Unreal Engine 4 now free

[L. Scofield]

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

5% royalty still applies.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Awesome. I was using an old version because I didn't want to pay the $20 a month just to toy around with.

<link broke>

 

[Davros]

Scot post a video on b3d and decides it would be a great idea to make it private.

 

[London Geezer]

Strange, I played the video just fine this afternoon, and now it says it's private...

 

[Scott_Arm]

Wtf ... That link was shared by Unreal Engine on twitter. It was a highlight real showing all of the games coming out, or recently released, that are made using Unreal Engine.

 

[Deleted member 2197]

Double post.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Here's a working link of the "sizzle" reel.

 

[orangpelupa]

why some games are shown twice?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Not too many AA games there... yet?

 

[Thorburn]

Grabbed this the other day and been playing around with some of the sample content. Quite easy to build some simple benchmark tests using UE4 with AI characters in the ShooterGame sample and some camera paths - similar to the old fly-through bot-match benchmark mode in one of the Unreal Tournament titles.

 

[Shoujoboy]

I signed up the second I found out it was free, currently downloading and installing it.

 

[London Geezer]

Silly question, but is this something I could try and learn, play around and see how it goes, with the help of a few good tutorials? Or is it going to be completely outside the capabilities of someone who only every really messed around with Maya and 3D Studio Max, many many years ago, and never with a game engine?

 

[kars]

Just tried the Unreal Tournament pre-alpha. There's no aliasing... at all... All other games look like a crawling mess after this.


*Ok, maybe there is, but their AA is very effective!

 

[Thorburn]

Silly question, but is this something I could try and learn, play around and see how it goes, with the help of a few good tutorials? Or is it going to be completely outside the capabilities of someone who only every really messed around with Maya and 3D Studio Max, many many years ago, and never with a game engine?

There is a fairly comprehensive Marketplace with everything from environments and character models to blueprint (scripting actions) to get you started, along with a number of tutorial projects. Certainly no harm in giving it a look now that it is a free download.

 

[Alexko]

Silly question, but is this something I could try and learn, play around and see how it goes, with the help of a few good tutorials? Or is it going to be completely outside the capabilities of someone who only every really messed around with Maya and 3D Studio Max, many many years ago, and never with a game engine?

If you have some programming experience, you should be fine with a few tutorials. Otherwise you'll hit a wall at some point, probably fairly soon.

 

[iroboto]

/cry. I want to make my game so badly, but I'm torn between trying to learn how to write my own graphics engine and just putting out a product. I guess even with UE4 you're still going to have to write some graphics code so this might be where I should actually start before jumping any lower level.

I guess I suck with level makers though, this part has always killed me about these large engines.

 

[Scott_Arm]

/cry. I want to make my game so badly, but I'm torn between trying to learn how to write my own graphics engine and just putting out a product. I guess even with UE4 you're still going to have to write some graphics code so this might be where I should actually start before jumping any lower level.

I guess I suck with level makers though, this part has always killed me about these large engines.

With UE4, you don't really need to write any code. You can do everything with their blueprint system. It's kind of amazing. What you want to learn should really drive what tools you're going to use. If I were you, and you just wanted to learn the basics of how D3D or OpenGL work, I'd find a simple tutorial and write your own renderer from scratch. You'd be doing boring stuff like rendering a cube, but you'd learn how it works. If you jump into Unreal Engine, you may not really see how that happens.

If you want to make levels, the tools in UE4 are very very nice, and their video tutorial series is incredibly good.

 

[iroboto]

With UE4, you don't really need to write any code. You can do everything with their blueprint system. It's kind of amazing. What you want to learn should really drive what tools you're going to use. If I were you, and you just wanted to learn the basics of how D3D or OpenGL work, I'd find a simple tutorial and write your own renderer from scratch. You'd be doing boring stuff like rendering a cube, but you'd learn how it works. If you jump into Unreal Engine, you may not really see how that happens.

If you want to make levels, the tools in UE4 are very very nice, and their video tutorial series is incredibly good.

I've got triangle rotating on my screen. Drawing 2d images was easy from scratch I found - not much different than working with a high level XNA/PSN@Home kit.

The pain was setting up a Windows Application LOL Oh goodness, but it was good to see the parts about the buffer swap chain and all the settings you setup before your draw to the screen.

My disconnect point is where models and levels get introduced over simple primitives (basically I only know how to work with procedural graphics/abstract stuff that can be computed by simple functions). My next game will pretty much be one of these, ideally i'm going to move to simple 3D geometry over just doing 2D again like my last game. So in theory I would hoping to learn how to write geometry shaders, but UE4 will likely just create the primitive for me with a mouse click (last time I was using the CPU to generate the shapes to be rendered)

I've not a clue how to make complex models, I'm not good at seeing in 3D space, later my tutorial book there are tutorials on how to make importers for 3D programs, but I generally suck with all 3d modellers.

But I'm suprised that UE4 is that abstracted, that pretty awesome. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Scott_Arm]

The UE editor, you can create Blueprints for objects in your world. If you have a model for a light, with a number of light sources and a script(blueprint) to turn the light on and off, you can bundle them into another blueprint and paste them into your levels. The basic editor allows you to do some reasonably sophisticated level design, but if you want really complex geometry you have to import a mesh from a modeling tool. They have tutorials on how to import, and there is a marketplace where you can buy community created models, animations, rigs etc.

You can do all of your physics, animation, game logic, networking and shaders through the blueprint system.

 

[iroboto]

The UE editor, you can create Blueprints for objects in your world. If you have a model for a light, with a number of light sources and a script(blueprint) to turn the light on and off, you can bundle them into another blueprint and paste them into your levels. The basic editor allows you to do some reasonably sophisticated level design, but if you want really complex geometry you have to import a mesh from a modeling tool. They have tutorials on how to import, and there is a marketplace where you can buy community created models, animations, rigs etc.

You can do all of your physics, animation, game logic, networking and shaders through the blueprint system.

nice. Okay. Very much like Unity actually lol. But this is good. I'll try it out. It's C++ right? Unity is C#