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Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

unrealengine.com

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Re: Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

#151

Post by frontier »

antihero wrote: post #130

I'd be interested to see how the royalties work when UE for is not the primary part of the product. Say, hypothetically you had an advanced visualisation component that you wanted to build in UE, or a virtual tour part of a much larger app. Or even using it to provide some sort of AR experience, however this was just one feature of a much much larger project, which revenues could be in the millions. Does that mean th…

Back when UE4 was first released I asked that question in relation to training simulations within larger courses and the answer was that, as no software was being sold, then no royalties would apply! (just the $20/mo subscription cost at the time) Definitely contact EPIC and get a ruling on your specific case, but I was blown away! In the end we didn't go ahead with those simulations as the html5 support wasn't quite ready at the time.

Re: Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

#152

Post by cpitman »

jokoon wrote: post #129

How really easy is it to set up a beginner's project with this engine ? I mean it's a commercial engine, it has all the bells and whistles, but how easy is it to learn it ? Does it require one to use the editor to use the engine, or can I start with a simple bit of code and start going from there ? What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unr…

I think what may be missing that this is more than just a "graphics" library, and that by taking over the event loop and overall structure of the app they make it so that you can get a running game (as opposed to rendering a quad) far faster.

Game development forums are full of skeletons of people that tried to roll their own "game engine", forgetting that their goal was to make a game[1]. Unity (haven't used Unreal yet) makes it so that you can get a prototype done in less than a day. I probably looked like a kid waving my phone around like a joystick to steer my sub around a 3D ocean, changing the handling, etc. Starting with a graphics library would make that a multi-day task.

[1]: No really, when I was younger I essentially stopped working on my game and developed a fully compositing GUI/Window manager. Fun, but totally besides the point.

Re: Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

#154

Post by tsotha »

trendnet wrote: post #141
jokoon wrote: post #129

How really easy is it to set up a beginner's project with this engine ? I mean it's a commercial engine, it has all the bells and whistles, but how easy is it to learn it ? Does it require one to use the editor to use the engine, or can I start with a simple bit of code and start going from there ? What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unr…

I don't have any experience on Windows, but here're my 5 cents. >What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Unreal Editor is even bigger. >...earth to earth when it comes to programming ? ~4k headers, they have their own build system. Using Xcode is not very fun, it's either indexing/compiling, or just waiting while the build system tries to decide whi…

They're all like that. One of my favorite games keeps running out of memory because Unity 4 doesn't really work on 64 bit windows so they had to stay with 32 bit.

Re: Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

#155

Post by Arelius »

jokoon wrote: post #129

How really easy is it to set up a beginner's project with this engine ? I mean it's a commercial engine, it has all the bells and whistles, but how easy is it to learn it ? Does it require one to use the editor to use the engine, or can I start with a simple bit of code and start going from there ? What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unr…

> What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unreal Engine more earth to earth when it comes to programming ?

The programming experience in UE4 is great, but is clearly not what you are looking for. It's very opinionated, And your code very much needs to fit within it's framework.

> If it's a powerful 3D renderer but it's hard to use for simple things and it's not easily extensible, it's not really worthwhile.

It's not a powerful 3D renderer. It has a quite nice 3D renderer. But Unreal is a game engine, and must be treated as such, it's renderer isn't really modular, and if a 3D renderer is all you want, I suspect you can be better suited elsewhere.

> I see it's very powerful, but I'm still wondering about the real utility of an "engine" versus a library.

I could perhaps go through a lot of examples to help illustrate the point, but perhaps the significant amount of games that ship every year based off of Unreal Engine is better evidence that there is significant utility in the "engine"

> if you have some new idea and you are a programmer

What if you aren't a programmer, what if the idea fits within the bounds of what the engine is built to do. Certainly, there are large classes of problems that UE are poorly suited for, but there are also large classes of problems that a web browser, or even a blender are ill-suited for, use the tools when they suit your problem.

> I guess this engine is great for small studio who want to make a real 3D game quickly, if their programming style fit well, but if you're an indie or a demoscener and you're just experimenting, this engine is just too powerful.

I'd agree that this engine is poorly suited for demoscene type work, but depending on your game, UE is great for indies, and depending on what your experiment is, can be great for experimenting.... Not all experiments are technical in nature.

> but I don't see becoming a standard in the game programming community

Unreal Engine is already a standard in the game programming community, and has been for 10 or so years.

Re: Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

#156

Post by Arelius »

trendnet wrote: post #141
jokoon wrote: post #129

How really easy is it to set up a beginner's project with this engine ? I mean it's a commercial engine, it has all the bells and whistles, but how easy is it to learn it ? Does it require one to use the editor to use the engine, or can I start with a simple bit of code and start going from there ? What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unr…

I don't have any experience on Windows, but here're my 5 cents. >What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Unreal Editor is even bigger. >...earth to earth when it comes to programming ? ~4k headers, they have their own build system. Using Xcode is not very fun, it's either indexing/compiling, or just waiting while the build system tries to decide whi…

> Also guys at Unreal prefer new features over stability.

Unity was just as bad on the stability department in my experience. And at least Unreal pushes their new features to production quality. Unity on the other hand seems to push for new features just to hit a feature list on a box cover.

Re: Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

#158

Post by Arelius »

[deleted] wrote: post #153
scott_karana wrote: post #3

It appears they've backed off on the royalties, too: originally, it was 5% of gross[1], and now it's 5% of gross after $3000 sales per quarter.[2] 1 https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/welcome-to-unreal-engine-4 2 https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

[deleted]

Steam does not take 90% of sales.

Re: Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

#159

Post by Arelius »

worklogin wrote: post #101
walru wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wanted to know how the 5% royalty is enforced. Other, much lesser known, engines have attempted to do something of this sort by acting as an intermediary eg. publisher, planning to pay developers after they were paid by Apple. For obvious reasons that was immediately dismembered by the community. The only way I can figure is they'll ask for an iTunes connect login so they can check on the numbers for them…

So a state-of-the-art graphics library, a critical component to your new, moderately successful video game, doesn't deserve 5% of the revenue?

Perhaps not, as a graphics programmer, rewriting the rendering system is comparatively simple, enjoyable, and perhaps not worth 5% of a moderately successful game.

However, UE4 is much more than just a graphics library. I'd argue that it's editor alone is worth many times more than their rendering features. And IMO, it's trivially worth the 5% of revenue.

Re: Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

#160

Post by pushrax »

fuzar wrote: post #123
adventured wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hardly ridiculous when you consider where we just came from, the era of $250,000 - $500,000 source access engines. You're not constrained by obligations if you choose not to make money with your product. So yes, it can be free of charge and free of obligations. Developers have to earn money somehow, unless you want Unreal to cease to exist. This model not only makes perfect sense, the product can absolutely be f…

It's conditionally free. If it were unconditionally free that would permit you to use the term without question or having people call bullshit. When they do call bullshit, which is to be expected, it's absurd to go around accusing them of whining and being ridiculous. Get a grip.

Isn't "conditionally free" still free?
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