Unreal Engine 5 = Game Changer

The equivalent of GameObject in Unreal is actually a component. Scene Component, to be more precise. However, components can only exist within an actor, with root (Scene) component within the actor providing actor's transform. The closest equivalent of "Actor" in unity is prefab instance root. Basically, imagine if "GameObject.transform" was optional, and BoxCollider component had a transform of its own.

That's Unreal object model.

Things get more fun when you start diving into ownership and packages.

 

I don't think ReSharper is the best advice for someone that has problem with performance. I love ReSharper, can't work without it, but man does it slow down a large project

Can't wait until they rework it to be out of process or that VS is rebuilt in x64

 

Yea, i feel something is not good when look into the .vs folder and found a db file of near 1Gb.
€89.00 (1 year) to dont need to pay more? umm.. there is no other IDE that work "correctly" with to much files for free? im not saying is expensive, only sounds weird to me.

More clear, thanks!

 

Everything I've heard says the exact opposite when dealing with Unreal.

No. Visual Studio is the oddity when it comes to affordability. Most IDEs are not free.

 

Granted I haven't used ReSharper with c++ infact I didn't know it worked even hence the name sharper since it's made for c# but anyway. ReSharper needs to load the entire project into memory for fast lookup. Problem is VS is a 32 bit program so there ain't memory enough to index a large project, that constraint should be true for c++ too

Edit: there have been romours for years that they will rewrite ReSharper to a standalone 64 bit program and then integrate with VS using memory pipes

 

They grow to 5 gigabytes or more in no time. My plugin test project has .vs folder with 5.5 gigabytes of stuff.

Basiclaly, Unreal is much more hungry for HDD space, and Visual Studio is a resource devouring behemoth of its own. One of the resons why I upgraded RAM to 32 gigabytes is because I was hitting the swap when using VS and Unreal together. I'd recommend to have abotu 100 gigabytes free just in case, if you're planning to do anything.

You're on your own googling for alternatives, pretty much. They're really pushing visual studio for it. Visual studio has became bloated and is not as good as it was in, say during visual studio 2003/2008/express times.

One interesting possible alternative is QtCreator.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US...rLinuxDeveloper/SettingUpQtCreator/index.html
Haven't used it in ages, though.

 

Agree. Just a comment on this (keep seeing similar things). OOP tools can work, but in C/C++ you can optimize certain code paths if they are causing performance issues. But with Unity there is no access to the C/C++ source, thus you are at the mercy of the underlying design. If the underlying design doesn't hold up in certain scenarios, your only option is to try to make something work in C#, which may or may not work.

Engineering a game engine to be able to work for any type of game, any networking model, any etc. is a challenge. Doubly hard to do it well without making a AAA game while doing it (like UE). The hurdle Unity is trying to overcome is that their original underlying design isn't flexible enough to handle certain game designs (it's flexible but you may pay a hefty performance price). And since they don't want to give out their source, they have to try to make a flexible system available higher up (C#), that can allow different designs and still have good performance.

DOTS, DOD, OOP, all are good tools and have their place. I agree with Unity that data is important and I like their direction with DOTS, kinda wish UE had something similar. However, I don't like not having access to the source code, I actually like working with C/C++ when trying to squeeze out some performance or when implementing a different design (ie: FPS, RTS, Infinite or large open world, etc. have some core differences).

Not having the source kind of puts a higher burden on Unity to get everything correct, because they have to provide flexibility for different designs without giving low level access. While UE is designed as an FPS engine (with some flexibility).

This new UE Demo does some cool things. My first thought is I wonder if that will be able to be done in DOTS some day (a lot would have to be exposed, so unlikely). My second thought is... if I had source code access I could attempt it now.

DOTS does allow a kind of lower level (ie: free from garbage) access and also easier multi-threading... but I'd still like the source

 

Rider is coming to Unreal. It's in early preview right now.

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/rider-unreal/

 

In reality though how many indie developers mess with the source code of UE? Also what if Epic does not pull your pull request, then you need to support a custom build of UE until the end of life for your game which can be decades even

 

I don't want to pay subscription.
Would be willing to do one time purchase if the product is good.

 

Actually you can sign up for the preview and get an evaluation license that'll last until February 2021.

 

Visual studio is subscription too, almost all creative tools are subscription these days.

edit: Community support upto 5 free copies actually, didnt know. Its same as for devops which makes sense

 

Visual Studio has community edition. Rider does not.

And free versions of most creative tools exist.

 

I agree, Rider should have a community edition, for UE4 at least. It's just too good of a tool not to have if you write a lot of C++ code.

 

Yeah I know, but what I didnt know is that it was ok to use for corporate use up to five people.
And most software does not exist free for corporate use

 

Jetbrains have that for most of their tools, but it doesnt do you no good since we use it commercially.

 

If the foundation technology doesn't change, you might still have to bake in one way or another?

 

I'm late to this thread, but I like how everyone is hyping this up, as if any of us could ever achieve that level of graphics. You need millions of dollars for that.

The GI will need a very good pc, unless they invented some unknown algorithm nobody knew about (they didn't), and no doubt has the same issues of bleeding, and will be low-res. I'm sure I could see some of that in the background before she jumps off. Does anyone know if it casts indirect shadows?

The auto-lod seems good, but must take up an amount of ms per frame vs old techniques, so I doubt it will be used everywhere in every game.

I'm not trying to bash it, but I don't think these features are a threat to Unity. These features are more of a threat to Unity:

- Unified renderer with a shader editor
- Blueprints visual scripting (Bolt 2 doesn't even have some of it's features)
- Built-in mesh LOD'ing (not to mention UE5's), with imposters
- Terrain shader that isn't just a diffuse/normal (2003 graphics).

Unreal Engine took over the engine space by being easier to use than other engines, not by having better graphics (Quake/HL1 had baked GI, but Unreal didn't until UE3, 8 years later). Hopefully Unity can catch up by prioritising ease-of-use.

A quick win would be putting NavMeshComponents into the engine. Why is it sitting on Github?

 

havent they release details yet? they said in a week after the announcement.

 

Thanks for that clarification! It's really easy to forget about things you mentioned

I guess, most of the professional indie studios I know. Even with a single programmer handling the entire project. I'm aware of some studio developing their first UE4 not only without source code but also without a programmer, only in blueprints... You can still develop a game like that, sure.

But... if you have a full-time programmer, it's so easy to switch to "source builds". It's so tempting, you have to physically resist.

Imagine that the entire source code of Unity (or another "not yours" engine) is available publically. Obtaining it is easy as clicking a few buttons and waiting a bit until GitHub Desktop fetches the repo. There's no even "code dumps", just grabbing constantly updated repository. Not only release branches but many "dev-branches" like dev-rendering, dev-framework, dev-editor or "master" for merging everything. All non-NDA platforms are there for everybody. And you never pay for it, even if not gonna ever pay a single cent to Epic.

Most of the engine is written the same way as your project's code. Using "Unreal C++" framework, the engine's core cares about hiding pure C++ and low-level platform code (like handling strings or little-endian/big-endian thing).
Compiling and using the engine is like downloading a few hundreds of code modules more. If something looks too "voodoo magic", you can ask online or... come back later when you understand engine/C++ better.
Especially that with C++ environment you already did set up some CIS system to build code on some server and deploy binaries to non-programmers. So push the entire engine downloaded from GitHub to your server and that's it. Instructions to build binaries are basically the same for pre-compiled build or source build.

So... imagine that you could access a source code mostly written like your Unity C#. And you're hitting a wall. Some critical bugs? Function or data unexposed from the engine? Something preventing you from implementing new features in a good way? So you spend 2 days on S***ty workaround instead of simply making an engine method public? You see this code already since source code can also be download with pre-compiled binaries through the launcher. You see this god damn function that isn't exposed to you for some weird reason.
Or maybe engine's code is perfectly fine, but for your use case, it doesn't work well.

You already know the language/framework used by the engine... What do you do?
You can use a lot of bad words, express how angry you are online or... you can just download the source code. Compile it (30 minutes with SSD and old Intel CPU, 6 cores) and change whatever you like.

Oh, be sure that Epic won't accept most of the pull requests. Many of them are fine, but Epic too slow with processing it. Bear in mind, when Epic engineer accepts PR of some stranger, he later takes responsibility for it. Fixing bugs, performance regression, other unintended behavior because someone submitted a "clever improvement"

But most of the time you won't even consider your change to be a candidate for a pull request. To small change to bother. Or simply changes specific to your project. You needed to change something to make your life easier. In my current company, we make small tweaks all the time.

Well, if you gonna support your game for years, you don't definitely want to use source build and have better control over everything. And you want the customized build of the engine when you're weeks before game release. Quick fixes/changes can save your ass.

 

I was joking around with one of the artists at work wondering how his meshes would look if he were to massively increase their detail and bring them into UE4, and he mentioned that there wouldn't be a need to increase anything because he was already working with millions of triangles thanks to sculpting everything in Zbrush.

 

That's the point, you will need a team of artists. Won't it take him a week to model/texture?

 

Yes and no. His first character takes the longest but once he's gone through the process of creating the first one his workflow massively speeds up and subsequent characters can be created much faster.

 

I did 8+ new projects from scratch. 2019.3.0f9, 2019.3.0f13, 2019.0f14, 2020.1.0b9, 2020.1.0b8 and I had been working in 2019.3.0f9 when it happened. I was 95% done. I had been working three years back in 5.6 and upgraded it two months back as the gentleman who got me use of the trademark asked me about it and has been a lifesaver more than once. He bought me the honking computer I am using now. So I dug in as there was no work around to keep me busy.

So, you had a notion you were gonna straighten me out ..heh.. No go dude.. Don't need the advice you offered. You may have a career with the Unity Bug QA team. I have used Unity daily since early 2010 professionally. I have watched the regression happen release by release. The promises broken release after release. The show stopping bugs that never get fixed.

 

The editor would not stay open long enough to do anything. I had to drag the 36 terrain out and into another folder of a new project and then used Terrain To Mesh to get those optimized from the Project because they were not working in the Hierarchy of a new project.. Lost a month of hand planting just detail vegetation. The project was borked. It would not open with everything in it. The UI was gone, the terrains black, the SpeedTrees black. There was thousands of AABB errors in the console and vertices off in Infinity. I reckon once I finished the motorcycle sim I had about 10 days of dev work left. Now I am back to planting trees along 11 miles of highway. That took a month or more the first time so I could cover the sight angles with dense foilage so it would not have to be everywhere. Carpal tunnel here i come, right back where I started from tadada tadada tadadadadom..etc.

 

Thats how 3D assets are made. You have a high poly version, that drives the normalmap btw. Then you manually retopology to a lower poly model. Problem for us indies that buy assets off the store is that we dont have access to that high poly version

 

Right, but I was trying to make the point that you don't need "millions of dollars". Our studio has yet to reach that point.

Only because artists selling assets on the store are targeting the most common use of Unity. Mobile game development.

 

It doesn't matter. What matters that every 3D artist - even aiming "current-gen" quality - would forget about the process of converting a high-poly asset into low-poly, dealing with LODs (even if mostly generated by UE4, but still you need to set up this) and normal maps. And maybe the final "next-gen" asset wouldn't take much more space, with new mesh format, dropping LOD versions, normal maps.

That's upgrading art quality by eliminating much of the traditional pipeline.

As a bonus you could freely use photoscans in your art mix. Keep in mind, you don't need to make an entire game like the UE5 demo. Even Fortnite use Quixel's photoscans, mixed into stylized enviro

 

To that guys defense, modeling the number of assets seen in that demo will cost you.. alot....
Thats why its so nice that we have the asset store, cgtrader, turbosquid and artstation to help us poor indies fill our world

 

Enjoy the foliage tool placement in UE4. Not perfect, but you could easily seed the vegetation there in few days. And the first dirty version in a day. There's procedural foliage tool in an engine, but I not sure how good it is (maybe still "experimental").

Only remember to nicely plan to separate the entire map into sublevels. 11 miles is a lot of for any engine, think about streaming early

 

I much rather let UNity deal with the engien source code so that I can focus on our domain, the game logic. And in the past they have been very helpful and quick on fixing bugs we have found. But it has declined in recent time.

In all honesty, I dont think we would mess with the unity source code even if we had the choice. Just too much work keeping our version in sync with upstream etc.

 

Here is another one. While writing the post to @angrypenguin I am trying to update to Azure Sky 6.0.2 from 4.0.1 I have imported the update it 15 times now. I clicked on 6.0.2 to update ad then import it. Most times it goes all the way through the progress bar and then disappears. This time I had the import button when I chose 6.0.2. I import it and it is 4.0.1. I delete the folder and to start again. 6.0.2 is not available. I wait 5 minutes and it reappears. I go to import it an it won't because another process is using it.. Not in my project it ain't. I cancel the dialog and five minutes later it is available. I have to go through the whole download process again. This is maddening. I want the Asset Store window back. It never acted crazy like this.

Just did it again damnit. 4.0.1 is not 6.0.2..Then it is not available..then it is ..by downloading yet again.. What idiot programmed this crap???

 

I feel your pain, but legitime question here, don't you use git or some backup method? Or those got broken as well?

 

It seems to me like what you're saying is that most indies wouldn't be able to change the source code of Unity in a meaningful way and therefore there's no point in them having access to it. I definitely think it's true that most people are not capable of reading and changing the source code for the better, but that doesn't mean there aren't those who can. Indeed, if individuals or teams run into problems connected to the actual engine itself, those bugs will be found and dealt with way more efficiently if everyone has access to the source. That way, everyone benefits, even if it's just a small percentage of users actually capable of reading and changing it.

I think Unreal Engine, Blender and other projects are testaments of how powerful a community can be when having access to the source code.

 

If I can choose between proper QA, automated test to catch regression early etc, etc, then thats a thousand times more important than having the source open. If I wanted to F*** about with the engine code I would have went with a proprietary engine

edit: and we have the competence inhouse to work closer to the APIs, its not that

 

Why not both?

Here's the thing though - you wouldn't have the mess with the source code, but you'd still benefit from it being available to everyone!

 

With typical workflow, they'd be dealing with retopo after sculpt.
Skipping retopo phase would be great.
Then again, I have hard time imagining animation of anything without the retopo.

 

Did they do a video or talk about this, or is just something that people have noticed? That sounds super interesting mixing something for hyper realism but still keeping the stylized aesthetic just fine.

 

The demo was made using megascans.
The whole megascans library is free for unreal users.

 

Your wording implies that the demo is made up entirely of megascans assets but that's not accurate.

 

Sure, but to the point, they do give their indie users a big bang for their buck, and it's easier all around for indies to get great quality assets for affordable prices.

 

Yes, but just having access to the megascans repository won't alter his statement, and worse yet because you're using megascans the assets you have to create yourself will need to be at a similar level or look completely out of place.

 

How long before machine learning catch up?

 

Does the point system for downloads apply to unreal users? Or is it the case that you can download whatever whenever?

 

Stylization process of the Megascans assets was covered in this video:

A piece of the environment at 5:50.

 

The megascans library is huge though. Funnily enough, the character aesthetic they chose for the demo wasn't "in line" so you can mix and match quite easily (hell, look at how UE marketplace is growing up, everyday you get tons of new assets, every month you get a bunch of free ones and seems to be growing at a faster rate than the assetstore).
Hell there are thousands of CC0 scanned assets that can't be used because they need to be cleaned up, and this is one solution to that hurdle.
Just wanted to point it out not for shilling Epic, but because it's used as an excuse to handwave the engine in general "lol it's only for AAA people", which is not entirely the case.
Also all the library is free for UE games as far as I know.

 

If nanite auto optimize asset to virtualize them, we could probably also import sloppy UVed high rez mesh, which mean cutting down time authoring.

 

The Megascans library is completely free for all Unreal Engine users. You can find more in this video:

 

Fair point, really like that integrated quixel library, unity should take note, and they have a talented fellow swede that is their lead artist there

 

I didn't like the art direction on the main character, didn't fit the realistic look of the rest.