Unreal Engine 4

Oh, to be a fly on the wall at that meeting...

For now, I've placed my bet on Unity so I hope they come through this for the better.

 

I'm curious if it is possible for someone to write a blueprint 'compiler' for c# or another scripting language. Blueprint looks powerful enough to complete most games people use Unity for and if you could write a blueprint component without having to dip into c++ that'd be huge.

 

My two cents: this is HUGE news for all of us developers. Now we have two major players competing for our marketing, which in turn will hasten thinsg a bit, in my point of view, in terms of releasing new features.

Maybe Unity will review its business plans, maybe not. Maybe Unreal will drop the signature stuff altogether when their business model is strong enought.

So, it will be a race on whitch platform has the best features in order to validate its business model. Releasing the source code and requiring a small monthly fee is Unreal's firt move.

So, I think that another "countermove" and huge step forward Unity can take is... giving us the Linux editor. The Linux SUPPORT is still a work in progress, it seems, for the Unreal guys; Unity ALREADY have it. And as of today, the Unity Linux editor is the mos voted feature in Unity Feedback.

The thing is: Unity is no longer withou serious competition - now they have to deal with the fact that one of the most powerful and seasoned game engines in the market has gone completely (mad?) open. We can tackle its internal C++ code, for Lenin's sake!

Any advantage Unity can amass right now is a necessary step.

 

Im a Unity fan and have been a pro user since 2.6 but I agree with those saying that the full price for each platform that Unity charges is a huge turn off. And then to hear that the WebGl would be another $1500 platform is kind of pushing me to possibly switch to UE4 even though I would like to stick with Unity if they change their prices.

 

@Digitalfiends, nice post. I too signed up immediately for the UE4 subscription and I wonder how Unity Tech will respond.

 

Yeah that is a big turn off for me as well.

 

Guys dont forget why alot of us are using Unity,
THE ASSET STORE!
Can I buy an advanced character controller with half of an action game already coded for me with UE4?
Nope, as a modeler / animator I would never even dream of learning then coding it all from scratch myself.
Unity has hope as long as they put more money into their asset store, beyond what the public is contributing

I dont see a "Zerano MMO kit" for unreal being sold on an "unreal code base store" any time soon if you know what I mean

For now I'll consider it an enlighten preview, 20 bux a month is nothing even if your doing a side project,

The best answer to most decisions is: Why not both?
I look forward to testing unity 5 pro, unreal engine 4, and the new cryengine update

 

for indie $10-20/m+5% is not bad deal better than $1500 + upgrade or $70/m for x months since its less upfront and less per month. and if it makes no sales it great if u make sale then ur problem is not 5% its 30% for stores and taxes which r bigger chunks. plus it keeps developer tool development funded so u get nice tools n that priceless

 

Well, UE4 got something like an asset store now. And if a lot of people use UE4 and if they can submit stuff it'll get filled pretty fast, too, i guess.
Think i've seen on some screens somewhere here that UE4 already has a full towerdefense example there.

But for my part the asset store is not such a big thing, for scripts i rather check the web for code snippets i can use for my own specific demands when i'm stuck. And for art (models/textures) i've got some websites in my browsers favorite list. Even though i try to avoid using sold (especially) 3d models for example since personally it gives me a strange feel to see assets i use also being used in other games.

 

Just subscribed and downloading as I speak?

Exciting times ahead

 

But they have "Tappy Chicken" in it already, what more do you need It's a bird that flaps when you tap and you have to avoid obstacles!

 

Wow I didnt realize unreal has an asset store type thing now, thats, well, Epic!
It will be interesting to see it grow,
Is there a networking example included in UE4 ? Or are we in the dark if we want to make an online project for now?

Also I agree on models, I think the asset store is much more practical as a code base, if there were just more polished and bigger / better frameworks on the store I think alot more people will use whichever engine has the more powerful kits.
I think thats what it will truly come down to, I've learned alot from Zerano, his kit is the main reason I use Unity.
As a 3d artist I would be lost without something like that

 

I hope Unity comes back with an offer quickly. I was about to fork out the $600 for my pro 5 upgrade but now two better offers are on the table - Unreal and CryEngine - both wanting a share of the creative's future. With VR headsets, mobile and WebGL getting everyone excited I think engine companies are wanting to position themselves for the future. Things are going to change quickly in the next 10 years.

If I were Unity I would drop the upgrade price immediately to keep current Pro users and work on a decent subscription model.

If they don't respond then the tables will turn ... U4 and CryEngine will look after the indies and Unity will be seen as "elitest".

 

Yeah I just saw that in the marketplace. I had a good laugh

On a serious side. Man they have tons of great sample projects to play and explore. It's mind boggling.

 

Well it's very early days for sure, but this is going to happen, and probably sooner than you think. And they do already have a basic basic framework for there own asset store. As a Unity Asset Store developer this news has piqued my interest quite seriously for a variety of reasons.

My current projects on the Unity Asset Store wouldn't be directly portable to UE4, but the possibility is now there for developing on two platforms... twice the potential customer base... (and yeah twice the potential learning curves/ development headaches as well)... not to mention padding my financial exposure around a little and not being tied ito the fortunes of one company. This has always bugged me about developing on the asset store... the exclusivity. Of course I love Unity and want them to be on top! But am I going to put all my eggs in one basket now that there is another basket being woven? for sure nope!

Because of this I've already purchased and downloaded UE4 and messed around a bit to see both what the current potential is and the not-too-far-off potential is. I'm sure I'm not alone here.

 

Those video tutorials linked on the main UE4 page are really sweet too.

 

I think it would be completely unreasonable to expect UT to drop their upgrade price completely. I think there's enough people using Pro though who are "unhappy" with the upgrade prices, that UT do need to revise them. We can't all be wrong that the upgrade prices are a little excessive.

To be honest, I would have been happier paying slightly more for the initial buy-in on Pro, and then maybe $200 per platform for upgrades (completely off the top of my head), than I am having to fork out these pretty hefty dollar amounts each time. Or at least a more reasonable break down for the platform add-ons; Unity Pro $10, iOS $2.50, Android $2.50, etc (again just example numbers).

I love Unity. And I've invested a great deal of time into learning it. For the new project that I've just started, I certainly won't be going anywhere, but this has definitely made me stop and think about whether or not I should really pre-order those upgrades in preparation for the next project, when this morning it was a no-brainer. I'm already up for $1250 next month for an Android Pro license.

When all is said and done though, let's not forget that Unity 5 does look AWESOME. I feel a little sorry for the UT guys that these other announcements have overshadowed what is obviously a massive day for them, and a really great achievement.

 

Ba-Dum-Tss!

 

For the guys trying this on MacOS - curious about the performance and what you're running on. The requirements are pretty hardcore.

 

Well, I've read almost this 19 pages.. and no one from Unity Team respond to the thread.. Guys ya need to make some announcement, it's not a bad idea to go lower on price now. I see Unity is still a very good platform for newbies, like me. But just for 19$, to get a completely full featured dev platform... it's insanity.. Epic just did something, a revolution... You do it also, please. I just started learning Unity and I feel bad to do not continue with this. You have great 2d tools, which makes life easier to develop such kind of games..

 

Not to mention CryEngine at $9 a month with NO royalties. This is amazing news too.

To be honest I expected more for my initial $1500 pro 4 license ie the long discussed UI. Now I need to spend another $600 to get that. But I got a 2D system that I didn't really want.

Another thing ... maybe let the Asset Store determine the core price. Buy core Unity for say $500 lifetime license then if you want an UberShader system buy that on the Asset Store etc. Not sure it would be possible to make sure a modular engine.

 

The Unity peeps are all at GDC so we'll all need to be patient about a response. I also wouldn't expect a knee jerk reaction either, I would hope and expect for a carefully considered and worthwhile counter.

 

That isn't true. The UI is coming in 4.x - you won't need to pay anything to get it.

 

I see the modular aspect of Unity as one it's greatest strength's as well as one of it's greatest curses.

Just opening up Unreal Engine4 and seeing all sorts of things "just working" is enough to make me wax poetic. But then again, I have no idea if it's even possible (well, feasible) to do some of the things I've wrangled out of unity.... custom inspector's for my own little modded terrain system etc. must. investigate.

 

one good thing of all this

not only will hopefully unity respond with new subscriptions / pricing / terms

but they will also have to respond on the development front to, so hopefully they will once and for all / finally upgrade mono runtime

@ chingwa

the thing is u'll be most likely having to rewrite your assets in c/c++

and perhaps u can use c# using .net interfaces to go in and out of managed code and interopt services (ability from native api to interface into .net and from .net into native apis) real fun stuff...

 

I tried some demo projects and it runs smooth so far.
I don't get the 60fps experience when I'm in Play mode, but I guess a GTX650M is not optimal as gaming card. Especially when it already have to carry a retina display resolution

 

I'm running a 2014 MacBook Pro 13" - I'm guessing the Intel Iris isn't going to like UE4

Might have to do my UE4 playing on the ol' Alienware.


EDIT: Mind you, Unity runs beautifully on pretty much ANYTHING - another tick in the Unity column!

 

Best not presume. The website says 5% of sales revenue, independent of whatever other vendors take. If the product cost a 100, then Epic get 5. Then the vendor takes 30% anyway.

So that's a total of 35% gone not 5% of what remains.

 

Yeah - they do actually specify this with an example on their site:

 

Yeah not sure about a Intel graphics card. Unreal is quite performance hungry.
Good thing is, once you've subscribed you can download the OSX AND Windows version of Unreal.

As for the performance in Unity. I guess this depends on the project. If you have a big project with lots of HD content and complex shaders, Unity's performance drops also pretty fast. I saw that happen with my Wild Scenery Kit, with a small terrain and lots of trees and other geometry. I had problems to run that on my old MBP 2011.

But of course, not everyone needs cutting edge graphics.

 

But was that a problem running the scene (as in "Play" mode), or running the Editor while building the scene?

 

Just to be clear there is no really a problem to run that scenes on my computer.
It runs in the editor and in Play/Sim mode pretty much on the same speed as far as I can tell that.
Not blazing fast, but reasonable given the scene (DynamicSceneShadows.umap, which has lots of animated objects, dynamic shadows, reflections, moving skybox, post fx like motion blur etc.) The FPS counter shows me around 20 fps in that scene.

 

Well only thing for me is, I learned Unityscript and C# from using Unity. I don't know anything about C++

I might have to stick with Unity for my current project and then consider learning C++ in order to make use of UE4. I mean the fact that you can use the free version of Unity AND sell it commercially with no royalties, is still a pretty powerful thing. BUT, I will definitely look at UE4 a lot harder now.

 

It's not that Epic is hiding this in any way. It's clearly explained on their website, with an example. And where this is "even more expensive" is beyond me?
l can make a game without a huge financial risk. Look if you're a small team and you have to pay each member a Unity license for each module, plus the third-party assets, you will need a decent budget.

I'd rather pay a small subscription fee (which I can cancel anytime) and share 5% of the sales price with Epic, once my game launched. It's not that it really hurts.
Only downside is the paperwork for me.

 

Going to C++ from C# is a little harder than the other way around but it's not like going from a scripting language like JavaScript to C++. The hardest thing about C++ is the memory management (initializers/constructors, destructors, and pointers.) Templates can be a bit challenging too if you haven't used C#'s generics. Still, you'd get up to speed on the language pretty fast. One thing you'll miss from C#/Java is the ease of manipulating strings; the .NET Framework classes; as well as some of the more advanced features such as dynamic types/reflection, etc. It's been awhile since I've programmed in C++ and I know there have been some improvements since I moved to C#. If I had a choice, I'd still choose C#.

 

Thanks Digitalfiends those are some good pointers (no pun intended ). I heard rumors UE4 *might* allow C# development, but they were simply rumors. Until then, I will have to learn C++. So thanks for the heads up

 

UE4 doesn't really require you to concern yourself with memory allocation either, at least if you're just writing logic. But it's a good subject to have some awareness of anyway

 

hsitory of game engine in my live
2005 - 2009 -> 3D Gamestudio
2010 - 2013 -> Unity
2014 - 2018> Unreal 4
2018 - 2022> Unreal 5
2022 - 2026> my own game engine

 

Exiting news indeed. The license cost of Unity Pro is still reasonable for any serious developer, but this levels the playing field because the licensing cost of the Unreal Engine has been anything but reasonable in the past. $20 / month is basically free, my guess is they've set this just to keep the kids away, and to make sure you've entered some kind of business relationship with them for when they come to collect the royalties.

The most interesting part as I see it though is the full source code access. The advantage this gives them over Unity is that they won't simply be receiving bug reports, they will receive bug reports including patches that fixes the bug, which will no doubt improve the quality of the engine rapidly.

 

GI.biz are suggesting the CryEngine license includes console (no source code).
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-03-20-cryengine-adopts-subscription-model

That said, everyone seems to have glossed over the press release's terminology, which suggests there will be other access tiers:

As a first tier of its new program, Crytek has revealed that from May this year [...]

The fact that they say royalty-free infers that you're making royalties, ergo it's commercial.

 

Would this run on my laptop with an i7 4500U (with intel hd 4400) and 8gb ram? It does run dx11.

Would be pretty stupid if i got this to try it out and then it doesn't even work, anyone got an idea if I can run this?

 

Quote from crydev forum about UE4s lighting going on now:

Nope, you still have to bake your maps with Lightmass.
They were going to do real-time GI but the console generation wasn't powerful enough

http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=126&t=83635&start=945

And:

Currently, hybrid lighting (like Enlighten) is the best solution. Many games are using it now.

Indoor lighting is fault of CryEngine. It doesn't have indoor GI(point light GI, SSGI or real SSDO, etc.) even now. LPV is weak as GI effect. Sunlight only, 1 bounce. So Crytek adds many lights manually everywhere. We must do that to make nice result. Unfortunately, full dynamic lighting have much more demerit than merit.

http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=126&t=121707

 

Haven't look deep enough to unreal, but from the documentation it looks like it is still oriented toward FPS games. Does it have something like editor scripts in unity? What about procedural terrain generation? I'll be glad If anyone who has used the new unreal engine could answer this questions. As much as I would love to use C++ for game development, I don't think that unreal has the same possibilities with respect to API (and therefor for game style (FPS, RPG, 2D adventure, ...)) as the unity. I could be wrong of course because I haven't look deeply.

Thank you

 

A slightly more verbose explanation on the state of affairs on UE4 lighting:

https://answers.unrealengine.com/qu...-of-dyanmic-lighting-are-available-and-w.html

 

C++ for game dev is the dumbest thing ever, I wouldn't choose c++ over C# 0.1. I've used it for embedded applications and it is a peice of crap.

Unity and C# forever!

 

@ TylerPerry

yeah i agree. c/c++ is hardcore. would increase cost, time, difficulty, ect...

c# is jitted with a good vm/runtime its a little slower, but not all that much. especially when u know that most udk people have been using unreal script which is not jitted or natively compiled and is instead an extremely slow (20x-30x or more) slower interpreter and kismet is worse and the new visual programming language is most likely as slow or slower than kismet cause unlike unreal script which was a bytecode interpreter kismet and blueprints maybe dom interpreter cause when i looked up blueprints language it came up with old bytecode interpreter which is way slower than even a bytecode interpreter. ok they could be doing some kind of bytecode with their implementation, but still visual programming languages tend to be very slow...

c# and java are much better, you dont deal with memory / pointers... ok there is some performance and size price to pay, but jits are good at hiding much of it and gc well that can only get better, lets hope.

 

I came into this thread thinking Unity was doomed
I leave it now knowing Unity 5 is king
Shall we say I have been "enlightened"

 

Unity 5 isn't even out yet. So how can you compare that?