UE5

What kind of proof, that would be publicly available, do you expect? Everything's a claim until a court makes a decision.

 

How nanite works, good article.

http://www.elopezr.com/a-macro-view-of-nanite/

Also the thing I don't understand is that they say nanite is for static meshes only in the docs. But in the video they also say the monster has 1.5m tris nanite meshes around its moving parts which is not static. Confused.

 

And then you went on to question Apple's intentions.

According to you nobody is a serious contender to Steam. Putting that aside, if you're going to argue that nobody is making a better offer than Steam then I'd expect you to be pretty familiar with what's on offer. ;-)

If this and this and this aren't "flowery PR" then I have no idea what could possibly be.

It's been fun, but I'm out of this one.

 

AFAIK the monster is skeletal with enormous static meshes attached to bones/sockets
Also, Nanite should support skeletal meshes, Early Access renderer is missing many planned features.

 

Any similar cases?

 

More? What? Why? There is another one I believe, but I can't be bothered to find a link. Why do you need more lawsuits?

 

It's too bad we're just arguing over adjectives at this point.

It is a respectable thing for a company to put their money where their mouth is. That's all. I used 'flowery' in the sense of feel-good, non-commital, investment-free sweet-talking. Dramatic is a different thing, it can be combined with real action and commitment. Which is exactly what Epic are doing.

My entire point is that no one is a serious contender to Steam. I would say that Steam used to be worthwhile, they had shelf space that meant something at one point. They also had quality control, at one point. It's all gone out the window as they got bigger and bigger, in hopes of using sheer momentum and size to keep everyone using a gigantic industrial bin to sell their games in, and paying through the nose for it. It's hard even to believe that we were all guessing in the thousands for the entry fee, probably in a short while it will go to zero, I mean why not? What's there for Steam to lose..?

And on top of that, there is really no such thing as a contender to the app store to begin with, since first you'd have to design a phone to rival the iPhone. That's why the mobile platforms do ridiculous, low-quality-service stuff like pulling games without saying why and making you resubmit until you happen to get things right. Changing algorithms without any warning to make your game disappear off the face of the planet. Making you pay a third of your rev.

For me, the problem is clear as day, I want more competition to sort things out. I don't care about intentions, who knows, maybe in a few years Epic will be the big evil monopoly and someone else will be fighting the good fight. But right now, they are doing good work as far as devs are concerned, and that's what I am.

 

You don't need to have a single device rival the iPhone. You can do it with a whole slew of devices as long as they all belong to the same company. Everyone thinks of Apple when it comes to market share but the company with the most market share is Samsung.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share/

Samsung has their own store.

https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/galaxy-store/

Samsung charges 30%.

https://seller.samsungapps.com/help/termsAndConditions.as

 

Yeah, but you don't have to use the Samsung store. You can still sideload your apps. That's a huge difference.

 

Being able to doesn't mean you're competent enough to do so. I'd love to know the percentages of people that sideload apps but I can't find anything aside from the percentages of malicious apps.

 

I agree with this in general.

Of course everybody will be as big of a jerk as they can get away with. A thief believes everybody steals and mr nice guy believes everybody is nice. But I think reality is that big business weeds out non-psychopaths so we can safely assume any of these charming CEO's talking about how they love us in fact want to bath in our blood.
But in order to become the biggest jerk, Epic is doing helpful things for all of us peasants so that we will side with them.

I say cut off all the heads and let anarchy reign but who cares what I think. Right now Epic is doing things that make me more capable of producing the games I want to make so up with Epic.

I agree also that there is a big difference between Unity "flowery" PR and Epic taking real action which produces change. You can't fake the funk, this is probably why the empty pillow talk from Unity rubs some of us the wrong way.

 

Apple goes out on a limb to prevent people doing so though, including penalising them for any form jailbreak.

 

I really like this idea.

 

I'm not even that much of a cynic .. I think that there is a cycle that companies (and many other things) go through where they start off flexible and capable, taking risks and trying to push the envelope. And then after they peak and become successful they degenerate into habits of trying to buffer themselves against risk and competition, only caring about holding onto what they already have.

And any large company is also a committee of people with different motivations and affinities, and as these companies establish themselves and settle into a routine, avoiding anything that deviates from it, enterprising people leave for fresher pastures, and in come the business androids to ride it until it's dead.

I'm a bit surprised by Epic in fact, I thought it would have arrived at that point by now. Maybe it has plans for something, but it is going about its business as if it has a lot to do, and doesn't have forever to do it.

 

It is interesting that you're comparing steam with app store.

Steam does not have a hardware platform tied to it (steam machines have failed), while appstore is pretty much tied to apple gadgets. Basically, the closest equivalent to steam would be google play, and not appstore.

And speaking of googleplay, there are vendor-specific alternatives to it. Mi has its own store, samsung has its own store, etc.

 

They are both part of the same problem (a poor quality market for indie games) in different ways.

Steam is basically a monopoly right now, but not an 'illegal' one as far as I can tell. They simply didn't have enough competition yet. They might be anti-competitive but no more than anyone else. In the case of Steam I think gamers more than anyone are the ones who make it difficult to offer alternatives. They would rather that devs get less money so they don't have to install another launcher. That's why Epic maneuvered the way it did with exclusives, and I although it's not an ideal situation, I think it was likely necessary.

The situation with the app stores is a bit more complicated. I believe that it's good for something that is very widely used (a search engine, social media, operating systems etc) to have some of the aspects of a 'public place', where there is more freedom of traffic and business than simply what the platform wants to allow in its own self-interest. This isn't a moral issue, and I have nothing against Apple in particular, I think it's simply a question of the health of a society and its various industries in which this widely used thing exists.

I'm not sure exactly how this would operate, I know there's questions of branding and quality control and a certain measure of commercial ownership to take into account, so I'm not going to sit here and try to figure it out exactly. That's for courts to do. But I think right now the app stores are an over-saturated mess, offering crappy or non-existent service, and take an arm and a leg for very little in return. In these circumstances, a system that takes 30% of revenue (before tax) is not one in which any self-respecting business can flourish, it's turned into a place where all you can do is gamble on having so much of a hit that your tiny share of the profits is enough to draw a decent salary. If I had to pay half a dozen people in a studio, the margin would be so thin that any type of creative risk-taking would put the whole business in jeopardy.

I think something in the range of 10-15% at the very most seems to be reasonable, and should become the norm.

 

Yep.

 

As opposed to the bait and switch what the developers are doing who are advertising on Steam and then go with EGS... "Sorry guys, our fans, we love you, but money is money, now we screw you over because why not, but here is a cute stolen dance animation, because why not, hahaha".

Oh and after all that, developers try to tell to the community/follower-base they built on Steam that Steam has no value. Mwhahahalol.

 

Well... If you don't want to sideload, you still have Google Play.

Thing is: you have the choice.

 

So why is anti-competitiveness acceptable in Epic's case but not anyone else's? Is it because you perceive that Epic's curated store will benefit you in some way, while you'd disregard the direct benefits both developers and consumers have from other stores despite their supposed anti-competitiveness? Either being anti-competitive and monopolistic is bad, and we vilify Epic alongside everyone else, or it's not bad, and their actions are solely self-serving. How are you drawing the line?

And just to be clear, the store is, at present, unviable, even with their actions. It's bleeding money, and the revenue they're making is from moneyhats. Strip away the anti-competitive behavior and Epic offers nothing. Not to devs, with their excessive curation and utterly absent discovery features (which can only improve sales), and not to players, with the barebones nature of the store.

That may change. It probably will. But as of yet it really hasn't.

Thanks, I misinterpreted this:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store

So it's the equivalent of the Apple Store (or the Apple Store is the equivalent of it given the dates), except in Apple's case they're not locking devs into a certain software suite, coincidentally owned by the same company.

I know which one of those I'd consider more anti-competitive and monopolistic, but that's just me...

And regarding this thing--

I cannot for a single second imagine that Steam has been around for nearly two decades and no one bothered to challenge this. I also expect to see proof before believing it. If it's true--shame on Steam, and I hope they feel the full weight of the law.

 

But it does offer something I want, though?

It offers a place where you can buy games without dealing with some sort of community/achievement bullshit, and at the same time it isn't flooded with a sea of garbage titles.

Coupons on occasion works better than on steam, and some titles that are language locked on steam aren't language-locked on Epic.

Those are valuable and desirable features...

 

Right now we are living through the era of the platform monopoly. Apple was first to market with the ergonomic phone/ ipod/ etc. Valve was firs to market with a killer online distribution platform. Both of these monopolies were compounded by a transition from physical media. This meant they could take a HUGE cut, but still provide big incentives to media producers on the new platform.

There was so little competition that they were given enough time to create an iron clad monopoly. There are a lot of factors that play into this, from foreign governments to predatory business practices that have been discussed a lot in this thread.

Long story short, you can't break monopolies this profitable, too much power is derived in too many sectors by empires entrenched in the very fabric of our economy and power hierarchy. The entirety of our society bends over backwards to maintain the "old guard".

I'm going to state the obvious: Epic are playing the long game and they're going to fight these monopolies in a way that's never been done before: With killer, next level tech that the competition simply can't compete with. They're going to spin the game around on its head. They're not going to bottleneck the distribution as the means to monopoly has always been in the past, they're going to control the means of production by having head and shoulders the best production software on the planet that is so mind meltingly next level, that no one can compete in a way that valve and apple could only dream of. Their competition got fat and lazy, they fed off the monopoly. Why innovate? The entire point of a monopoly is so you don't have to. You intentionally stagnate the medium, you destroy all competition by any means necessary and you conjure money out of thin air until you kick it.

This wouldn't be an artificial monopoly solidified by underhanded tactics of market, this would be absolute ownership of the only software that can produce top tier product. From Games, to Movies, to business software, to who the F*** only knows what. What Unreal is doing really is unreal. While everyone else is overhyping their product I truly believe Unreal is underselling it strategically.

It doesn't matter if Valve and Apple tell Unreal, "F*** you, we wont let you on our platform because we own this town and we get all the toys, now F*** off." If Unreal holds the keys to the killer tech of the future, it will ultimately be them who can pick and choose who gets to survive as a distribution platform.

Hardware will normalize in the coming decade, more and more talent will enter the fields of tech and entertainment. Hollywood will not be special, distribution platforms will not be special. All the INSANE memory restrains of these assets you guys keep making a big deal out of? Guess what those requirements do for Unreal in the future? Create a need for new services that they can use to turn the table on the competition. THEY will be the ones picking and choosing which fire hoses are able to stream their insane content. THEY will be the ones pioneering new demands of infrastructure. Meanwhile I can't even compare code changes between commits in the built in collaborate functionality Unity has BUILT INTO THEIR DAMNED SOFTWARE that's been there for years.

What will be special in the future? The absolute bleeding edge tech and pipelines that allows for the best interactive movies, the best video games, and the best interactive, user generated content.

For the past 10 years valve has been pissing away your money making VR headsets only techies go out of their way to adopt in a vain attempt to keep the markets closed. The rest of the industry has run in similar circles.

The only company out there that seems to be doing F*** all, and not having the walls fall in upon them amidst all the madness of the modern world is Unreal. And hats off to them, I hope they kick the heads of their competition further up their asses.

 

My stance on this, is, that at the end of the day, these are all large companies vying for our money in various ways. Epic's is to paint themselves as the good-guy/underdog, despite being anything but.

My take: trust no one. None of them care about you, and none of them deserve your loyalty.

 

On the Epic Store, everyone pays 12% whether you used UE, Unity, Godot, Ren'Py, or anything else. That's not locking you in.

 

@IllTemperedTunas someone drunk on the cool-aid of Epic proportions... Ouch.

Exactly. I'm attached to the things useful to me. If Epic were trying to win me over it wouldn't be impossible. But they chose to lock people in instead of win people over. This is why I said eff them. I don't buy a single game on EGS, I don't care the freebies, I don't buy a single game went to them to be exclusive, not even later when they are available on other stores. No matter how interesting they are. I cast my vote with my valet. Not much, but we all should do whatever we think is right.

 

Ouch? What are you spouting about? Half your sentences don't even read off the page and i'm the one "drunk on cool-aid" of epic proportions? Could you be more of a smarmy F***?

These message boards have really gone to S*** with the big headed self-felation even by gamedev standards over the years.

If you're going to stroke your own ego in public so hard, you should at least have the common decency to let others do the same, ffs.

And for the record no one has any delusions that Epic is a massive company looking to out F*** the other faceless evil studios. All's i'm saying is at least they're providing a F***ing product.

 

Have you guys ever met or listened to Epic founder Tim Sweeney? He's basically James Halliday from Ready Player One (pictured).

I think as long as he has control over his company, there will be no great evil-doing afoot at Epic.

 

Well, reading your post above, one could think you're writing the Epic-man comic book where the hero is fighting the similarly sized evildoers Apple-man and Valve-dude... By all means, you do you, but Epic is the same sh*t. Billion dollar corporation with a narcissistic leader. I know, cutie nerd by night, but CEO by day FFS.


Anyway, the tech is still awesome, the Unreal Engine is still cool, the corporation still sucks.

 

@IllTemperedTunas please stay calm, without uneccessery aggressive responses.
There wasn't any bad intention from poster above.
I enjoy reading this thread so far, and I would like to enjoy further more.
Thank you for consideration.

 

Replace multiple monopolies with single monopoly is not a bright future at all.

 

PIXYZ should be made an integral part of the engine or at least an officially supported free package. PIXYZ being expensive is the reason why me and many other people who work with CAD don't even look at Unity for goodness sake. I mean, no one wants to spend days or sometimes weeks to optimize/retopologize our assets just to somehow get our content into the engine, that too it get's a lot crappier in the way. Unity surely doesn't seem to like students and independent designers/engineers to use it. They just want some bunch of Volvo or Tata employees using it in their production.

Consider myself as an example - I am a mech. engg. student so I make content using SOLIDWORKS. I then have to import my content into 3ds Max (thanks to it for supporting a lot of native CAD formats import). I then have to spend an arse ton of time optimizing the meshes of complex assemblies having part count ranging anywhere from 25 to 1700 to make it less heavy for the engine. I already lose a lot of mesh detail here. Then I have to export it as FBX from 3ds Max, so that I can get them crappy meshes with no assembly hierarchy and material data preserved into the great Unity engine.

On the other hand, I can simply just import my SOLIDWORKS assembly file directly into UE, because Datasmith is completely free, besides being more capable and being under immense active development than PIXYZ. This makes UE more than welcoming for creators like me.

 

BaNanite

 

My daughter mentioned perusing through your earlier replies and the mention of a rust crate, one of her questions was are you hoping to support 'OpenGL, Metal, directx and vulcan' and if so have you viewed the source for Hazel Game Engine and do you have any public repos on the matter? All rather latin to me of course, but we had to ask?

 

I look at it differently if the company is struggling to break into a monopolised market. Also, I don't much care about Steam's anti-competitiveness, all companies are anti-competitive, I'm more interested in whether Epic succeeds with the store and starts to put some competitive pressure into the system.

If it succeeds, it will benefit me (and everyone) by making it more difficult for Steam to do whatever the hell it wants and get away with it because there are no real alternatives. For gamers too, it can only be a good thing, though less so because while the prices on stores don't differ a lot, the sales for a developer do.

So even a company worth 30 billion dollars, spending money left and right like it grows on trees, can't break into the game store business? I think that proves my point.

I must admit the store is pretty barebones for being 2.5 years old, though.

 

Going back to UE and RTS titles, https://gamerant.com/ex-blizzard-dev-dreamhaven-frost-giant-unreal-engine-5/

 

This is spot on. Back in the day, even being able to sell your game online at all was a big deal. By now, it should be a mature market full of competition and value.

But the speed that tech and software moves at is so fast compared to anything else, that by the time anyone even notices them, these companies are worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

And what do they do with that money? Turn around and start building fences. Buying patents like crazy, and doing nothing with them. Buying up competitors and making them disappear. Building a network of technology and media so connected together that to get into one area you have to break into all of them. And then they dictate whatever terms they want, and people just accept it.

The only thing that resists (so far) this monopolisation is the internet itself. But even that is getting slowly walled in by the network of social media, search engines, servers and backends, devices and operating systems until it's going to be effectively possible to decide the terms on which someone exists or does business online.

 

I disagree. As a developer I'm more than happy to stump up and compete to get a distribution deal. Done it before, I'll do it again. And as a player the Epic store is far more discoverable than Steam even without discoverability tools, because there are few enough games that I can literally look at them all.

Discoverability only became such an issue on Steam because they decided to stop curating content. I only need tools and recommendations and curators because Steam decided not to do that stuff themselves. Let everyone in and the customers can decide what to buy. Well, Steam today is what that looks like.

When the Epic Store eventually has enough stuff it will also need some functionality to find specific things. While it only has 500 products, though, a scroll bar and a new releases section do just fine.

(I think they're doing a great job with their store, and was previously happily using it and buying stuff there.)

 

I was a little sleep deprived when I made my prior post. Lots of interesting discussion here and I shouldn't be derailing the thread. So quick apology to Lurking ninja who was likely just being a little smarmy in good fun. To many of us the stakes seem pretty high these days and tensions can run pretty high.

 

I also do apologize if I was too harsh. Let's agree to disagree and keep on going.

 

I don't really touch existing game engines outside of the Unity/UE/GameMaker/Godot space, honestly. My main plans are for the engine to support DirectX since it gives me the greatest compatibility range in my target hardware of Windows PCs. Vulkan support going back a bit can be iffy, especially with integrated cards, and the Windows OpenGL situation is dire to say the least.

Note that the drivers that come for a lot of devices don't actually come with proper OpenGL support if they're pulled down over Windows update as well.

 

Good to know, thanks!

 

...whoops, that was actually going to be part of a larger post that was going to go over a lot of the ramifications this case is likely going to have on games, especially in adult spaces, which is increasingly a problem, but also I could tell I was getting heated and decided to back out of the thread for a while because I'm trying to be better about that. I forgot that the forums can sometimes save part of a draft if you navigate away from a tab.

 

What a marvelous attitude! I suppose, if you don't mind the advice of a blundering old buffoon, life can seem like it is constantly throwing us curve balls, sometimes it is quite difficult to see the wood from the trees, I've had this happen many a time in my younger days. I always find a decent walk and chat can help, the fresh air works wonders and we as a human species were meant to be social, even though humanity can be quite unpredictable. Thank you for taking the time out to answer our question and good luck with your game dev journey.

 

Just so you know, but I learnt today that the best video game and animation school in France ("Les Gobelins") are giving Unity and Maya learning lessons. They decided that for next year, they will switch to Unreal / Blender.

This says a lot about the current Unity state. Game schools are a very good indicator about what tool is doing well in the industry.

While Unity is still the most used platform, it won't last very long in it's current state of not improving anything while Unreal crushes it with bleeding edge, awesome and most importantly, just working features.

Edit : by the way, I tried UE5, it's incredible, event with a GTX 1060. I'll switch to it for sure when i'm done with my current production.

 

Don't forget about services/companies owned by Unity. They often promote them with games that use different engine https://blog.unity.com/games/why-hi-rez-isnt-worried-about-the-launch-of-rogue-company.


6 out of 9 of these games are made in Unreal and 0 in Unity. It's a bit worrying that services make more money than Unity Engine, I can imagine that in the future focus may shift towards them.

Yes, for me number of triangles of simple sphere skybox went down from 4000 to 2000, hopefully they'll somehow make it work on more platforms.

 

That reminds me... is 3dsmax even alive at this point? I almost never see/hear any mention of it.

 

Nah, they're separate staff and continue to serve the industry at large... though they would be responsible for any integrations with Unity. I think it will be a long time before these are offered as services for indies or smaller developers, but it's certainly a bunch of things that could weigh against choosing UE5 for devs, if Unity handles it right.

 

Yes, though it's down to $1,700/yr from the $3,500yr cost it had for as long as I can remember.

 

So far Epic makes a lot more stuff free or cheaper (quixel, artstation, realitycapture, monthly assets, mega grants, online services).

Vivox is free for up to 5000 CCU but it was there already before Unity acquisition.

 

Fair enough, I forgot about your stance on social features, and curation/lack thereof is a choice, not objectively good or bad.

Looking at the examples on the Wikipedia page for "vender lock-in" I'm having difficulty identifying an obvious, clear-cut definition. But I think the fact that you get lower royalty percentages when using Epic's engine on Epic's store, when past (passed?) the $1 million threshold, is a clear example of anti-competitive behavior. It's something to push users (developers) towards the Unreal engine, not based on its features or the lack thereof in other engines, but its ownership by the same company. This is vertical integration, mentioned here (I won't pretend I read the whole thing, but I did read that section, which references numerous cases that look similar to owning/selling a game dev engine-->hosting games on a store).

Can you give examples of Steam doing "whatever the hell it wants" and getting away with it? In the abstract I of course agree that having more competitors in the space is good. But what examples do we have of Steam doing things as a store that harmed developers or consumers? Monopolies in our current framework are not inherently bad; it's only when the companies in such dominant positions use their dominance to restrict competition (such as the vertical integration of a dev engine and a store, with benefits for one based on the other, or not permitting developers to lower prices of their games on other stores). It's incredibly telling that the complaints about Steam are not about anti-competitive behavior, but about people dissatisfied with their cut or the number of games (or in a certain cat's case, their social features). It sounds like you're excusing improper behavior over some imagined or theorized harm Steam could do.

I don't really understand your last sentence - it somehow benefits gamers when developers make more on one store vs. another?

First, I don't think they couldn't break into the game store business. I'm 100% certain they could have a store cart if they wanted to. I'm 100% certain they could have a real process for game "submissions" if they wanted to (despite promising it would happen in mid-2019). I'm 100% certain they could have half of the features Steam has if they wanted to. They're making literally billions with Fortnite, and the features literally already exist. Why they don't do any of that, I don't know (well some of it is probably their view on useful store features, but the rest I don't know).

However I'd return to my "monopolies are not inherently bad" point of view, and I think in the end that's what it is, simply a difference in point of view. Some think a monopoly in and of itself shouldn't exist or is wrong. I don't hold that view (I find it appalling honestly - I think it punishes success and innovation) - I think when the company proves themselves to have engaged in competitive behavior (such as forbidding lower prices on other stores) you can justifiably take action to limit them.

Fair enough. I personally don't like curation but that's not objective and I shouldn't have implied it was.

I bought David Cage's three games when they hit the store (and loved all of them, despite the outright scorn I've seen online over the years) but haven't bought anything else since.

Edit - this is all pretty off-topic, sorry for that. My general opinion is that I really like global illumination and I really like the idea of an inherently LOD-less solution, but it sounds like the latter isn't that at all (just the baking happens in the build somewhere behind the scenes). Either way I really like C# and my experience in other areas has led me to believe that the overwhelming majority of the time, the creative is the rate-limiting step, not the tool. The guy who's producing my music works in Pro Tools, but my demo didn't suffer at all from being made in Sonar. Learning the tool was the main thing.