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Epic News: Unreal Engine 4 Released

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So this is great news.

 

Today, Epic has opened up Unreal Engine 4 to the world! UE4 is now available for download in its entirety, including the full features, tools and the entire C++ source code for PC, Mac, iOS, and Android through a subscription plan. You can subscribe to UE4 for $19 per month, and ship games with UE4 commercially by paying 5% of gross revenue from product sales to users.

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/

 

Edit: Trailer

 

Edit: Editor

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Wow, I didn't realize they were making it so accessible. Really cool!

 

I'm trying to get a sense of who they're appealing to. Is this a good option for amateurs/hobbyists in the same way that Unity is?

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I was testing this back in October and was really dissapointing. Half the features available in Unreal 3 weren't implemented and from the looks of it (at least pertaining to my job) they planned to just copy and paste it from Unreal 3, which was not the upgrade I was looking for.

 

Other then rendering fidelity, I have no idea what UE4 would offer over Unity right now.

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Personally I hate Kismet.

 

Unreal is in a weird spot. There are almost no announced games using UE4. I assume there is something wrong with it. I have no basis for that assumption other than that UE3 was very popular and UE4 isn't.

 

IMO the main strength of Unreal Engine is the tooling. It has node based shader editing, cutscene editors, level editors, etc. It's a much more complete package than Unity in some ways.

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Good news, Kismet's totally different now! It's blueprint! (which is actually pretty rad to be fair)

 

When I was testing it in October and we were supposedly supposed to start production in January my recommendation was to continue to use Unreal 3, as crazy as that would have been. We would have needed so much programming support to get the features it didn't yet have.

 

The same thing happened with Unreal 3 though, and the saying goes "Don't ship a game on Unreal until Epic has shipped their own game"

 

But I wasn't even sure Epic was going to make games anymore, but apparently they are still working on Fortnight and something else.

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I've been using 4 for about six months. I find it to be excellent. Previously I was on UE3 and before that Source, I haven't delved deeply into Unity but by most accounts what Unity has over UE4 is pretty much the asset store and the existing community and community documentation. Both of which Epic are hoping to emulate. And a bunch of rendering and polish stuff, obvs. 

 

The licensing deal is also kind of incredible.

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This would probably have been a much larger problem for Unity a year ago. There's a significant cost to switching platforms.

 

Unity is "good enough" for a lot of small-timers and features like cutscene editors, fancy lighting models and node-based shaders don't matter all that much for that sort of person. I see this aimed more at mid-level devs - a studio of say 6 people with professional experience in UE already - rather than really small or novice devs.

 

Unity also runs on consoles and Vita. Which I think is starting to matter more and more as PC channels become overstuffed - being on console does lend a certain credibility to a project.

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This would probably have been a much larger problem for Unity a year ago. There's a significant cost to switching platforms.

 

Unity is "good enough" for a lot of small-timers and features like cutscene editors, fancy lighting models and node-based shaders don't matter all that much for that sort of person. I see this aimed more at mid-level devs - a studio of say 6 people with professional experience in UE already - rather than really small or novice devs.

 

Unity also runs on consoles and Vita. Which I think is starting to matter more and more as PC channels become overstuffed - being on console does lend a certain credibility to a project.

 

All true, but the $56/month price difference will probably be the deciding factor for a lot of beginners who haven't invested hundreds of hours into learning Unity scripting.

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Unity still has a free option, however limited. This is a big factor for the super small time who are just getting into things and/or have no money to spend.

 

Which is fine, because not everyone has to be going after that market.

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I'm tempted to check this out, I like having a more traditional Hammer style level editor with CSG tools. Also, this should probably go in the Unity questions thread, but it seems tricky to make Unity load custom maps at run time unless you define your own map format and parse it. It comes more naturally to UE.

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I thought it was $19 a month?

 

If it's $19 once, then nevermind, I retract my statement.

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It is a $19/mo subscription, not a one-time fee of $19.

You can subscribe to UE4 for $19 per month

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THEN I RETRACT MY CONDITIONAL RETRACTION

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Yep yep yep! Gonna grab this, was tooling around with a game concept and using Unity, but I didn't like how it was going in my head. When I think I've got the idea straight I'll grab UE4 instead, I love the look of the interface and Blueprint scripting sounds awesome.

 

I wouldn't be surprised to see this end up available at the next Molyjam, and other game jams besides.

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The subscription service is for access to updates. If you sign up, then cancel you don't lose access to the code or tools. Kind of a strange business model unless they're going to be pushing out significant updates each month, but on the other hand they don't have much to lose.

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THEN I RETRACT MY RETRACTION OF THE CONDITIONAL RETRACTION

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I'm pretty sure the point isn't the $19 a month, that's just to keep up support costs per person. No the point is to get it in the hands of as many people as possible and play the odds. Can you imagine something like Angry Birds or Temple Run being developed on this plan? Millions rolling in from one license, and it's not like all the non million making licensees are going to cost that much.

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The subscription service is for access to updates. If you sign up, then cancel you don't lose access to the code or tools. Kind of a strange business model unless they're going to be pushing out significant updates each month, but on the other hand they don't have much to lose.

 

As I understand it you still need to give them their 5%, that's where the real money is.

 

I've been playing around with it for a few hours, did some tutorials. Blueprint is quite nice, reminds me of Max and Pure Data except the end result isn't a horrible squealing noise.

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5% onto of the 25-30% Steam takes is becoming unreasonable, especially when Unreal has very little to offer over other options that don't take that extra percentage.

 

I seriously don't get it, unless they have dropped some amazing updates over the last 4 months, it's still an unproven engine. UE3 was basically in the same state when they released it and it was only until after Gears shipped that it could be made for a game.

 

Dave Lang made some really excellent comments about UE3 on the recent Bombcast and it was pretty much spot on with both my experience of Ue3 and Ue4.

 

Big devs can afford 500k to buy a license (which is roughly what Unreal has cost in the past), but I can guarantee they won't accept any percentage off the top. It's why the bigger devs have started to develop their own internal engines as it doesn't make sense to drop that much money every time you make a game.

 

As a level architect I found the tools in UE4 subpar, the streaming and data management exactly the same as UE3 (which works, but after 8 years, kind of expected better) and several other features I could rifle off after trying to make a level that weren't even acknowledged. 

 

I have to imagine small to mid sized devs would want every penny they can get from their sales with the lowest overhead possible. I'm looking to go independent next year and doing the math on any royalty deal just for an engine seems unacceptable as the margins are so narrow that it makes a difference if I can sustain a business or not. But that's just my situation and I'm surprised that I'm not seeing more people speak up on how awful that UE4 pricing is, so maybe it's not so bad.

 

It's so easy to get caught up on their visual demos, because that's what they do best, but looking the documentation and inner workings of it, it just isn't there for a lot of the types of games I'd be making.

 

Just after being completely unimpressed with the engine, I have no idea why anyone would pay so much for it.

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I will respond to the rest of that later but just fyi the part about AAA devs definitely not accepting having to pay a royalty is false. That is what happens

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