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Microsoft forks Unreal Engine 4 and ports it to Universal Windows Platform
- shmerl 10y agoI hope it's not an EEE move[1]? MS aren't new to such things. I.e. make Unreal Engine work with certain things only on UWP platforms, putting everything else at a disadvantage. I don't have much trust in good intentions of MS when gaming and 3D graphics are concerned, given how they are dead bent on lock-in with DX12, while the industry is collaborating on Vulkan. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoEvery single Microsoft-related news item does not require mention of a 20-year-old business strategy from before the Internet era.
- shmerl 10y agoPossibly they don't mean anything evil here, but as I said, MS aren't free of lock-in nastiness yet. Otherwise they would have joined the Vulkan working group already. They simply didn't earn trust in that area.
- toss1941 10y agoWhat could Microsoft gain by helping make Vulkan better? I can see them wanting to support it on Windows but Nvidia and AMD will do that for them so what can MS possibly gain?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- shmerl 10y ago> What could Microsoft gain by helping make Vulkan better? Developers' efficiency. But MS understanding of "gain" is a crooked one. They want to prevent developers from releasing anything for the competition, so they use tools to make it harder (lock-in tactic). Or if they can't prevent it, they want to tax it (i.e. to make it more expensive). It is clearly crooked. And I don't mean just to make Vulkan better. I mean MS starting supporting it instead of DX12. Same AMD can produce Vulkan support for them for Xbox quite easily.
- cocotino 10y agoMS supporting Vulkan instead of DX would be shooting at their own feet. Makes 0 sense to them.
- shmerl 10y ago> MS supporting Vulkan instead of DX would be shooting at their own feet. Makes 0 sense to them. Same as supporting standard HTML instead of ActiveX and Silverlight? If not using lock-in is shooting in one's own feet, you have some strange notion of what's normal.
- toss1941 10y agoI don't see the parallel there. HTML was always a secular technology, unlike DirectX which was created and developed by Microsoft for Microsoft.
- shmerl 10y agoI guess you don't remember browser wars. Until MS started supporting standard HTML, they were pushing all kind of junk like ActiveX and Silverlight, in attempt to monopolize the Web with lock-in. Only when browsers competition intensified, they reluctantly started supporting standards (even WebGL). Some still suffer from that lock-in though, such as South Korea who are stuck with very bad decision of requiring ActiveX for bank transactions. Exactly same thing here. They used DX to lock 3D graphics into their platforms.
- floopidydoopidy 10y agoIf it quacks like a duck.
- stryan 10y agoActually, this may be a valid concern. It does look like Microsoft is trying harder and harder to lock down PC gaming. See Gabe's [0] and Tim Sweeney's [1] complaints. [0]:http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-8-catastrophe-driving-valve-to-embrace-linux/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/steams-newell-windows-... [1]:http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/tim-sweeney-to-microsoft-universal-windows-platform-can-should-must-and-will-die/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/03/tim-sweeney-to-microso...
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoNewell's comments are from 2012. Sweeney's comments have been pretty much directly invalidated by Microsoft's actions. Note that this year Microsoft made a point to address Sweeney's comments by demonstrating Steamworks in a UWP app, and the Windows 10 update releasing today makes it easier to install UWP apps without the Windows Store. They've repetitively reiterated that UWP apps can be sold through third party stores, the difference is primarily a technical one: That UWP apps are sandboxed (like Android and iOS apps) and therefore less able to act maliciously. To date, Microsoft has done... nothing I'm aware of... to lock down PC gaming. FUD articles are abound though.
- shmerl 10y ago> To date, Microsoft has done... nothing I'm aware of... to lock down PC gaming. DX12 is a form of lock-in.
- kayoone 10y agoUnless you are writing your own, all the major game engines support multiple graphics apis anyway.
- shmerl 10y agoIt doesn't contradict what I said above. Supporting multiple APIs is a burden, whether it falls on those who write their own engines, or those who write those engines for others to use. You can view it as a tax which increases costs and reduces efficiency. The point of lock-in is exactly such tax, which will deter some from using anything else, or at the very least make it more expensive for those who will use something else. This tax is passed to the end user either way, in the form of slower progress, higher prices, unavailability on other platforms and so on.
- ungzd 10y agoIt would be EEE if they, for example, ported DirectX to Linux. But here they're just ported other product to run on their "a-la Android for desktop" system. Possibly evil but not exactly EEE.
- oldmanjay 10y agoWhat is the possible evil?
- Sylos 10y agoThey can definitely also EEE with this. Take a game engine, create a fork for your platform, wait until your platform and fork has a significant market share, and then start introducing features to your fork, which are not directly available on the main-branch. I can't seem to find anything on how UE4 is licensed, but even if Microsoft is forced to release all of their source code, if their fork is different enough from the main-branch, it might be extremely hard to backport all of these features into the main-branch.
- shmerl 10y ago> They can definitely also EEE with this. Take a game engine, create a fork for your platform, wait until your platform and fork has a significant market share, and then start introducing features to your fork, which are not directly available on the main-branch. Exactly. Or if it's not even a fork anymore (let's say it was merged upstream), make those features platform dependent / unportable even in the main codebase. It will still be EEE.
- Ezhik 10y agoI seriously doubt the UE license will allow this. The source code may be available but it's not "free software".
- detaro 10y agoAnd everybody using the fork still has to pay Epic according to the UE4 license, it doesn't matter for Epic which version they use: they get their 5% profit share either way. If Microsoft were to discourage Win32 apps Epic would have to adapt UE4, but the MS fork can't really make that harder.
- Ironlink 10y agoDid they then change their minds? The github repository is gone (404), and the user does not have any repositories: https://github.com/MICROSOFT-XBOX-ATG/MICROSOFT_UWP_UNREAL https://github.com/MICROSOFT-XBOX-ATG/MICROSOFT_UWP_UNREAL https://github.com/MICROSOFT-XBOX-ATG?tab=repositories https://github.com/MICROSOFT-XBOX-ATG?tab=repositories
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoIf you read the linked post, it explains how you need to connect GitHub to your Epic Games account to see the repo if you see the 404 error. (I didn't know this sort of thing was a GitHub feature, so it was interesting to me. I initially made the same mistake.)
- htaunay 10y ago404 is Github's default answer for when you try to access a private repo you don't have access to. You can test it by logging out of our account and attempting to access a private repo url you usually can access.
- jandrese 10y agoShouldn't this be a 403? Making it a 404 is confusing.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoThe primary reason to do this is the same as why most logins will just say "incorrect username or password" rather than revealing the username is in fact, correct, and just the password is wrong. You don't want to reveal the identity or location of something that is hidden. If I have an unannounced project at github.com/ocdtrekkie/unannouncedproject, you might discover the name of my unannounced project by fishing for URLs that come up 403 instead of 404. Confirming something exists narrows what someone looking to find out something secret has to look for. If you know what my username is, you only have to guess passwords for that username. If you know what my project name is, you only need to look for references elsewhere to that project name. Just knowing the project exists could be telling, if your project was like... github.com/apple/nintendo-igameboyphone it would potentially be a really revealing thing if you hadn't announced it yet. Slack had a big fiasco when entering a fake @whatever.com address would let someone see whatever.com's teams prior to email verification. From just room names alone you could discern some potential acquisitions in negotiation, teams at Microsoft or Apple you might not have otherwise known existed, etc.
- erdevs 10y agoIs this only a fork rather than being accepted into mainline because of Epic's thoughts regarding UWP? http://www.pcgamer.com/tim-sweeney-thinks-microsoft-will-make-steam-progressively-worse-with-windows-10-patches/ http://www.pcgamer.com/tim-sweeney-thinks-microsoft-will-mak...
- bitmapbrother 10y agoWhy would a multi-platform game engine mainline changes that are only applicable to Windows 10 devices?
- United857 10y agoWhy not? Since it's a multiplatform engine already, any platform specific code would have already been modularized from the very beginning.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoIt's also code that modifies the engine in a way that Epic's founder disagrees with.
- Asooka 10y agoI think you could make the case that people should not be locked in to UWP if they wish to develop an UWP app with Unreal Engine, so giving them an easy way to deploy on UWP, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS is beneficial to the engine ecosystem as a whole, even if you think that UWP is not something you should develop for.
- krautsourced 10y agoWell there's also special code that caters for Android and Apple store development, so why not also Windows store. As long as there is choice, there's no problem. If the MS fork were to disallow any other target platform, that would be a problem. Otherwise I expect it to make it to the main branch soon.
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- whatshisface 10y agoIt is true that Microsoft has been behaving well lately (GWX aside,) but it is also the case that their getting-away-with-it power is at an all time low. Microsoft would benefit if they could do all of these anti-consumer things, but that recent stampede towards Linux proved that the tennantry can be easily spooked and dangerous when on the move. Developers are leaving windows to work on Linux and Mac, to the extent that I have not seen a start menu on a single laptop in the entire CS department. If, at some point in the future we all ended up locked in to .net, I would be surprised if Microsoft's management continued their support of these charitable projects. In that light, I think it would be wise for us to avoid getting locked back in - so that Windows might continue moving towards being a nice place to work.
- adventured 10y agoTheir 'getting-away-with-it' power hit an all-time low 10 to 15 years ago. They have drastically more room to abuse their position now than they did back when they were universally feared and relentlessly pursued by the US Government. Smart people actually thought Bill Gates was going to seize control of the Internet and put up toll roads, and that Microsoft would own all commerce. The scare-mongering and media insanity was non-stop for years in that regard. If I started listing sensational scare quotes about Microsoft from that time by other industry leaders, journalists, media publications, government leaders and other billionaires, we'd be here all day. By comparison to what Microsoft went through in the late 1990s, today is a cakewalk, they have drastically more freedom and less of a spotlight on their behavior. Nobody really cares about Windows now, nobody fears Microsoft like they did in 1998, nobody thinks Bill Gates is Satan incarnate, nobody is calling for Microsoft to be broken into pieces.
- apalmer 10y agoI think you are misunderstanding... there are multiple dimensions to 'getting-away-with-it' power. While you are correct that Microsoft is under way less legal and public image scrutiny, they also have lost the lock in that gave them the power to do what they want and have everyone else in tech follow. point blank most families these days have 3 or 4 iOS or Android computing devices for every 1 windows computing device.
- NKCSS 10y agoSo I guess I'm the only one here on hn who thinks this is very cool?
- krautsourced 10y agoNope. Me too.
- ianai 10y agoI thought it was cool, too.
- mobiuscog 10y agoDefinitely cool.
- erikb 10y agoSadly it doesn't say anything about motivation. First instinct with Microsoft is that it is probably a dk move. So some explanation would be great. Oh well, let's see how it develops.
- Voloskaya 10y agoMicrosoft wants more (good) apps on W10's store, so they port as much tool as possible to ease W10 apps development. Seems pretty straightforward?
- krautsourced 10y agoHow is that a dick move? It's open sourced development that gives you better support if you plan to develop for their platform. They did the same for Unity with their VS/VSCode integrations etc. There was nothing negative about that, as far as I'm concerned.
- yarrel 10y agoIt's not open source. This kind of confusion is part of the problem.
- aaronsnoswell 10y agoHopefully this is a pre-cursor to seeing HoloLens build support from UE4.
- FLGMwt 10y agoOnly because it hasn't been mentioned, I'll remind everyone that they recently did the same with React Native https://github.com/ReactWindows/react-native-windows https://github.com/ReactWindows/react-native-windows Cool stuff.
- mobiuscog 10y agoEqually cool (and with Ubuntu, react-native is really becoming a useful 'standard' for cross platform GUI work)
- dbg31415 10y agoThat'll make Minecraft a little more interesting.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoI was betting on MS buying Unity, but this way they can get support for their platform waaay cheaper.
- troyclark 10y agoYes, but did they send notification emails to every developer with write access to the UE4 main repo?