Unreal Engine 4 now free!

Flux on 3/3/2015 at 06:42

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Or not easily, as Renzatic's link goes into significant detail about.

Very easily in fact, all these unity fanboys never bothered to learn ins and outs and accused unreal for being "fps engine" only, while tons of developers made tons of mobile, 2d or rts or adventure games and released them on steam or applestore or elsewhere by using udk, and will keep doing on ue4.

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What on earth are you even talking about?

There have never been AAA games made by unity, by aaa, I mean not just graphics wise. Yes, unity is good for fast prototyping for certain projects, just pointing that most big studios still stay away from it, for many other reasons. You can't make mass effect in unity, period, which part you don't get? You can make a good sci-fi rpg-action game in unity but not in the scale of mass effect in every aspect.

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Um, yeah, I'm not diving into the source code, thanks.

Seriously, why not? In this age of tons of other middlewares, utilities and plugins becoming either free or very low-priced, why wouldn't you want to integrate some, if your project needs? Or fix whatever shortcoming the engine might have. Or port it to whatever gaming system for the future or support some new fancy gaming peripheral or fix the bugs resulting from future operating systems etc...Source code is golden, you never know you might need it.

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Sure. An engine that's fantastic for AAA cinematic FPS's is not necessarily appropriate for garage indies.

So many garage indies made and released and earned their living from "indie" udk projects for the last few years. Now, they have better option with ue4, not just because of source code but getting some grants even for prototyping...

Damn it, I'm not sales agent for epic games:mad:. I've been using both engines for a long time and it just annoys me when people don't get simple technical facts.

zajazd on 3/3/2015 at 08:00

I am porting Thief: The Dark Project to UE4. I need two mappers with 20 years of experience in porno industry and a sound designer.

Shadowcat on 3/3/2015 at 08:52

Quote Posted by Flux

You can't make mass effect in unity, period, which part you don't get?

I think it was the part where you presented any kind of justification at all for your argument?

What is it about Unity that doesn't "scale" sufficiently to make it possible to implement the likes of Mass Effect?

Vae on 3/3/2015 at 10:13

Quote Posted by Nameless Voice

The 5% royalty of gross on anything you sell with it is still there, but it's now completely free for non-commercial projects, and you no longer need to pay to keep up-to-date.

...add to that, the 5% royalty doesn't even kick-in until beyond the $3,000 income threshold per quarter.

Quote Posted by Nameless Voice

UE4 is much much better than UDK, from my limited experiences with both.

Yes, UE4 is better in every regard when compared to the obsolete UDK.

Watch now, as the escalation curve increases with the rapid synergistic development of the engine.

Nameless Voice on 3/3/2015 at 12:10

Underworld Ascendant is being built in Unity. I somehow doubt they'd be using an engine that can't cope with the level of complexity they need.

I still think UE4 is the better choice, but I don't have enough experience with Unity to dismiss it.

The thing is, UE4 is not the same thing as UDK (a simplified engine made for indie developers) - it's the evolution of the full Unreal Engine that has been used in major games for years. They've had a lot more development time and money than anyone else.

Flux on 3/3/2015 at 12:11

Quote Posted by Shadowcat

I have to add "scale and smooth integration to consoles, be it last-gen or new"...People really tried, I know, but Unity didn't deliver to small-to-mid sizes development studios' demands back then. By demands, I mean scale of bigger projects AND multi-platform release...How many AAA games have you played on unity, that saw a simultaneous, smooth release for pc, xbox and playstation?

Sorry, if I sounded a bit obscure. Here are some details, if you want to dig further;

Back in around 2007-2009, Epic didn't care much about the indie scene and ue3 source license was 750K. It was very frustrating to many developers. If your team didn't have at least 1-2 million cash startup, there was no point of even trying to prototype your project to pursue a publisher. During those times, people flocked to alternatives like torque3d and unity and pool of other "indie" engines and unity managed to survive better. Unity source code was 30.000usd and this was alone to salivate many indie outfits. But the terms and support was obscure. They talked about possible ps3 port but xbox360 support had lots of question marks. Instead of paying epic 750k and 3% royalties, 30k was much better alternative naturally and several developers I know wanted to try unity for multi-platform development. They failed, simply because unity wasn't designed from ground up for such a task. But when you paid 750K to epic, your game would run on both ps3 and xbox360 in few days.(In theory, you know it is software afterall but more than 100 multi platform releases running on ue3 before the period of udk should prove a point.)

Knowing their position, epic didn't care to reach indie developers back then and thus many flocked to unity, made successful indie projects but only on a limited scope, not involving consoles. They were happy, and yeah, who cares. But epic wants to dominate engine-licensing business.

So;

Around late 2009, Epic saw the danger of "younger generations migrating to unity, either being satisfied or just simply out of frustration with alternative engines" and they even started calling indie wanna bees (myself including) and asking our opinion. In a short time, UDK was released to masses, as if Epic said "Sorry indies, now we really want to care about you".

So basically most of other engines became somewhat obsolete to indies and the ring was for unity vs udk, thus began many internet legends spurting from over-night developers related to this silly "battle of unity vs. unreal".

Unity is not any easier than unreal or c# is not any better than c++ or vice versa. Yes, you can prototype many many different scopes of projects on unity but if you want the complexity of an standard AAA production and being able to run on consoles, then there is no point of comparing the engines, as used by dozens of studios, unreal is the only choice if you want 100% proven support for multi-platform release or if you don't want to invest in coding a in-house engine.

You can argue why would/should indies care about console development, but shift of accessibility between xbox360 and xbox1 for indies is amazing. In few years, literally everyone with an ms account will be able to develop for xbox1 and sell it. By then, the value of "source of an engine that has been proven to be working smoothly on consoles" would become more significant.

henke on 3/3/2015 at 12:26

Does UE4 block/mute audio through walls by default, or at least have a reasonably easy-to-set-up solution for that kinda thing? That's an issue I had with a first person stealth horror game I started making in Unity last year. I'm considering moving the project over to UE4 now. I'm betting enemy AI is easier to set up in UE4 as well, and of course the extra graphical oomph would be nice.

Flux on 3/3/2015 at 12:31

Quote Posted by henke

No, it doesn't mute audio by default but you can code a special volume to ensure such tasks(as if you are using room brushing of dromed). We did the same with Solarix, special volume to wrap around rooms to define "who hears what and when". I haven't heard any engines that uses static meshes AND they mute sounds by default since it would be problematic for any games other than stealth.

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I'm betting enemy AI is easier to set up in UE4 as well,

Unity's pathfinding and locomotions are very effective for such tasks as well but having source code is invaluable if you want intricate path-finding, which you would, if we are talking about a stealth-game.

henke on 3/3/2015 at 16:31

Hmm, alright. Yeah I've already got the enemy AI patrolling the level in Unity using navmeshes. Sounds like I'd have my work cut out for me even in UE4. Still gonna download and check it out though.

Yakoob on 3/3/2015 at 22:01

Quote Posted by Flux

Because most indie devs don't wanna get into that, they just want an engine that will get them 95% of the way there without having to mess under the hood. Unity does just that especially when you add the tons of scripting and modeling assets available.

You're right that you can't make (or rather it would be VERy tricky to make) a triple-AAA Mass Effect sized game on Unity. But a shrinking minority of games are at that level, and it's never been Unity's intended purpose. The triple-AAA model is not for indies anyway, it takes way too much time/resources/money and is way too big of a gamble. Smaller-to-medium games have proven a more profitable and safer bet, and Unity is just fine for those.

If Unity launched today next to UE4 than yea, UE4 would probably be the better choice. But Unity has a few years running start of refining, providing cross-platform development, and creating a rich asset store that many non-programmers and non-artists can default to.

TL;DR - I'm not disagreeing UE4 may be more powerful than Unity, but "power" is no longer a critical requirement for vast majority of devs these days. UE4 may overtime Unity in due time but for now, I think Unity can hold on its own.