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Epic News: Unreal Engine 4 Released

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Lacabra, it would be incredible if the first game to officially release on UE4 would be your low-poly adventure game.

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I don't work the books, but I'd be surprised if any of the games I worked on paid a royalty after shelling out 500k for an engine. But again, I'm not the money person, just an artist.

But it would even be more incentive for them to cut Epic out, which is what everyone is doing now, so sure, why not.

edit: Ah, so apparently the contracts are on a per company basis, so it could be different for everyone. On several forum posts on the epic board I've seen the number 400-750k thrown around for a no royalty license; which could be completely hearsay. I said 500k because that was the number we through around at Propaganda 8-9 years ago when we bought two of them and I know there were no royalties involved in that specific deal. At Ubisoft, I don't know the numbers as it was Unreal 2.5.

Anyway, I think there is a no royalty free option, but the big companies need to be willing to pay for it and considering they all want the 100 million dollar sales, I'd imagine they would take the hit on a flat fee.

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I don't know about the new one, but Conviction was. But it was modified in a way that it acted a lot like Unreal 3, then because the original Conviction was mainly in the day time it had some really amazing tools for shadows and fake GI (which is why enlighten is taking care of now) along with really solid physics tools for props and such, coupled with an impressive system for rendering specular/reflection for objects... all of it was really cool for it's time and I haven't seen a lot of engines do what that engine was made to do.

 

So it was 2.5 but seriously modified.

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I always got the abstract impression that Ubisoft made things their own, even when licensing middleware. I was actually operating on the assumption that the Assassin's Creed series was running some modified version of Unreal--I had no idea it was running on Ubi's proprietary Anvil.

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I'm told Blacklist uses the same engine as Conviction (or, you know, the next "version" of it) and that that engine is so far removed from UE2.5 that it's unhelpful to think of it as being that engine

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It was a great engine, but was already showing it's age for Conviction, so I'm surprised that after they moved the core team to Toronto and hired new people they wouldn't have just switched over to Ubi's engine to allow a little more variety in their level set ups; but I guess it would take too much time to work in all the mechanics again. I have to imagine they would be making that hard switch for the new gen, but will be really pleased to see if they don't.

 

UE2.5 fundamental architecture on an Xbox One game in 2015-2016 would be hilarious.

 

Anyway, the tech guys at Ubisoft are great, I've never seen a company more dedicated at developing tools and features for their engine than I have anywhere else; but i guess with their numbers they can afford to do it, but it also showed a commitment to the development team, the project, and thinking a head for the future.

 

Anyway, back on point, I will be excited to see what people make with early UE4, it should be interesting, I may be fundamentally against their pricing structure, but the engine can at least render pretty things so hope people experiment with that a bit.

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