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Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

unrealengine.com

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Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#61

Post by leetNightshade »

kcbanner wrote: post #40
angersock wrote: post #8

It's kinda weird seeing all the pull requests in the bugfix list. Like, it's good to share progress, but it's sad to see it on a proprietary platform.

How is it sad? Everyone is learning how to build a better game engine. Are you suggesting that the same pull requests should have been made against an open source game engine? No open source game engine comes close to UE4 in feature set.

That people are contributing free work for someone else (Epic) to make money off of. Yes, I think they're suggesting to put that effort towards an open source engine, or towards a company that will reward you in some way for doing said work.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#62

Post by danschuller »

jim-greer wrote: post #29
digikata wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if game development work culture is different at the engine companies vs the game studios. My hypothesis is that less/no crunch leads to better productivity...

I used to develop games for PC in the 90s (Ultima 7 and Netstorm). The combination of complex products and hard holiday deadlines was just a bitch. Console development still sucks. Mobile and PC with online distribution are much less stressful. If you develop tools ship dates don't matter too much as long as you're consistently improving in ways that your customers care about.

I loved Ultima 7.

An amazing feat for the time! The world simulation aspect of it was really cool (and something even now you don't see that often. Like a baker going to through process of baking bread everyday)

Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#63

Post by greggman »

jim-greer wrote: post #29
digikata wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if game development work culture is different at the engine companies vs the game studios. My hypothesis is that less/no crunch leads to better productivity...

I used to develop games for PC in the 90s (Ultima 7 and Netstorm). The combination of complex products and hard holiday deadlines was just a bitch. Console development still sucks. Mobile and PC with online distribution are much less stressful. If you develop tools ship dates don't matter too much as long as you're consistently improving in ways that your customers care about.

Interesting. I found PC 100x more frustrating than console. With console there's 1 target. With PC there's infinite targets. No matter what you ship it won't work on someone's GPU, OS version, with XYZ installed.

A company I worked at shipped one PC game and swore never again. Their support costs went through the roof relative to console.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#64

Post by rje »

ousta wrote: post #49
Sir_Vival wrote: post #17

I wish it had better 2D support - the choice between Unity and Gamemaker could use with another solid option.

when i was using unity 2D the downside was that you cant really leverage the engine basics such as gravity for 2D top down games. is it still the case?

Unity has integrated a 2d physics solution that is very similar to their 3d solution. It has different strengths/weaknesses relative to the 3d solution.

Another option is simply using 3d physics volumes with your 2d sprites if you need features of the 3d physics systems. This works fine and you can constrain objects to a plane/rotation axis as needed.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#65

Post by pandaman »

digikata wrote: post #6
rl3 wrote: post #2

Is it me or does Epic have one of the most effective and productive development teams on Earth? This was less than two and a half months ago: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-49-released

I wonder if game development work culture is different at the engine companies vs the game studios. My hypothesis is that less/no crunch leads to better productivity...

I work at a game company and over length of my career interacted with quite a few engine companies. The separation is at where you set the bar.

If a game company shipped a game in a state that an engine company does it could only fly on PC and would only take a little while before players would realize that this company ships half-done games and stopped buying them immediately after release.

I am not putting down the engine companies, it's just the different priorities that both have. A game ships to a consumer who has no way of working around its bugs, an engine ships to a developer who has likely already rewritten half of the engine anyway and, even if not, is able to get back with bugs and request fixes/workarounds. For an engine company's customers it's preferable to get the new features than a 99.99% bug-free build. Game company customers are of opposite preference.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#66

Post by Daiz »

Sir_Vival wrote: post #17

I wish it had better 2D support - the choice between Unity and Gamemaker could use with another solid option.

Seeing as you listed Game Maker there, I would throw in a recommendation for Construct 2 by Scirra: https://scirra.com

They have an excellent 2D HTML5 game engine and a very nice IDE to go with it. The event programming system they use is at least powerful as Game Maker's GML (if not more so) and you can also write your own plugins with JavaScript. Out of three mentioned programs, C2 is definitely my favorite for a couple reasons:

- It's built from ground up with 2D development in mind. Unity in comparison is primarily for 3D development, and while its 2D tools have improved over the years the difference is still really obvious.

- The overall user interface design of C2 is actually from this decade and makes good use of big screens of today. In comparison, you can still very much see the relatively ancient roots in Game Maker's UI when programs were designed with 640x480 screens in mind, not to mention how tons of features added over the years have just been slapped haphazardly into wherever there was room in the UI at the time. Game Maker's drag & drop coding is also just terrible, it's really either GML or go home with it.

- Pricing. You don't have to pay any extra for additional exporters or such with C2. Of course, there is the caveat of having to pay extra attention to mobile performance with C2 games being HTML5-powered on everything it exports to, but on actual computers you can cover the Windows/OSX/Linux combo very nicely.

Now, I mostly do game development as a hobby (which I've been doing on and off ever since I was ~9 years old), but if I wanted to do a commercial 2D indie game project for release on Steam (or similar) today, I'd definitely use Construct 2 for it. If I wanted to do same except for mobile, I'd probably evaluate C2 for it too (simply because I like it so much), but I might end up using something like Unity instead if performance proved to be too much of a headache with C2.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#67

Post by mentos »

jim-greer wrote: post #29
digikata wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if game development work culture is different at the engine companies vs the game studios. My hypothesis is that less/no crunch leads to better productivity...

I used to develop games for PC in the 90s (Ultima 7 and Netstorm). The combination of complex products and hard holiday deadlines was just a bitch. Console development still sucks. Mobile and PC with online distribution are much less stressful. If you develop tools ship dates don't matter too much as long as you're consistently improving in ways that your customers care about.

Wow you know I always knew that Ultima Online had its predecessors in the Ultima series but never really researched them until now. Its blowing my mind right now to see the evolution of the games leading up to UO!

Currently been working on my own FPS for 1.5 years in UE4 (hoping to release a trailer soon) and I owe a lot to Ultima for inspiring me to learn game dev at a young age. I know Richard Garriot has been working on what is effectively UO2 with Shroud of the Avatar but sadly have not had the time to check it out.

Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#68

Post by poelzi »

jim-greer wrote: post #29
digikata wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if game development work culture is different at the engine companies vs the game studios. My hypothesis is that less/no crunch leads to better productivity...

I used to develop games for PC in the 90s (Ultima 7 and Netstorm). The combination of complex products and hard holiday deadlines was just a bitch. Console development still sucks. Mobile and PC with online distribution are much less stressful. If you develop tools ship dates don't matter too much as long as you're consistently improving in ways that your customers care about.

I loved netstorm. One of the best games ever, thank you :)

Re: Unreal Engine 4.10 is Released

#69

Post by Kristine1975 »

ploxiln wrote: post #52
shasta wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt it. Isn't Unreal Engine still written in C++?

It is, but a lot of in-game object behaviors (and almost all modding) was done in "UnrealScript", a sort of java like language that compiles to bytecode. https://ardvaark.net/unrealscript-and-domainspecific-languag... UE4 seems to have more complex scripting capabilities: > UE4 also includes new developer features to reduce iteration time, and allows updating of C++ code while the engine is running. The new "Blueprin…

UE 4 doesn't have UnrealScript anymore. Quoth Tim Sweeney: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/213647/Epics_Tim_Sweeney_...

>Another realization the team had was that the separation between the C++ code and UnrealScript in Unreal Engine 3 held things back for the engine and for programmers of games. "You end up with basically two different programming worlds," says Sweeney. "Each is nice in its own way, but the boundary between is a very messy place."

>"We removed UnrealScript, and went strictly to C++, and we have seen huge dividends from that," says Sweeney. "It would have been almost impossible to get to the point we were today, to release the whole codebase."

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