A first look at Unreal Engine 5 • Hacker News Board

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#11

Post by Trasmatta » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #2

Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine 4 all those years ago before getting too too excited. Big step forward, absolutely, but it won't be as seen here.

I remember the first UE4 thing I saw was Fortnite, which didn't seem that impressive...that might have just been the first UE4 game though, and not the first UE4 footage, I can't remember.

(Just a reminder, this was back when Fortnite was not a Battle Royale game, and nobody in the world knew about the it. That game was in development / early access for ages before it became the biggest thing in the world.)

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#12

Post by deerIRL » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

metalforever wrote: post #6

deerIRL wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a huge jump from the previous $3000 per quarter being royalty-free when they initially made UE4 free. It will be interesting to see if it helps them capture more of the indie studios from Unity.

Yeah I would personally use this instead of Unity because I don’t want to pay royalties on a tiny indie video game that I’m barely making any money on. My games aren’t ever going to gross a million dollars. The licensing model at Unity is vague regarding whether tech workers need to pay for Unity Plus if it’s a side thing for them also (I recall there being a 100k cap).

It may have changed, but back when we were looking into Engines to use, Unity had a completely free license until you hit $100,00 in sales or wanted to remove the unity splash screen on app launch which costed a then flat $1500 licensing fee for the "Professional Edition".

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#13

Post by IshKebab » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:57 PM UTC

OctopusSandwich wrote: post #10

That looks so good! I hope they add few VR related features. I tried running the default VR scene with Unreal 4 and couldn't get it to work. Unreal looks better than Unity but I found it difficult to get started.

I've got the default VR scene running on my Quest. It works pretty well - there's just a slight bug with the teleport texture.

The Unreal Editor was not as easy to use as I thought it might be, but it isn't too bad. I wish it didn't take an hour to recompile shaders all the time though.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#14

Post by crangos » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

Looks impressive, especially the reduced friction for artists. The demo hints at several shortcomings of the engine, though, especially the nanite componet. Stepping through the feature highlight (whatever the youtube compression lets through), during dense scenes geometry often gets washed out, looking less detailed then an authored model would probably look. Hard edges often appear fuzzy, and the fuzziness is not temporally stable.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#15

Post by guilamu » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #8

In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very good and getting close to movie quality. But that "close to" remained "close to" for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre rendered, they are still gaming like. That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hol…

Well, I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that the Unreal Engine will also work on the next XBOX (and any PC) and that the PS5 was less powerfull than the next XBOX.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#16

Post by wastedhours » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:58 PM UTC

trynewideas wrote: post #3

buried lede, perhaps: retroactive to Jan. 1, "Unreal Engine royalties waived on first $1 million in game revenue" > Unreal Engine End User License Agreement for Publishing: This license is free to use and incurs 5% royalties when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your lifetime gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD.

Also > Epic Account and Game Services

I think this has the potential to be a huge shift if enough developers build games targeting Fortnite players. There's an ecosystem right there to be tapped into, and Epic just happens to be giving you the tools to do it.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#17

Post by metalforever » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

avolcano wrote: post #9

metalforever wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I would personally use this instead of Unity because I don’t want to pay royalties on a tiny indie video game that I’m barely making any money on. My games aren’t ever going to gross a million dollars. The licensing model at Unity is vague regarding whether tech workers need to pay for Unity Plus if it’s a side thing for them also (I recall there being a 100k cap).

Well, it's worth noting Unity doesn't have royalties - you just pay per seat on a monthly cost, and it's free indefinitely* if you make/raise less than $100k a year. * (this also means no official support and a few missing features, not sure if UE4 offers everything for free)

It is unclear whether you have to pay the monthly fee if you don’t have a registered business and are working on something in your free time, and have a day job making 100k+. I don’t like how the motivations are out of whack here . Unity makes more money if I don’t finish my game .

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#18

Post by Cthulhu_ » Wed, May 13, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #8

In the past, I have always looked at Demos from Games and thought this is very good and getting close to movie quality. But that "close to" remained "close to" for quite some time. Even though It is improving every year but you can still tell it is gaming graphics. Even if some of the shots are not real time and pre rendered, they are still gaming like. That Unreal 5 Demo was the first time ever I thought this is Hol…

I think with every engine- or console generation people will go "this is photorealistic!", but in practice / real games it doesn't look / feel that way, or (maybe more likely) you get used to it until you run into the next best thing.

That said, The Mandalorian has used the Unreal engine to render real-time backgrounds for scenes, so it's good enough for that at least.

And in films they don't need to do real-time, they can take their time to render a scene.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#19

Post by andechs » Wed, May 13, 2020, 4:00 PM UTC

deerIRL wrote: post #12

metalforever wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I would personally use this instead of Unity because I don’t want to pay royalties on a tiny indie video game that I’m barely making any money on. My games aren’t ever going to gross a million dollars. The licensing model at Unity is vague regarding whether tech workers need to pay for Unity Plus if it’s a side thing for them also (I recall there being a 100k cap).

It may have changed, but back when we were looking into Engines to use, Unity had a completely free license until you hit $100,00 in sales or wanted to remove the unity splash screen on app launch which costed a then flat $1500 licensing fee for the "Professional Edition".

Removing the splash screen for Unity is a feature - Unity has a pretty bad rep (perhaps undeservedly) because so much shovelware uses the engine.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#20

Post by seba_dos1 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

the_pwner224 wrote: post #7

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #2

Everyone should just keep in mind the first look at Unreal Engine 4 all those years ago before getting too too excited. Big step forward, absolutely, but it won't be as seen here.

I'm not sure whether your comment was about a time delay before release of the engine, or whether you're implying that computer hardware won't be fast enough anytime soon. In the video they said it was running on a PlayStation 5. There was a section in the demo where they had interactive gamepad controls so it appears it might have actually been running real-time on a PS5? I never thought I would be saying this but s…

This is a demo. You can easily see that it's structured in a way that allows to easily mask loading of the new scenes and that there's not a lot of interaction going on - pretty much the only interactive thing they shown was dynamic illumination (which is something they were promising since early UE4 demos, and I believe that's what GP mostly meant) and particle system.

You can be sure that demos like that (especially early ones) make tons of compromises that are neatly hidden on the video but that usually wouldn't be viable in context of a regular video game - at least without severely limiting your game design choices.