6 ms·

Unreal Engine 4.9 Released

137 points by mminer 11y ago

hacker_9 11y ago
That is an epic list of changes!
- santaclaus 11y ago
  Don't you mean... an Epic list of changes?
stesch 11y ago
I'd say at least a week just to write the release notes. Perhaps even a month. This page doesn't end.
- teamhappy 11y ago
  I'd say they were generated from commit messages. Anybody with access to the repo could verify.
  - brandonwamboldt 11y ago
    They aren't, they are hand created. They talked about it on the live stream a few times. Definitely doesn't match up with the commits from what I can see either. They have a couple people work together to make the release notes, so I'm sure that helps.
- zubspace 11y ago
  I don't know if this is a blessing or a curse. 3D games are very complex. It takes years to grok all the concepts from linear algebra, to scene management, occlusion culling, shaders, physically based rendering, network synchronization, scripting and ai, game design and thousand other things. I think a large part, why smaller, "indy" engines like haxeflixel, godot, cocos-2d etc are surviving is because of the much lower entry level. I wonder if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse sometime under their own weight... How are they even adding all those new features without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me most.
  - brandonwamboldt 11y ago
    The UE4 codebase is very well built and organized for the most part (some legacy code is a mess). Even the community has managed to add quite a few large features to the engine, so I don't worry about it being unmaintainable. I often look through the code base to see how they do things and never have trouble finding my way around.
  - daenz 11y ago
    > I wonder if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse sometime under their own weight...How are they even adding all those new features without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me most. I haven't looked at their code, but I would bet they have fantastic regression tests. Something I've added to my own engine in the past year is "pixel perfect" tests: for a given test scene employing specific effects (soft shadows, reflections, refraction, etc) the renderer should produce an image that is a pixel perfect match with a known correct image. If you begin optimizing shaders and rendering code, regressions are caught very quickly, in an automated way. Sometimes the images are close enough to be acceptable (for example, if an optimization changed floating point precision, resulting in a color that is a shade different). In that case, the test fails, and you can replace the test image with your new rendered image, after you've vetted that it "looks correct" manually. It's not anywhere close perfect in testing all code paths, but the payoff is rather large for the effort put into creating the test.
    - zubspace 11y ago
      Things get interesting when the number of possible code paths increase. One such beast is the Unity Standard Shader. There are dozens of combinations depening on Metallic/Specular PBR, Multi-Texturing, Shadows, Light Types, Light Baking, Forward/Deferred Rendering and so on. Combine this with different backends (OpenGL, OpenGL ES, DirectX, Vulcan) and graphic card abilities and at some point adding new stuff gets quite complex. I guess they simply throw money and play testers at this problem. (Unreal probably more so than Unity) But how long can you scale this up?
    - mahyarm 11y ago
      In iOS they're called snapshot tests.
- dkersten 11y ago
  That is a whole new meaning to infinite scroll.
- DanielRibeiro 11y ago
  Yes. It also is nice tha that Unreal Engine is open source: https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github
  - kibibu 11y ago
    It's not open source in the sense most people would mean though - you're not free to redistribute the code, for example.
DarkTree 11y ago
I've never programmed with Unreal before, but I'm just curious: What method does one use to wade through such a large list of changes? Do you look for something specific, or read the whole thing, or just assume the changes will bleed flawlessly into your project? Very impressive update, congrats.
- brandonwamboldt 11y ago
  They specifically publish upgrade notes at the bottom, so that helps (as many changes won't break your project). I'm only working on a small hobby project, but I read the bulk of the notes. I mostly look through the subsystems I use most often, and skip over others that aren't super important to me. As always, the most important notes are at the top. Also, if you follow the live streams, you're aware of some of the bigger changes far in advance (same if you use the preview builds).
- gambiting 11y ago
  I work in a games studio in the engine team that integrates new versions of our engines and SDKs for PS4/X1 for our projects - basically when an update comes out you look at the section that's relevant to you and see how it integrates with your flow. So graphics programmers are interested how the GPU pipeline is changing, gameplay programmers are interested what are some new improvements in scripting, console programmers want to know if there is anything new we now have to use to remain compliant with Sony/MS requirements....really, very rarely people read the whole thing fully. You read what you need and then try to work from there. Usually a small team integrates a new version of the engine into the project and if there are any problems then relevant people try to help - and if it's deemed stable it's merged into the main branch.
moron4hire 11y ago
The rendering engine is good, for sure, but you need to give it the right stuff to make look good. If you don't have the budget for art assets, Unreal isn't going to magically make your game look awesome.
- brandonwamboldt 11y ago
  I mean, that's kind of goes without saying, doesn't it? No game engine will make your game magically look awesome if you don't have the budget for art assets and don't have an artist on your team. That said, the tools make it very easy for artists with no programming experience to make fantastic looking games with in depth game mechanics without using programming, so thats a plus. The marketplace has quite a few high quality art assets, but they are pretty expensive, with each bundle ranging from $20-80 basically. The marketplace is lacking content for sure though, especially compared to the Unity asset store. More content gets added each week though.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    Judging from the number of people jumping on to Unreal and Unity, I don't think it does go without saying. And if you use the marketplace assets, you're going to end up with a game that looks like everyone else's game that also uses assets out of the marketplace. It makes certain aspects of connecting art assets with gameplay code easier, but I don't think it at all makes it "very easy". We're still talking about a non-trivial amount of programming here. If you're not a programmer already, gameplay code is still going to be a struggle.
    - deelowe 11y ago
      uhh... What's your point? Game development requires knowledge of game development and that you won't have a good looking game without decent art assets?
  - Rayearth 11y ago
    Even with the asset stores, have UE or Unity reached the point of being a "one stop shop"? It still seems like an art tool like Blender or Maya is also a required link in the toolchain for anything but the smallest of projects.
brayton 11y ago
What are the best VR experiences built with Unreal?
- soylentcola 11y ago
  What, like most demanding/nicest looking? Or most entertaining and fun? I believe the DX12 "Elemental" demo works with the Oculus dev units. I haven't gotten around to testing it but this thread has reminded me to give it a run after work. As far as most entertaining, that'll probably depend on what you're looking for and what your platform is. I've only got a Rift DK2 so I don't know about GearVR or Cardboard or Vive, etc.
Scuds 11y ago
There's an entire section for Playstation 4 improvements but only a few scant mentions of Xbox One. Are consoles done in parity, or is UE4 favoring PS4 development over XB1?
- cobalt 11y ago
  it's probably that the xbox is better supported currently actually. I think the xbox has historically had better support (Gears of War probably pushed a lot of code into the engine)
- venomsnake 11y ago
  I would say that MS once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and the latest sales trends were not good for the xbox. http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselling-the-xbox-one-by-almost-2-to-1-and-that-s-the-good-news--1298498 http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselli... Engine vendors follow where the install base is.
lupinglade 11y ago
Go Epic! Everyone should check out the new Unreal Tournament pre-alpha too, very fun games to be had!
- rancur 11y ago
  any benchmarks on this? this will be the next game I upgrade my GPU for
CmonDev 11y ago
> Microsoft's engineers added support for DirectX 12 to UE4 Don't you love it when everyone is competing on a level ground?
- pmalynin 11y ago
  AMD Engineers could have added support for Mantle just as well.
  - socceroos 11y ago
    AMD has 'discontinued' Mantle in favour of OpenGL Vulkan. Vulkan borrows heavily from Mantle.
    - Narishma 11y ago
      It's called Vulkan, not OpenGL Vulkan. It's not related to OpenGL, other than being made by the Khronos group.
      - socceroos 11y ago
        Well, it used to be referred to as the "Next Generation OpenGL Initiative", but yes, its not technically the old OpenGL API any more.
cwyers 11y ago
It's fascinating to me that they've already hit 4.9 and we've yet to see a major AAA title running UE4 -- all the big Unreal titles we've seen so far this year (Batman: Arkham Knight, Mortal Kombat X) have all been UE3.
- arca_vorago 11y ago
  AAA titles dont get done in a year, which is about how long UE4 has been out. On top of that, I would say UE4 is just now getting to a place where it would be ready to be used in an AAA pipeline, so unless they spent a ton of time on asset creation before hand, I wouldnt expect to se any AAA titles for at least another year or even two.
- Impossible 11y ago
  I think this says more about the current state of AAA games rather than Unreal Engine. Batman and Mortal Kombat have years of engine and gameplay work and diverged from vanilla UE3 a long time ago. It's easier for those studios to upgrade their renderer and port to modern consoles than it is to throw out and rewrite years of custom work. Other surviving AAA franchises use in-house publisher engines or long running franchise specific engines. ARK (http://www.playark.com/ http://www.playark.com/) is a solid success, but it's a mid-tier game. Fable Legends, Gears of War 4, Street Fighter V, Lawbreakers, Tekken 7 and a handful of other games can probably be considered AAA. Given where the games business is right now I think most commercial UE4 titles will be mid-tier indie titles from ex-AAA developers, and Epic has tailored their business model and engine to reflect that reality.
Paul_S 11y ago
All the mainstream engines now support a linux target (and in fact UE supported it for donkeys years) but so few developers release it, partly due to a dependency on an external service or framework. But I'm hopeful now, especially if that service is steam.
kitsunesoba 11y ago
How Blender and OS X friendly is Unreal these days? I'd like to dabble with it, but I heard that its Mac support started off rocky. I also don't feel like learning an entirely different 3D tool when I'm already familiar with Blender.
- Voltage 11y ago
  I use it on OSX just fine. I also work sharing content with colleagues across filesystems. Regarding Blender, Unreal accepts FBX file format, and I've had no issues with imports from Blender.
unoti 11y ago
How is mobile support now? I'm interested in making simple mobile titles, but Unreal seems targetted at making super high performance games on high end mobile devices, rather than simple games that most devices can run. Tappy Chicken would make my phone get super hot and destroyed my battery-- and that's about as simple as a game can get. Is Unreal a good choice now for making straightforward mobile games? A year ago, I felt like Unity was a better choice for that, but wonder if that's still true today.

137 points by mminer 11y ago

hacker_9 11y ago

That is an epic list of changes!

santaclaus 11y ago
Don't you mean... an Epic list of changes?

stesch 11y ago

I'd say at least a week just to write the release notes. Perhaps even a month. This page doesn't end.

teamhappy 11y ago
I'd say they were generated from commit messages. Anybody with access to the repo could verify.
- brandonwamboldt 11y ago
  They aren't, they are hand created. They talked about it on the live stream a few times. Definitely doesn't match up with the commits from what I can see either. They have a couple people work together to make the release notes, so I'm sure that helps.
zubspace 11y ago
I don't know if this is a blessing or a curse. 3D games are very complex. It takes years to grok all the concepts from linear algebra, to scene management, occlusion culling, shaders, physically based rendering, network synchronization, scripting and ai, game design and thousand other things. I think a large part, why smaller, "indy" engines like haxeflixel, godot, cocos-2d etc are surviving is because of the much lower entry level. I wonder if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse sometime under their own weight... How are they even adding all those new features without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me most.
- brandonwamboldt 11y ago
  The UE4 codebase is very well built and organized for the most part (some legacy code is a mess). Even the community has managed to add quite a few large features to the engine, so I don't worry about it being unmaintainable. I often look through the code base to see how they do things and never have trouble finding my way around.
- daenz 11y ago
  > I wonder if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse sometime under their own weight...How are they even adding all those new features without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me most. I haven't looked at their code, but I would bet they have fantastic regression tests. Something I've added to my own engine in the past year is "pixel perfect" tests: for a given test scene employing specific effects (soft shadows, reflections, refraction, etc) the renderer should produce an image that is a pixel perfect match with a known correct image. If you begin optimizing shaders and rendering code, regressions are caught very quickly, in an automated way. Sometimes the images are close enough to be acceptable (for example, if an optimization changed floating point precision, resulting in a color that is a shade different). In that case, the test fails, and you can replace the test image with your new rendered image, after you've vetted that it "looks correct" manually. It's not anywhere close perfect in testing all code paths, but the payoff is rather large for the effort put into creating the test.
  - zubspace 11y ago
    Things get interesting when the number of possible code paths increase. One such beast is the Unity Standard Shader. There are dozens of combinations depening on Metallic/Specular PBR, Multi-Texturing, Shadows, Light Types, Light Baking, Forward/Deferred Rendering and so on. Combine this with different backends (OpenGL, OpenGL ES, DirectX, Vulcan) and graphic card abilities and at some point adding new stuff gets quite complex. I guess they simply throw money and play testers at this problem. (Unreal probably more so than Unity) But how long can you scale this up?
  - mahyarm 11y ago
    In iOS they're called snapshot tests.
dkersten 11y ago
That is a whole new meaning to infinite scroll.
DanielRibeiro 11y ago
Yes. It also is nice tha that Unreal Engine is open source: https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github
- kibibu 11y ago
  It's not open source in the sense most people would mean though - you're not free to redistribute the code, for example.

DarkTree 11y ago

I've never programmed with Unreal before, but I'm just curious: What method does one use to wade through such a large list of changes? Do you look for something specific, or read the whole thing, or just assume the changes will bleed flawlessly into your project? Very impressive update, congrats.

brandonwamboldt 11y ago
They specifically publish upgrade notes at the bottom, so that helps (as many changes won't break your project). I'm only working on a small hobby project, but I read the bulk of the notes. I mostly look through the subsystems I use most often, and skip over others that aren't super important to me. As always, the most important notes are at the top. Also, if you follow the live streams, you're aware of some of the bigger changes far in advance (same if you use the preview builds).
gambiting 11y ago
I work in a games studio in the engine team that integrates new versions of our engines and SDKs for PS4/X1 for our projects - basically when an update comes out you look at the section that's relevant to you and see how it integrates with your flow. So graphics programmers are interested how the GPU pipeline is changing, gameplay programmers are interested what are some new improvements in scripting, console programmers want to know if there is anything new we now have to use to remain compliant with Sony/MS requirements....really, very rarely people read the whole thing fully. You read what you need and then try to work from there. Usually a small team integrates a new version of the engine into the project and if there are any problems then relevant people try to help - and if it's deemed stable it's merged into the main branch.

moron4hire 11y ago

The rendering engine is good, for sure, but you need to give it the right stuff to make look good. If you don't have the budget for art assets, Unreal isn't going to magically make your game look awesome.

brandonwamboldt 11y ago
I mean, that's kind of goes without saying, doesn't it? No game engine will make your game magically look awesome if you don't have the budget for art assets and don't have an artist on your team. That said, the tools make it very easy for artists with no programming experience to make fantastic looking games with in depth game mechanics without using programming, so thats a plus. The marketplace has quite a few high quality art assets, but they are pretty expensive, with each bundle ranging from $20-80 basically. The marketplace is lacking content for sure though, especially compared to the Unity asset store. More content gets added each week though.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Judging from the number of people jumping on to Unreal and Unity, I don't think it does go without saying. And if you use the marketplace assets, you're going to end up with a game that looks like everyone else's game that also uses assets out of the marketplace. It makes certain aspects of connecting art assets with gameplay code easier, but I don't think it at all makes it "very easy". We're still talking about a non-trivial amount of programming here. If you're not a programmer already, gameplay code is still going to be a struggle.
  - deelowe 11y ago
    uhh... What's your point? Game development requires knowledge of game development and that you won't have a good looking game without decent art assets?
- Rayearth 11y ago
  Even with the asset stores, have UE or Unity reached the point of being a "one stop shop"? It still seems like an art tool like Blender or Maya is also a required link in the toolchain for anything but the smallest of projects.

brayton 11y ago

What are the best VR experiences built with Unreal?

soylentcola 11y ago
What, like most demanding/nicest looking? Or most entertaining and fun? I believe the DX12 "Elemental" demo works with the Oculus dev units. I haven't gotten around to testing it but this thread has reminded me to give it a run after work. As far as most entertaining, that'll probably depend on what you're looking for and what your platform is. I've only got a Rift DK2 so I don't know about GearVR or Cardboard or Vive, etc.

Scuds 11y ago

There's an entire section for Playstation 4 improvements but only a few scant mentions of Xbox One. Are consoles done in parity, or is UE4 favoring PS4 development over XB1?

cobalt 11y ago
it's probably that the xbox is better supported currently actually. I think the xbox has historically had better support (Gears of War probably pushed a lot of code into the engine)
venomsnake 11y ago
I would say that MS once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and the latest sales trends were not good for the xbox. http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselling-the-xbox-one-by-almost-2-to-1-and-that-s-the-good-news--1298498 http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselli... Engine vendors follow where the install base is.

lupinglade 11y ago

Go Epic! Everyone should check out the new Unreal Tournament pre-alpha too, very fun games to be had!

rancur 11y ago
any benchmarks on this? this will be the next game I upgrade my GPU for

CmonDev 11y ago

> Microsoft's engineers added support for DirectX 12 to UE4 Don't you love it when everyone is competing on a level ground?

pmalynin 11y ago
AMD Engineers could have added support for Mantle just as well.
- socceroos 11y ago
  AMD has 'discontinued' Mantle in favour of OpenGL Vulkan. Vulkan borrows heavily from Mantle.
  - Narishma 11y ago
    It's called Vulkan, not OpenGL Vulkan. It's not related to OpenGL, other than being made by the Khronos group.
    - socceroos 11y ago
      Well, it used to be referred to as the "Next Generation OpenGL Initiative", but yes, its not technically the old OpenGL API any more.

cwyers 11y ago

It's fascinating to me that they've already hit 4.9 and we've yet to see a major AAA title running UE4 -- all the big Unreal titles we've seen so far this year (Batman: Arkham Knight, Mortal Kombat X) have all been UE3.

arca_vorago 11y ago
AAA titles dont get done in a year, which is about how long UE4 has been out. On top of that, I would say UE4 is just now getting to a place where it would be ready to be used in an AAA pipeline, so unless they spent a ton of time on asset creation before hand, I wouldnt expect to se any AAA titles for at least another year or even two.
Impossible 11y ago
I think this says more about the current state of AAA games rather than Unreal Engine. Batman and Mortal Kombat have years of engine and gameplay work and diverged from vanilla UE3 a long time ago. It's easier for those studios to upgrade their renderer and port to modern consoles than it is to throw out and rewrite years of custom work. Other surviving AAA franchises use in-house publisher engines or long running franchise specific engines. ARK (http://www.playark.com/ http://www.playark.com/) is a solid success, but it's a mid-tier game. Fable Legends, Gears of War 4, Street Fighter V, Lawbreakers, Tekken 7 and a handful of other games can probably be considered AAA. Given where the games business is right now I think most commercial UE4 titles will be mid-tier indie titles from ex-AAA developers, and Epic has tailored their business model and engine to reflect that reality.

Paul_S 11y ago

All the mainstream engines now support a linux target (and in fact UE supported it for donkeys years) but so few developers release it, partly due to a dependency on an external service or framework. But I'm hopeful now, especially if that service is steam.

kitsunesoba 11y ago

How Blender and OS X friendly is Unreal these days? I'd like to dabble with it, but I heard that its Mac support started off rocky. I also don't feel like learning an entirely different 3D tool when I'm already familiar with Blender.

Voltage 11y ago
I use it on OSX just fine. I also work sharing content with colleagues across filesystems. Regarding Blender, Unreal accepts FBX file format, and I've had no issues with imports from Blender.

unoti 11y ago

How is mobile support now? I'm interested in making simple mobile titles, but Unreal seems targetted at making super high performance games on high end mobile devices, rather than simple games that most devices can run. Tappy Chicken would make my phone get super hot and destroyed my battery-- and that's about as simple as a game can get. Is Unreal a good choice now for making straightforward mobile games? A year ago, I felt like Unity was a better choice for that, but wonder if that's still true today.