Unreal Engine 4 FREE...

LOL

 

That potato... it's like... life size on my screen... I wish I could 3D print it...

I look forward to derailing UE4 threads in the future.

 

BUT,any source code be found TO make demo like " zen garden" in UE4.7?and how make that awsome demo in unity??

 

No, you don`t have to recompile project if you change code now. That is history.

 

ue4 has extremely useful Construction Script's functionality.
How this functionality can be implemented in Unity3d? Can someone give me a link to the documentation or tutorial videos?

 

There are always will be.

I still remember when UT had licenses, Unity Indie ($250), iOS/Android Basic Addons($400), iOS/Android Pro Addons($1500), Unity Pro ($1500). Then UT got rid of Indie pricing and made it free, people were like "Hurray! I can make games for free now." Then people complained. Then UT got rid of iOS/Android Basic addons and made it free and people were like "Hurray! I can publish to mobile for free now." Yet some people complained about Pro features. Then UT releases Unity 5 for free with ALL engine features which includes Pro iOS/Android addons. Yet people will complain about the not having darkskin UI and custom splash screen and how expensive it is to have those specific features and arn't willing to spend $1500 on those features.

I have a gut feeling that UT will make darkskin UI for free in the next iteration.

And there will be complaints about it.

 

I have to agree. I think the only people who have legitimate cases on any of these issues are the people who pre-ordered pro and aren't happy with the changes to the mobile branding or the people who feel their pro-purchase has now been devalued. Yes you could argue they could claim a refund; however I can see why they are not happy with the situation.

I myself am a free user and unless one of my little games becomes a crazy success will unlikely be subscribing to pro. I am happy with what I am given. If it says 'Didn't pay for pro edition' on the splash-screen and had an orange UI I'd be happy. I always have the choice of not using Unity with no loss.

 

@Squiggledome , @bigSadFace it reminds me of reading the diablo 3 forums lol. People are never satisfied, especially on pc. Where should devs draw the line? Should we try to make the less grateful in our community shut up? I wouldn't mind the dark skin (or custom skins) becoming a thing for everyone since it's the last difference in the engines... but it's not really necessary.

But from the perspective of someone with weaker eyes who doesn't know how to adjust screen brightness / change the lighting in their room, I can see how the darker ui skin is a must.

 

Exactly tom, I for one have problems with contrast, but I find the splash screen text more offensive to me personally.

 

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

 

Hehe caught that did you? <grin>

 

I can't imagine how many times that joke has been made over the last few days, haha.

 

Hehe low hanging fruit and all that lol

 

Unity should make their own version of blueprints using mecanim, 0.0 code. Example would be Icode formally know as AI Mecanim. Also extend this functionality for ugui as well. Making games these days is about allowing fellow artists/level designers to be in total control of the engine and not segregating the team.Let them do what they do best with no restrictions or technical barriers. This is a new era in game design where programmers built these awesome tools and game designers get to play with new toys.
I think is counteractive, especially if you are a one man show and now have to pause to learn c#, etc.
I would like to know what are your thoughts on this.

 

Check out playmaker. That's probably the closest unity-available thing that resembles unreal blueprints. It is a little pricy, but if you want fairly efficient visual scripting, it won't be better than play maker.

 

Hi Tomnn,
Yes I know about third party solutions and yes they work quite well.
I'm talking about revamping Unity and taking that next step. Look a cryEngine, its a black box even for programmers.
For the next wave of game developers/Artis who are non technical minded, but want to get in this industry. The choices will be obvious.

 

For entry level, the choice IS obvious. What do people new to game development care about most? Shiny graphics and ease of use. That's basically the definition of Unreal Engine with blueprints. When you get to hardcore developers who want to modify the engine source and code in C++, that's also the obvious choice for Unreal.

Unity is the middle market for intermediate developers. Blizzard chose it to develop Hearthstone. They even got playmaker to use with it. Why would they do that if UE4 has blueprints? Unity might just be the sweetspot for speedy development, ease of use and power. With PBR shading, Unity might even steal some users away from Unreal.

 

I totally agree on that.
The playmaker/Unity combo is powerful enough to make all kinds of simple to complicated games.
All I'm saying is why not adopt a new method of coding visually across all the different components. Mecanim, Ugui, AI, shaders, etc. If Unity did this their would be a surge of new game designers, artists. The quality of a game is measure by repeat gamers coming back for more. It does not have to be visually stunning or complex. Flappy, crossy road are good examples. I don't care for which engine the game was created. Is not a bragging thing or pride, is about what tool can get you the results you're looking for. If Gamesalad or game maker had an awesome game at the app store, do you think gamers will say. Is power by such and such.

 

Blueprint may be a visual development tool but you still need to understand programming on some fundamental level to make more than trivial use of it.

You mean the success of a game. Success does not automatically equate to quality.

 

They may in the future. All of the recent updates for Unity and Unreal has been closing the gap between them. Unreal got some nice new ui tools... Unity got a 64 bit environment and PBR shaders... in time, the only difference left will be whether you want to code in c++ or C#.

I think it would be best for Unity to buy out PlayMaker or make them a partner or whatever the process is to have it become a built in, standard tool. I've heard some efficiency concerns about how Unity handled animating the new UI with Mecanim, but playmaker turns your visual code into a FSM, so the performance is actually pretty good.

Hmm.. this would also allow them to continue developing other things if they simply adopt playmaker as a visual scripting tool.

 

As long as they kept the C# api it would be okay. I'd have no use for it. Personally, I don't even use the Scene Editor to lay out levels. Only to bring in content assets and create prefabs. I think Unity is already too visually oriented making development more difficult than necessary. It is fine for very simple games where your focus is on just making the game look awesome. But when your focus is on actually making the game itself awesome code and custom data structures are the way to go. At least for me.

EDIT: I should say I no longer use the Editor for more than managing assets and prefab creation. I started out in the Editor fully doing it the way all the vids show. Each project I used the editor less. My simple Christmas game was still using the scene editor. I made another game after that a collaborative effort with another forum member. That was much more custom work and less editor usage. My current project is finally where I want to be decoupled from that editor as much as possible. I was fighting against many things previously such as scene persistence and so forth and while I did create systems to handle all of those things I ran into now they are not even an issue by simply using a single scene and handling everything myself with custom data structures.

 

'With PBR shading, Unity might even steal some users away from Unreal'

it is true for the opposite direction, too...

 

I started in March last year when Epic made unleash UE4. I guess in the end everyone has their own method of creating games. Visual scripting or coding, does not really matter as long as your game does not suck. Unity and Unreal are just tools and it comes down to...what you're most comfortable with. I use both engines and they are both a pleasure to work with.

 

Or the one that gets the job done. Which is going to be the most important factor if you started dealing with complex functionality as Blueprint is considerably slower than C++. If I recall the statements correctly, it is at least 20 times slower.

 

Nahh there's still a massive gaping hole between Unreal and Unity at the moment and it's far from trivial. Every time Unity takes 2 steps ahead in 3D, Epic takes 10 and that's mostly down to what they do and who they are.

Unity has 21 platforms to deal with, a lot of their staff are regional support etc. whereas Epic deals with a small base of platforms whilst having a larger core development team, so Epic will be more focused and they will always excel in this area.

Unreal has expanded greatly but not gracefully, I was searching around for ages trying to find the generate fields option under mesh settings. It's starting to get a little convoluted and fat, also it's far from an easy tool to get used to, it's not the sort of engine you can mess around with for a week and pretend to understand it in any sense.

With Unity you can, it's not a difficult program to use if you're used to games dev and in the end that can be worth more than anything else.

 

Yes is slower, but not slow enough to warrant a concern. With every new release it gets an optimization overhaul and new powers. Imagine blueprints a year from now. We'll be designing games with simple drag and drop power codes. The logic making will be even simpler. Your only concern will be the content creation and game type. Wetta is know using it for demonstrating how movies could be watch. Give then 3 years and you'll be watching The Hobbits in 4k in VR. For developers they will be creating games inside the game and not in a flat screen. Change or perish like the dino.

 

Because no way is Blizzard going to pay Epic 5% off the mad piles of cash they're making on Hearthstone. Not when it was developed with only 20 people.

 

10 times slower, 20 times slower, something like that. But you can make it better by writing your own blueprint functions. The slowdown in blueprint comes from the number of nodes you need to connect to do anything. If you make some specialized and not-so-portable nodes for your project, I'm sure the speed difference is negligible. Also keep in mind you're comparing it to C++. Being 10-20 times slower than C++ is still fast lol.

@ShadowK do you think multi-platform support and ease of use is why Blizzard went with Unity? I'm still confused as to why they didn't use an in house engine in the first place

Haha oops, almost forgot blizzard is part Activision now. This is definitely the answer.

 

If I remember correctly what Epic said: the first UE4 XBoxOne game was created by a team creating their first game, and that without a single coder in the team, in Blueprint only.

 

A really hope they will compile it to C++ later. It should be fast then. Or can anyone think of a reason why that should not be possible?

 

I'd say uScript is closer than PM, both visually and functionally. It also generates actual code.

 

I assume the modular design is what stops it from generating efficient code from a string of nodes.

I haven't seen uScript, I'll check it out for future recommendations.

 

I've been having fun with it, making nodes for the less coding-proficient. It's just very low-level by default (down to individual methods per node, more or less), but writing bigger nodes (like my OInput wrappers) is easy. It's not state machine-based either, but more events/chains.

 

In-house engines are flexible but a liability, it costs more to make and can be challenging for 100 man teams never mind someone who wants to actually put out a game. So why bother? If it does what their in-house engine doesn't, then what's $1500 X 20 compared to 50X whatever engineers are needed to make it work X amount in staff wages.

Games make money, in-house engines don't.

 

Well yes and no. Depends on the engine. Depends on the company.

 

I hope it's better, it's twice the price

I think I'm over my visual-scripting-is-cool phase.

 

Mine lasted about... a day and a half. Then I realized that I could just do everything faster with code myself and... the non-programmers couldn't use it any better than code.

 

There's no yes and no about it, if you'd like to debate it at least put some sort of explanation.

 

For me, it helped focus on how to design a finite state machine and what they're best at. The answer now feels obvious, so I feel a little bleh about buying playmaker just to learn that lol. Good thing it was half off.

As easy as it was to make little state machines and they can be reusable... writing monobehaviours is just as easy and even more portable.

 

Writing your own nodes may be beneficial but you need to understand C++ to do so. Or hire someone to do the job for you.

Yes, but that's typically the base benchmark everyone compares to.

By fundamentals I was implying the very basics of programming. Aspects that you would learn in any early programming course such as if-statements, loops, etc.

I'd be curious to know the name of that game by the way. At one point I knew the name but now I can't remember and Google isn't being particularly helpful either.

 

It's on sale every now and then, but not nearly as often as PM. Heck, you have to work hard to miss a PM sale these days

 

Ah, that's true. I forgot the argument was not only simply using the system, but using it with little to no coding experience.

SIGH. Just like every company comparing their services to dial-up internet. Those commercials are painful to sit through...

 

Not as painful as the dial up tone.

 

It's not understanding C++ that's the problem, unless you're doing big stuff like incorporating middleware or back end functions then it has memory management etc. already sorted for you. So it's no harder than C# IMO, the stickler as with any piece of software is trying to figure out the API and how they want you to do things. This applies to Unity as well.!

I've tried out third party software with source, it's bad enough trying to reverse engineer a bunch of scripts. Never mind a bloody engine.!

 

Yes, it really may seem incredible: now you have free version with all pro features except some minor ones (though I personally don't consider a splash screen to be a minor problem), and you still complain... so why are you unsatisfied, damn you?! Allow me to answer that question. Really I don't care about difference between free version or pro version. I would use any version that fits my needs (if it fits) and I would not mind to pay for it (despite the fact that pro version is really expensive). In my opinion the main problem with Unity is it's business model. Unity never had and apparently never will have "must have" features of modern game engines - even pathfinding was added not long ago and this simple, really necessary feature was accepted as a "great improvement". The reason of all this as it seems to me is greed. If Epic created a new engine ground up with all necessary features, why greatly outnumbering Unity developers (let me remind you, that Unity is BIGGER company, than Epic) were unable to do same? Even now Unity doesn't have such basic features as morph animation support (don't tell me about blendshapes and animation editor)! Or modular skeleton mesh support (except some undocumented and lame third party solution)! Or geometry builder (again, except some third party pricey one)! Or Apex integration; etc. etc. etc. Version 5 advertises lighting improvement (from abysmal to nothing special), mecanim improvement and some audio editor as big pack of improvements, while engine still lacks most basic features. Why they do all this? If they add, for example geometry editor to engine, customers will pay (for pro version, of course) "only" $1,500 per platform. On the other hand, if they release the engine without some most basic features and sell them as "third party" add-ons in marketplace, they will earn much more money.
To be acceptable for me, personally, Unity must have at least all basic features and declare their price including ALL OF THEM, instead of selling them for additional price, like Playmaker (instead of having some graph editor), Pro Builder (instead of geometry editor) etc. Unlike this, UE4 has ALL necessary features built-in, out-of-box. You may create whole game without visiting marketplace single time.
So, IMHO, the main reason of complains is poorly developed engine and greed.

 

Not everyone wants a geometry editor inside of the game engine. And not all companies think it is necessary to have one.
Other issues like the material node and some other more important features like ShadowK talks about are a lot more important.
Not every company is going to make the exact same thing, otherwise what's the point of having different ones.
If a geometry editor is so important to you, then you know the engine that you will have to use.

And unless your the human resource department for both companies, you have no clue what people do or what office they are at, etc. Unity has offices around the world. Epic on has the one office on the east coast? Asking because that is the only one that I keep hearing about.

 

I wonder if Unity will enhance the terrain and vegetation a?

 

Yeah, not all cars have to have engines, wheels, or steering wheels - otherwise what's the point of having different ones? There may be a modern engine without morph animation support! Yeah! Sorry, but I am not going to argue with you.
As for sizes of companies - Unity's cost of capital is about 1,4 billion, while Epic's is about 450 million. There is no need to spy on human resource departments. If Unity in those conditions don't have larger staff working on engine than Epic, it proves only one thing - THEY ARE GREEDY!

 

And you know this how? And greedy? Then every company that I have ever seen must be too.
So Maya and 3dsMax and Blender should be identical is what you are saying?

 

Epic Games is backed by a company called Tencent Holdings Ltd. Tencent makes almost $10 billion per year in revenue and their market value is about $150 billion.