Unreal Engine Fouree (4 Free)

[geo]

I think two days ago Epic announced that Unreal Engine 4 is now free to use, but they still get a 5% royalty from your game sales. They've been headed this way for a while since its been free for college students over the past few months. Now is the perfect time to download it. I haven't messed around with it since July back with 4.2 and now its up to 4.7.

They've improved performance a lot and included a few new templates like driving games and dual stick shooter templates. Its also 4 GB for the engine when I remember it being larger. Maybe there are less resources and starter projects for all I know.

I had a chance to play around with it for an hour today to make a top down dual stick shooter from the template. Then using their official Youtube Tutorials I made conveyer belts, generating boxes that destroy into dozens of pieces when shot. Its fun to just play with in general.

Any thoughts on the engine and now that its free? Will we see a sea of crappy horror games like Unity3D? Does this put a stake in the heart of CryEngine and Valve's aging Source?

[AD_79]

DOWNLOADING

[Fulgrim]

It's a good engine for sure. I just hope this spurs people into action. With such a feature rich engine you can do a lot. But, it comes down to what people do with it and how many people are willing to team up to create something great. While it's still to early to tell, this could be the kind of thing that breathes some much needed life into the gaming middle market. Something that the gaming industry really needs.

[Clonehunter]

Guess I'll check it out. It's about time a worthwhile engine comes out to make the Anime porno harem game I've always wanted.

[Phml]

A one-time payment of $19 wasn't a deterrent to anyone even remotely interested in game development, but this change is going to make UE4 games a lot more accessible for modding purposes, which is good.

I see some negativity on the Internet over Epic being owned by Tencent, but damn. With UE4 they keep giving and giving to the community. The royalties apply after the first 3K USD you make per quarter per product. In other words, if you churn out small mobile titles that each make less than 12K$ a year, you owe nothing. If that's not indie friendly, I don't know what is.

[geo]

I think another secret reason for making it free is they're really hyping up the next Unreal Tournament and want maps from the community.

[Archi]

Bought it about a week ago and it became free now.

[Phml]

geo said:

I think another secret reason for making it free is they're really hyping up the next Unreal Tournament and want maps from the community.

I don't think there's any big secret behind their decisions. They want to become as ubiquitous as possible. It follows the Google, Apple and Valve model. Free product, take a share from every transaction. Want to mod? Register in our community. Bought the engine? You get a refund in store credit.

[geo]

Phml said:

I don't think there's any big secret behind their decisions. They want to become as ubiquitous as possible. It follows the Google, Apple and Valve model. Free product, take a share from every transaction. Want to mod? Register in our community. Bought the engine? You get a refund in store credit.

Correct. They make 5% and whatever they make off selling assets to the community. Both things just so happened to come out at the same time. Like Steam has a sale the entire library of Valve games for $20, well they're also selling soundtracks now.

Two things at once. When doing one why not do the other.

I have $30 in store credit now with Unreal. Maybe they give that to everyone or just the people that had paid the monthly subscription for it.

[geo]

I'm currently a level generator. I've got it so it generates rooms of random sizes, cuts doorways and creates a navmesh when the level is generated at the start of the game. So far it seems to be working pretty smooth.

Now I just need to generate random geometry in the rooms which should be easy enough and then make a choice of hallway or room.

[jmickle66666666]

i was about to get a subscription, glad i waited! excited to start using it. i've got a lot of issues with unity so it's good to have other options.

[Reisal]

There is a one time 5% royalty if you decide to sell your game with UE4 engine.

[Coopersville]

UT4 pre-alpha is available now as well.

[FireFish]

Clonehunter said:

Guess I'll check it out. It's about time a worthwhile engine comes out to make the Anime porno harem game I've always wanted.

In japan they release maybe 20 of those per year, some with high quality 3D renders. =)

Muhahahahaha heheheheh hu hu huuuu. *cough.

[Clonehunter]

Coopersville said:

UT4 pre-alpha is available now as well.

And it's pretty fun, if not just a remake of the first Unreal Tourney, seeing all the weapons seem to be exactly the same. But again, it is fun. I even nearly won my first match, so of course it's fun. And really fast paced.

[SYS]

Glaice said:

There is a one time 5% royalty if you decide to sell your game with UE4 engine.

That's quarterly 5% royalties on your gross after $3000 including any merchandising.

[Bucket]

Glaice said:

There is a one time 5% royalty if you decide to sell your game with UE4 engine.

Unless I read it wrong, it's 5% per copy per quarter. That means you're paying out every three months. I'm not sure what that means once your sales drop off; there must be a statute of limitations somewhere.

[geo]

Its 5% of everything. Like a $60 game, they get $3. Online retailers get 30%.

[Stygian]

On a related note Source 2 will be free to use.

[geo]

Stygian said:

On a related note Source 2 will be free to use.

What a non announcement. Kudos Valve. Especially with all the hype going into that speech. I've made levels for Source and its just cumbersome.

Now that I'm used to Unreal 4, its so much more efficient.

[Avoozl]

I think it's going to get to that stage where people will mostly use a certain engine because it's popular rather than just because it's a good engine.

[Inkie]

Source 2 will be free so Valve can continue the time-old tradition of buying up games in pre-development rather than making their own stuff.

[geo]

Inkie said:

Source 2 will be free so Valve can continue the time-old tradition of buying up games in pre-development rather than making their own stuff.

I think Valve has all its genres covered now and won't be buying up games. Valve still makes money on other games that use its engine like EYE, the Ship, Dino D-Day and even Vampire: Bloodlines the Mascaraed or whatever its called.

As for Source 2, from a strategic standpoint, Valve has the numbers, but Unreal has much more resources to make your game feel different. Source games all feel like source games. There's no variety even if you can program variety in. Its just that no one bothers... Just like you can use RPG Maker to make SHMUPs and even platformers.

There are college courses on Unreal Engine. Level design, programming and so on. I don't know of any for Source. They're similar, I'm not sure about Source 2 of course.

Programming in Source will get you fast tracked on Steam. That's also important.

[sheridan]

geo said:

What a non announcement. Kudos Valve. Especially with all the hype going into that speech. I've made levels for Source and its just cumbersome.

Now that I'm used to Unreal 4, its so much more efficient.

I think it's extremely unlikely Valve will be reusing Hammer as their official editor for Source 2. The Perpetual Testing Initiative proves that they have put tons of effort into improving their content creation pipeline and it only makes sense that at least some of that work would end up finding its way into Source 2.

[geo]

sheridan said:

I think it's extremely unlikely Valve will be reusing Hammer as their official editor for Source 2. The Perpetual Testing Initiative proves that they have put tons of effort into improving their content creation pipeline and it only makes sense that at least some of that work would end up finding its way into Source 2.

I hope they would after Hammer has been out for so many years.

[geo]

I was back at it today took me 2 hours to make my 3rd person character tilt his upper body up and down with the camera. I like their plant painting tool. I could have used that back with Morrowind.

Here's me running down NPCs. The car and car, first person view and car controls are all templates. The driver, collision on NPCs and ragdoll was something I had to do. Time to call it a game and slap a $1 price tag on it.

[DoomUK]

Speaking of UE4:-

http://cgcloud.pro/virtual-tur/

Commence graphical nitpicking and disparaging commments about the point of it.

[geo]

DoomUK said:

Speaking of UE4:-

http://cgcloud.pro/virtual-tur/

Commence graphical nitpicking and disparaging commments about the point of it.

The only nitpick that I have is after 8 months of seeing these, they've lost their impact. They're all white apartments with soft focuses and an almost unnatural soft white light. Although I was blown away that someone programmed a wall color selector. Its not difficult to program in, but no one has done it until now.

I keep seeing all these walkthrough style tech demos and they have montages of games, but never games. All of the Unreal 4 games I've played have been awful, like laughably awful, even from a game play standpoint. Well I guess that Unreal Tournament Free is the first "good" game from a game play standpoint and look.

Oh and I think I figured out the reason why UDK games don't sprint very fast. I made the sprint 2,000 yesterday and it it mooves really well, my jump is high and so on. Then I found the glitches. Running fast, jumping into a physics object will bounce me off TO THE MOON! Then if I put the sprint down to 550 which feels slow compared to Doom's walk speed, it doesn't do that. The default walk speed in the engine is 270.

When you adjust the walk speed, it doesn't automatically adjust the player character's animation. Like if he sprints 2,000 that just means he'll walk 10 times really fast. I think a lot of things could be streamlined here and with other editors.

I've also noticed that the car and driver are locked together so when I resize the car, because its fucking small, it resizes the driver. I had to put the driver in there and so when I put the first person camera in his head, he's taller than the wind screen.

After 2 hours on making the character aim up and down with the camera, I'm worried about what it will take to make his head look with the camera, but not the body. Fuck it time to go with grenades and guns!