Unreal Engine 4

Totally agree regarding candy:

1. I'm doing 2D at the moment (for Sony) but 3D is coming and our lead artist is heavily evaluating UE4/Unity...
2. I'm waiting for Unity 5 before unleashing the apocalypse of criticism, which I think is the comparison we're all wanting really since Tim Sweeney said to check back in 6 months since UE4 is beta at the moment. That's when we can start fairly comparing these two next gen heavyweights.

If we compare now, yeah, Unity 4 isn't a patch on UE4's visual power, and it takes a fair bit of work to bring Unity 4 within the same ballpark. Or not, if you've got a credit card and Marmoset + whatever assets, but that's neither here nor there as it's not out of the box.

But I think ultimately, visual stuff is gonna take up 25% of my project's time - there's still the making of everything and that's an ongoing worry for me with UE4. Still, time well tell and I think in 6 months that's when the kid gloves come off.

 

Unreal Engine 4 came out just recently, it would take at least 6+ months for people to release UE4 assets, demos and games. I was trying UE4 since mid 2013, prototyping some stuff while providing bugs and feedbacks but nothing really seriously.
As for our game, Forgotten Memories is a relative quite complex game, we've in fact developed our own game framework which by surprise at it's roots looks pretty similar to UE4 game framework layout (GameMode - > Player -> Controllers - > etc). It took us quite some time to develop this framework (which is btw tailored to third person survival horror games). I don't know exactly what could have taken us starting from scratch developing Forgotten Memories with UE4 as it never existed back when we stated on FM. By the look of it I can say, It could have save us lot of time, specially when we started designing our framework (which at first was a total pita mess), but that's probably our own fault as we transitioned from a prototype codebase into a bullet prof game framework. While I'm not a C++ master, I'm very comfortable with and the fact that UE4 manage all their objects is pretty good (though it can be tedious if you want to get outside of their framework with external plugins and the like but for gamecode programming in UE4, C++ is not a problem).
All that to say that we've invested quite too much on Unity (time and money) and for now we'll take advantage of all that. We'll use our framework for at least our next survival horror project. On the other side, I've started porting our framework on UE4 and I don't know exactly (right now) where this will lead us, this is something I'm doing on my tiny/shortly spare time and so far it have been a good experience as a large part of it it's already well handled and better designed by UE4.

 

You said it depends on the artist, then contradicted it saying Unity would look almost as good if it had the same graphical features ..

If you have the ability to take advantage of any engine good artwork is a must, I'm not sure why we discuss it at such length. Good art is a given, now what we're talking about is how to take this good artwork and use it to our advantage. I'm tired of this tech vs. art argument, use a diffuse visualise in UE4 on the AAA art demo's they give you. Get your hands on some really old tech and import AAA artwork into it, the art looks RUBBISH.

It's not mis-information, it's not down to perspective the art will look RUBBISH.. Rendering tech in modellers are some of the best tech you can get your hands on.. When we talk graphics and engines, we are talking tech.!

Things like lighting accuracy, shader quality like PBR, if a game could look like a V-ray render then it would be the best looking and physically accurate game ever but no engine is "There" quite yet. Although the full blown version of UE4, which they made ass creed with looks gorgeous and you can tell Z-Brush was there friend throughout and a lot of talent went into it.

CE is a gorgeous looking engine out of the box, probably still the best looking IMO.

 

That 'candy' is bread and butter for the artists though. There are real reasons that Epic has a large community of good artists.

 

Hm. Please don't get me wrong here - the eye candy filters are really cool and can add a lot of polish in the end. I love them. I really do. And I would not want to miss them. No matter of eye candy can mask mediocre art to begin with, though. It usually does not take more than a second for the trained eye to spot whether someone uses effects to mask shortcomings or shortcuts in projects. It's important but I would not call it bread and butter.

Creating art and models that work and are within production limits and also flexible to use - now there's bread and butter. That's not an engine thing, though.

 

Depends on the artists, but I can state that it is a royal PITA to get assets into it and extremely unfriendly in regards to what an artist needs.

Developers are going to have to learn to get on a lot better with art teams, as with the advancement of toolchains, there is a much stronger need for them to be involved in gameplay design now.

That's what the future is anyway Blueprint or BP like systems that are used by the design team to rapidly build out functionality and then cleaned up by the development team.

Developers can S*** on visual programming all they want, but that's how a designer's brain works and games tend to be a lot more well rounded when the design team is deeply integrated into gameplay. Visual programming certainly does work in the design world: Maya, Max, Nuke, Smoke and on and on. You do not count those as a form of visual programming? If not I guess we should throw the entire art side of the industry out the window!

Someone said here there is a reason that visual programming has never taken hold, but neglected to give the reason for it; which is it was never going to be used by what we would call a stereotypical programmer in the first place, but by more creative types.

Few people can break the mold and have the gift of being both a talented artist and a great developer - it is that past disconnect between both teams that leads to so many games with stunning visuals and horrendous gameplay or storylines.

Additions like Blueprint to UE4 or bolt on assets like PlayMaker for Unity are crucial today.

 

Why's people picking on Hippocoder because he refuses to play this silly game of 'oh, Unity Pro must offer $5 a month sub or I'm outta here'.

 

Did you skip the rest of the post? It doesn't just depend on the artist. Plus I know all about CryEngine..

 

It's not just the post effects that draws artists, it's the material editor, the hybrid deferred rendering, soft shadows. There's just more to work with. If Unity free were more robust and on par feature wise with Unreal, more artists would use it for their personal work. That's not a bad thing.

 

No one is picking on him, he's a very nice guy and we are just civilized dudes discussing the future of game development (to some extend).

 

I really don't think you fully read mine. I have experience with CE as well and there is a reason why games released with it have stunning visuals and horrendous gameplay. From a designers perspective with CE its an asset hand off to developers and cya later. You have to be a really motivated artist to want to deal with the CE asset pipeline.

 

I totally agree, that's the point that just make me not consider UE4 for any commercial project.
I'm among people who buy their tools, and own them, and can sell anything they create without having to report anything or no money to anyone.

 

One of the many reasons I stayed away from it, but still what experience do you have of working with large teams and artists?. Our artists are fine at coding their own tools for Modo. They can work easily with shaders and they generally don't struggle, all the core logic is done by us ruffians.. Myself I sit firmly in both camps, I model and code..

That's what makes them worth their pay packet, I can leave them too it and they just crack on. Now when we used CE I had them constantly complaining at me as they couldn't figure out how to get Biped's into the engine. I sat down and figured it out after a night and thought NAH! Moved on, let's not bring all the other issues with it. RC32 pipeline felt like it was from the dark ages, we had to build tools to mass import textures.. Uhh! Nightmare.

Sure artists get more *Involved* nowadays, they check a lot of their tech in the engine and modify as they see fit. Blueprint is great for character controllers to see how their animations and rigs work..

 

In the future we'll all be making games in some sort of virtual reality world. The days of actually downloading 8GB of software to make games is surely numbered. In that respect isn't UE4 really a step backwards? Why are we still doing the old code-->compile-->test-->repeat in this day and age? Always having to reinvent the wheel?

Worlds like Minecraft and Little Big Planet where you can dynamically make games INSIDE the game world surely points to the future. Like Squeak of old.

Maybe this is why they are giving away UE4 so cheaply because they have something new like this in mind! (Like when Tomb Raider 4 gave away it's level editor when they were working on their new better one). Could be a sign that Epic will no longer make games with Unreal Engine at all and are flogging it off!

Imagine all the artists putting on their VR headsets, and walking into the game level and sculpting statues and painting the outside of houses just like they were working in a film set.... that's surely the future, not working with a fancy photoshop-like IDE. (Perhaps this is why Zuckerman has bought the Oculus Rift).

What Unity needs to create is some kind of infinite virtual world in which you can enter it, create art and scripting events (which could be stored in the 5th dimension of the world) together with a market place where players can enter your part of the virtual world and play your game.

It would all run in the cloud, always on, and never have to compile anything (except maybe for a few plugins).

UE4 feels like something from the 90's just with shinier menus. Hard to get tooo excited by it.

 

Stop dreaming and return to reality , or do you prefer all virtual around you ?
I prefer lot more games made by veteran 3D artists to make unique crafted worlds like Skyrim, Uncharted series and others than garbage produced by pure amateurs even on VR.

 

Well veteran writers may still like to write their novels on a typewriter, but that's not really where the future is.

Dreamers create the future. What I suggested could have already been done by now. One problem is capitalism means that no-one wants to share proprietary code so everything has to be reinvented every time.

So in 2020 you can still sit at your PC computer and manipulate polygons with your mouse while I will venture into my 3D world with my 3D chissel and sculpt some virtual marble into a work of art.

I think its a bit silly to diss amateurs on a Unity forum!

 

No offense, but that seems like a really bad idea. There's a reason so many people prefer controllers to Kinect. And there's a reason that films rely so heavily on digital effects. If given the choice between clicking a button or flailing my arms around for several minutes, I know which one I'd choose.

 

Yes, and some use a computer with a word processor.

None use algorithmic text-generating software where they just rough out the idea and press Play*.

Paintings made with brushes are still around. Books written using text are still around. Games may well be made in a drag-and-drop way, but to think it will be a programming-free (Blueprint is programming) artist wonderland is equivalent to an illustrator saying he's going to put writers out of business.

Both UE4 and Unity are the state of the art, not Minecraft redstone wires.

* = Well, OK, some do.

 

Sorry for getting a bit cheeky by the way folks, i think it was a bit of juice and my sense of humour getting the better of me. This is a good thread and i'm glad it's being read - while I still have troubles with complaints about the pricing of anything, I can understand why others might, but more than any pricing issue is, i think, the more troubling issues regarding problems I don't tend to run into but are clearly felt by many longer-term users which relate to bug fixes, compromises and unfinished features (and maybe added lack of 'open-ness' of a system that leave it practically useless for some people's needs)

Other than that, i suppose I just hope things are taken on board - I think the only big criticism of Unity i've seen that seems like it ight affect me, although thus far I havent noticed, is lack of some mystical fidelity to the lighting and rendering and such, which I straight out know doesnt imply art in Unity looks rubbish, i'm no newcomer to computer graphics, but if that can be improved (In ways I don't understand but i'm sure i will when it happens) then i'll be theoretically entirely happy.

 

You're trying so hard.

 

Surely this discussion has got to the point where anyone thinking the grass is greener on the UE4 side should probably go have their discussions on the Unreal forums? I think we've established that both engines have their merits, and both have their downsides.

 

Just curious...

Is any of the UDK training useful at all for UE4? Like the 3DMotive or Digital Tutor stuff and the like? I mean is there any carry over? Materials? FX...Lighting?

I'd imagine any of the old Kismet training is useless in it's relation to Blueprints.

 

Wow, this thread never dies.

 

The transition from UDK to UE4 isn't bad, but unless you plan on sticking with UE3 tech, there is no real reason to go back and learn the ins and outs of UDK for the purpose of learning the new workflow/toolchain of UE4.

If you like the way Unity's editing environment works you will honestly hate the old UDK Editor.

Check out the tutorial videos on the Unreal Engine YouTube channel.

Digital Tutors I assume will be all over UE4 training soon enough.

I think this question is better off left to the UE4 forums. Discussing the merits of one engine vs. the other is a lot different than figuring out how one would get started. Even though UT has been lenient with this thread (I give them props for that) it's not fair to them for those kinds of questions to be posted here.

Just my honest opinion.

 

Thanks for the reply to my actual question.
As to your commentary on the validity of my question, I own UT pro... relax. I'm a paying customer, fair is what I say it is.

 

I also think that all the talk about Unreal Engine should be on the Unreal forums, and talk about Unity should be here.

 

Yeah I think this thread's run it's course really, we should let it die - what's been said has been pretty much said. Kudos for Unity for allowing it in the first place. 77 pages of a competing product? try that crap over on Cryengine or Epic forums - in the past it's led to tears, bans, deleted topics etc.

Either Unity's not worried or Unity 5 happens to be Moon Unicorns since they seem fine about it.

 

Sounds like a horrific leering conspiracy when you put it like that

 

Ahhh you posted that just as I deleted it , I changed my mind

 

Sounds fair and i got a few laughs, the key points have been repeated enough times, UT knows what people might be picking at, the result should be a good one

 

Or maybe we're just supporting the community any way we can But now that you mention it, Moon Unicorns _does_ sound cool...

 

OK, if this thread is about to be locked I’d like to quickly register my opinion.

I'll be staying with Unity to complete my current project and will probably upgrade to U5, but after that I'll be seriously evaluating a move to UE4. My thoughts:

1. Add-ons should go - they penalize people who just want to make mobile games. One license should include all add-ons.

2. Unity needs to concentrate on fixing bugs rather than announcing new features. The 64 bit editor is finally arriving in U5, but I no longer feel confident that the implementation will be stable and complete. This is based on past performance; e.g. Beast crashing on import in large projects, missing event functionality in Mecanim, etc. I appreciate that UT is making efforts to stabilize the engine - what was done to occlusion calling recently was an outstanding improvement - but there are way too many open bugs to feel confident about the future features.

3. The profiler should be free for all. By withholding it, Unity is (by default) encouraging poorly performing games to enter the market (and to make it worse, those games all have the Unity splash screen) - not good for public perception of Unity’s brand.

All of this was relevant two weeks ago, but back then there was no practical alternative. The landscape has changed radically, and Unity needs to react or its user base will decline significantly over the next few years.

Unity's strongest selling points right now are familiarity (for its existing user base) and the Asset Store. Most developers don't want to leave Unity if they can avoid it, but the stability issues and its price are making UE4 interesting.

UE4's Marketplace will get up to speed rapidly - I would expect it to be as vibrant as Unity’s in a year from now.

UT has the advantage right now: a captive user base with projects to complete, and a vibrant, active Asset Store. PLEASE don't blow this opportunity by just making a few cosmetic changes to the product and its pricing.

 

Anyone locking this thread I'm gonna explosively blow his arse on fire! And then you'll hear Powered by Unity! Hell yeah!
OK no sense comments aside. ^^
No, this thread it's important for Unity, they want to know what their community thinks about Unity itself (and others engines). What I like about Unity is their capacity to adapt. If that must be the case they will do it but don't close the thread It contains important valuable information. Let it die maybe but dont close it.

 

Of the above, i think absolutely the best thing said was about the profiler. If UT wants people to use their technology, then all examples of it being unoptimised clusterfucks with the dev having very few ideas on how to fix it are not the best way to go about it. A lack of profiler in free i could easily imagine to have done nothing but harm peoples expectations upon seeing the unity web loader or splash screen.

Just that

 

Someone explain to me, how people are bitching over 5% when Apple/Steam/Unity(asset store) take 30%?

*I get the math, if my game is super successful..blah blah...the 5% will cost you more then the cost of Pro..blah blah

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+1 to what daisyDynamics posted

 

Probably because in the case of a successful 'big' format game, that 5% could be an enormous amount of money

 

Bitching? I'd hardly call it that. It's just math - 5% of a large game's gross income could easily be more than the Unity licensing cost. It's a point of consideration when making decisions, nothing more, nothing less.

 

It's not so much 5% it's the fact 5% vs Unity's base price AND the nightmare of book keeping.

1. you need to register your game with epic before you sell it, or you're not allowed to sell it.
2. you need provide gross price, units sold and total amount earned (including any sales you might have had) without error.
3. you need to give them permission to track your app in some way, which includes any product id's SKUs etc.
4. You need to provide this information + pay them every 3 months without fail. Failure, means your product will get pulled.

It's no big deal for a small business, but for an individual I can see it creating lost work hours, stress etc. It's probably a couple of days work lost every 3 months. I'd rather not actually deal with that for one title. But maybe people have 3 titles on different platforms. That's when it starts becoming a proper problem for the little guy.

You also need to do this forever, or for as long as it's on sale. I would prefer to pay Epic a flat fee tbh and avoid 5% on those grounds alone. By contrast Unity doesn't care, so you can make 10 apps with that base cost, all about unicorns and hobbits or whatever. Nobody cares where you sell, how many games you have, how many markets you've ported it to etc, yadda yadda. Nor do you have to give Unity any information.

 

haha, well all of that book keeping is a fair bit easier to pull off than ... oh I dunno.... making a game engine like UT4.

If it doeen't work for you, don't do it. I say it's a hell of a deal for a certain set of games that address a certain market.

 

If you add new classes through visual studio, you need to compile and the editor needs to restart but if you add code through the editor you don't need to restart it or if you change stuff in your code without adding or changing properties/macros you don't need to restart the editor (there's a some sort of hot reload that happens in the background). It was stated that in the future hot-reload will work out of the box for your game code (editor code always need to be restarted).
Have any of you guys already debugged with VS and UE4? It was a total breeze! No crashes and work out of the box!

 

Lol.

 

Sure, but you should be bookkeeping either way, gotta pay taxes, and you should know how much your business is earning, and so forth to play employees or revenue share. If you can make a game, I am sure you can do simple accounting, if not you can get someone to do it.

if you sale through google play it is really simple.

 

You can negotiate a deal with Epic if your game is wildly successful. You will be a good showcase for them. If your game is not successful, do you think they have the time to send lawyers to you.

 

did you see the forum post where tim sweeney said this guy needed to legally send him 3 cents if he made 60. though they said they would find a way to make it more pleasant for those occurrences.

 

I don't think they're going to hunt the devs for each small game they release on the appstores and I guess they'd just ignore all but the seemingly successful (above certain threshold) titles. The opposite is impractical and might lead to bad PR in some cases.

 

I know Tim Sweeny, he would rather be coding than chasing you for the few cents. He has a Ferraris/Porches in his garage and he doesn't have time to drive them.

 

You're slightly over-simplifying things there.

Bookkeeping is simple, hell you can just give it to an accountant. Ask your accountant to manage the license provisioning side of your business though, and you'll get a little smile - because that means they get to charge you a lot more.

Licensing means reports on top of your existing accounts, managing a relationship with the accounts people at the licensor and dealing with problems when they arise (they do, it's just the twisted way the universe works against us all).

I agree that it wouldn't be a motivating factor either way, for me personally, but I know a lot of veteran devs who really would prefer not to have to complicate life when they'd rather be focussing on the job, and not "maintenance" as they see it.

Horses for courses.

 

I'm not sure about that HC. They do have a 70 page thread on Unreal 4 over at CryDev, they also have a much smaller Unity 5 one.

It was the Unreal forums where you weren't allowed to post about the competition.

 

Honestly a lot of that book keeping can be very easily automatized, and it should even if providing info to epic wasn't a concern.

I would add to that the all source control integration thing, now I don't want them to provide servers to host the source control for free, that obviously has a cost to them, but locking the integration at a software level, and having users deal with the problems that come with a lack of integration benefits no one, source control increases productivity and the quality of the product, things that are good for both unity and the client, and since they aren't middleware dependent there is really no reason to put it behind and additional pay wall (not even pro users have access to it without paying extra).
One needs to just look at topics related to source control to see how many people end up not using it, and I'm sure this would change if everyone had it on their unity version.

 

I share this same opinion. Profiler and Source Control should be added to the Free version. They are not Pro/Advanced features, they are essential to proper game development!