. CryEngine and UE use LPV GI as real time GI solution, in fact, LPV was researched by Crytek engineers a few years ago.

Also from Enlighten first page website (copy&paste):
"Tools & Integrations
Enlighten is available stand-alone or integrated into the Unreal Engine 3 and 4, with plug-in support for Max and Maya."

So the whole Enlighten argument just don't stand. If you really want Enlighten in UE4 you can have it I think. Is not something exclusive to Unity5.

Also as killer features, peoples only look at Enlighten.. what if they just looks at UE patches from 4.0 to 4.3 and UE roadmap from this year. And then look at Unity patches until now and what's on the roadmap. The difference is too big, don't you think?

 

How much does Enlighten for UE4 cost with licensing? Is it standard or a paid add-on?