Unreal Engine 4 now free

Damn, no lens flare?

Regards,
SB

 

Have to have a colour filter because of the artist's vision too. Nothing like a lovely yellow filter to make it pop.

 

4.11 preview 1. Some interesting things.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?94321

 

Cool. Game made by Epic available as a UE project as a learning resource.

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/e...-match-3-to-help-developers-make-games/631947

 

You can now install Unreal Engine directly from Visual Studio. From the screenshots it looks like you can (or were already able to) do the same thing with Unity.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudi...lling-the-unreal-engine-in-visual-studio.aspx

 

I watched some blueprint tutorial and...

OMG! it looks so bloody easy to use, just like Construct 2!. No need to use programming language

 

blue prints are good for well getting a decent game play layout, I wouldn't use them for a release though, speed wise it has gotten better, but server side work for multiplayer or anything like that, should be done in code.

 

There are techniques that handle silhouettes as well. For example:
http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~oliveira/pubs_files/Policarpo_Oliveira_RTM_multilayer_I3D2006.pdf

I am surprised that nobody has improved these old techniques recently. DirectX 11 introduced conservative depth output, allowing developers to output depth value much faster (does not disable depth culling optimizations). This is important for advanced per pixel ray casting techniques that handle silhouettes correctly (and write correct depth for shadows and lighting).

 

It's really nice. You can do a lot of cool stuff with it. The youtube channel with the tutorials for blueprinting and coding are top notch.

 

4.11 preview 3 is available https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/411p3-released-early-adopters

 

Does Epic have any plan to modernize the UI?
it looks so archaic, confusing (each icon is very detailed), and blurry on HDPI screen with scaling.

or its a standard in "AAA" game engine to have old looking UI like that? Unity3D also have the ugly UI. Simply because long time developers will already accustomed to it.

 

My guess is it's a matter of priorities. Making the Ui look nice is probably a "nice to have" rather than an actual requirement. The ui is actually very good once you learn it. They have an amazing series of youtube tutorials. The instructor is very passionate and concise. I'm sure improvements to modernize the look of the tools will come, but if you look at the roadmap and known issues, there's a ton of more critical work to do. https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap

 

It is unfortunately often that expensive "professional" SW packages have quite crappy (G)UIs. I work on software that cost more than 100 USD per year/user and that looks pretty horrible. I could go on if anyone is interested....

 

please do

 

Actually it is 1000 USD/year/user (+ plugins).

But anyway, these big, "professional" apps are usually based on really old code (25+ years) and the development teams are not that big. So all changes are really heavily prioritized and making the SW "feel" better is hard to quantify and push through unless the boss really cares. And that seems not to be the case a lot of times....

 

When it comes to real life budget, if it isn't consumer facing, functional is orders of magnitude greater than a pretty UI.

It's also why Windows has a virtual stranglehold on large corporations. There isn't a need to spend hundreds of thousands to millions of USD to update something that works just to have it do the same thing but with newer code. Cheaper to just upgrade the OS and machines and still run code that was created 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago, as long as it still works on the newest hardware and OS. And if it doesn't? Then you stay on the older OS/hardware. Hence why large corporations have a virtual stranglehold on Windows (backwards compatibility is number 1). It's a bit of a vicious circle.

Also why Mac OS will never gain significant penetration in the corporate space as Apple have no qualms with ditching backwards compatibility and forcing everyone to update their apps/programs.

Regards,
SB

 

Pretty cool. You almost need it to be a 2-player editor, so one person can walk around in vr and rough everything in while the other person works with mouse and keyboard to make sure everything is perfect without gaps etc.

 

https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1934273/