Welcome to Unreal Engine 4 • Hacker News Board

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#121

Post by dysfunction » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 9:47 PM UTC

unreal37 wrote: post #66

techiemonkey wrote: post #52

Yes! Another step forward in the field of graphics.. Soon we may see graphics approaching eye level quality

I read a blog post recently that outlined why we may never actually see photo-realistic games even as the technology improves. Basically, it's a MASSIVE amount of work/cost to create individual blades of grass that independently react to a person walking on them, vs just pasting an static grass texture on the ground. And unless the movement of the grass is really important to the story, it will never be cost-effectiv…

I'm betting some combination of procedural generation and scanning tech a la Kinect will start taking a lot of the workload off the artists. This has already begun to some extent, with many if not most AAA titles using procedural generation of terrain and vegetation.

The algorithms to control grass reacting may be difficult to write, but that only has to be done once. You could as well have said ten years ago that it would never be cost-effective to create photo-realistic CG films, but that has been pretty much accomplished at this point, and game developers are already borrowing techniques from films.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#122

Post by vezzy-fnord » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:04 PM UTC

techiemonkey wrote: post #52

Yes! Another step forward in the field of graphics.. Soon we may see graphics approaching eye level quality

I honestly think it's far more likely that game developers of the future will make use of virtual reality to create realistic games, rather than photorealistic graphics rendering. The latter would be hugely expensive both in computational power and manpower (although procedural generation could eliminate much of the latter, it still depends on your goals).

Also, the great thing about games is that they're not necessarily meant to conform to reality as a standard. If you want photorealistic graphics, go outside. A game that relies primarily on its graphical fidelity is doomed to obsolescence, but a game with good mechanics and an aesthetic is potentially timeless.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#123

Post by zenbowman » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:05 PM UTC

Wow is this ever a change! I remember when I worked in the simulation industry we had to hand out a cool $350k for a license of Unreal 2.5 (and this is when Unreal 3 was already out).

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#124

Post by snuxoll » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:06 PM UTC

lotyrin wrote: post #95

fotcorn wrote: post #58

What happens when you fork a private repo into a public repo on github? Is this even possible? Or how will Epic enforce the EULA?

You get a new private repo which you can't make public. It works pretty well.

And I can turn around, make a new public repo then push the code right back up.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#125

Post by mrschwabe » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:20 PM UTC

Interesting model for software distribution ($xx per month access paywall to source code, leveraging GitHub private repository). It's crossed my mind for smaller-scope projects.

Not sure if this will 'break the spirit' of GitHub and open source, but the next logical feature the GH team could do to accommodate this model more effectively would be to implement a "subscription button" users can click on to instantly get access. The fee is then tacked-on to the user's GH account (some of whom will already have their credit card on file), which is then distributed back to the repo owner less a small commission.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#126

Post by winslow » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:32 PM UTC

Mikeb85 wrote: post #63

This could be huge for indies who want to use something other than Unity. $19 per month is a very low barrier to entry. And 5% isn't much compared to every other AAA engine. And access to source code for this price? Damn. I'm still going to stick to my open source tools (for now), but this just put Unreal Engine on my radar...

Out of curiosity what open source tools are you currently using?

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#127

Post by jhuckestein » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:45 PM UTC

Essentially allowing all devs to use the source code and hosting it on github is brilliant. I imagine bug fixes and other improvements will be shared much more quickly and openly amongst developers. I'm not even sure if this happened at all before. I assume the few big studios who have the source code simply maintain their own fork.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#128

Post by mikelbring » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:53 PM UTC

rkalla wrote: post #36

Everyone seems pretty focused on the pricing - I thought the inclusion of an asset-marketplace directly into the editing environment was brilliant. You could imagine Adobe following suit very shortly here withs something similar and invalidate all those graphic/template/icon/texture/animation sites. You just open the "marketplace" inside of Photoshop and browse around for the assets you might want. Same would go for…

Creative Market has a photoshop plugin that lets you do this with their platform.

https://creativemarket.com/adobe-extension

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#129

Post by gabriel34 » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 10:59 PM UTC

So, they are opensource non-free. It will be interesting to see this model progress. If successful it could be a turning point for openness in software, but would pull requests be accepted into main? Would they get a cut of the cake? It would be interesting to see github handling this instead of patent and secrecy.

Re: Welcome to Unreal Engine 4

#130

Post by gabriel34 » Wed, Mar 19, 2014, 11:08 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

"5% of gross revenue resulting from sales to users." As others have pointed out, that is a huge amount, that is probably 25 - 30% of your "profit". The accounting is pretty easy though. Units * SRP * 0.05 == royalty. That said, it is a lot simpler than investing $25 - $30K up front while building the game, only to have it go poof because the market or your designer flaked out. Figure 3 year development at $20/month t…

Not so fast. Retailers' gross is SRP*Units. Dev's gross is what the next link in the supply chain pays him. That is still true in today's distribution model since Apple/Play/Steam store take some cut of the retail price and pays you the rest. One could even argue that you developing and you selling are two distinct companies and that gross is what dev you makes (actually they are quite distinct business functions, so I'm not bending anything here).