8 ms·

Unreal Engine 4.26

74 points by dagmx 6y ago

modeless 6y ago
The volume of stuff here is bonkers. Is every Unreal point release like this?
- tomc1985 6y ago
  It's not a point release. The '26' can be thought of as the major version number, and point releases will be like 4.26.1 Think of 4.26.1 as "Unreal Engine 4, version 26, revision 1"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  It's pretty much par for the course for game engines and 3D software to have a ridiculous number of features and advancements every year. Honestly puts almost all other creative tools, especially the likes of Adobe to shame.
elevenoh 6y ago
I - and many I know - won't spend the majority of our waking lives developing atop an engine that's now 40% owned by Tencent. Why? Because my users trust me. So I won't make decisions that increase the likelihood of my users being exploited. User exploitation is something tech folks doesn't seem consider, for now, anyway. But thankfully folks are waking up, and it's effecting valuations. Sad to see that Epic sold out. Tim Sweeney (epic CEO) acted short term out of the allure of $. It'll be hard to look into your employees & children's eyes not deeply regret this. I've shifted to Unity. Turns out it's remarkably better, so I can't complain about this impetus for the switch.
- echelon 6y ago
  Why didn't Tim Sweeney try to get funding elsewhere? It seems like he had a tech company and could have gone with any VC firm. Did he want to keep it private?
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Supposedly Tim Sweeney saw the writing on the wall in 2012 as Epic sold off the Gears franchise to Microsoft that "free-to-pay" "Games as a Service" were the future of the industry and decided to shop around for expertise in that area. Tencent already had expertise in that area (both homegrown in China with several successful "GaaS" games and in already owning Riot Games at that time), and the investment was also supposedly a signifier of a bidirectional exchange of expertise sharing. One primary source linked from Wikipedia: https://www.polygon.com/a/epic-4-0/the-four-lives-of-epic-games https://www.polygon.com/a/epic-4-0/the-four-lives-of-epic-ga...
- nuclearcookie 6y ago
  Out of legitimate curiosity, 1: What are you afraid of, now that the engine is partly owned by Tencent? The engine is OSS after all. What paths do you see for potential break of trust? 2: What are your use cases that you need a game engine for (making mobile games, console games, PC games, arch viz, ...) 3: What points make you feel like Unity is remarkably better? I'm asking these last 2 points because I'm in the field myself and I do have some different experiences regarding choice of engines. Thanks! * And what do you
  - AntiRush 6y ago
    Unreal, while source available, is not open source software. [1] 1. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing
  - jayd16 6y ago
    For the first 80% of a game, Unity feels great. It becomes a pain during the 2nd 80%.
    - purple-again 6y ago
      I hope that second 80% wasn’t a typo because it made me spit my tea out in laughter. I’ve tried my hand at a few indie games like probably every programmer/gamer and wow does that last mile to “done enough to say done with a straight face” seem to stretch on into infinity.
      - ortusdux 6y ago
        Having worked at a startup who's product was built around unity, that 2nd 80% is a killer.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  Tim Sweeney is the majority shareholder of Epic. https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1181944951686488066?lang=en https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/118194495168648806...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- cleansy 6y ago
  I’m curious to know why exactly is Tencent‘s share in Epic relevant while unity is VC funded and has the same pressure of making money?
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  I doubt your users give a crap. My experience with unity, as a free user, was it creating a TB of log files of nothing but it complaining that it couldn't connect to the internet to phone home its telemetry. I don't think either engine's approach here is particularly noteworthy though.
echelon 6y ago
I'm just getting started with Unreal, and I've got an overwhelming amount to learn. It feels like embarking into an entirely new field. I know Google works for these questions, but I'd like to hear opinionated responses if people have experience: How do you manage / version assets? Git? Git LFS? ...? How do you import photogrammetry assets? Do you need to process them in other software first, and is there a desired format to put them in? What's the best way to import and version them? Is networking support for multiple players something that works out of the box? Or do you have to hand roll this and the server code? Are there tools for integrating sensors like VR tracking and Kinect? What about adding real time point cloud data into the scene? How do you tweak shaders? Is there a good guide to shader development that is Unreal Engine aware? How do you delve into raw C++? Is Rust supported? How might I find people with experience to work with, review my code, or potentially hire?
- momothereal 6y ago
  For versioning, you can look at this plugin released/improved by Project Borealis: https://github.com/ProjectBorealis/UE4GitPlugin https://github.com/ProjectBorealis/UE4GitPlugin
- jayd16 6y ago
  I have more experience with Unity and I'm going to ask you to just Google most of this but... Git LFS is fine. Many shops use Perforce (although I hate it). >import photogrammetry assets? Depends what you have. The standard pipeline is to use a tool like Maya or Blender for model work and import into the engine as obj or fbx files. Unreal is supposed to have a pretty good out of the box network setup. Yes every VR platform seems to have an SDK for Unity and Unreal. Shaders and shader dev are a very deep topic that you should google.
- offtop5 6y ago
  I use Git LFS with my Unity projects. Other systems exist, like Plastic SCM, but their much much harder to use. I had issues with a contractor who couldn't figure it out and it partially lead to us abandoning that version of the project ( on v3 now, had to change direction though). Unreal is significantly harder than Unity, unless you stick to blueprints. Unreal's C++ is a harder language than Unity's C#. Plus I find Unity's community to be much more newbie friendly. Unreal tends to heavily tilt towards massive projects. Unity treats mobile as a first class citizen and it's very easy to get started. Then again, I've been using Unity since 2012 roughly, had I started with Unreal I might have a different opinion.
troughway 6y ago
I find it a curiosity that John Carmack is perpetually touted as the whiz kid even though Tim Sweeney has done far, far more from both a technological standpoint and a business standpoint. But then again I'll never understand the fawning to begin with so there's that.
- IronRanger 6y ago
  Because Tim Sweeney is just not as charismatic, unfortunately. Great guy though.
  - fullstop 6y ago
    Rocket League used to have Linux support before he came along. Now playing it in Linux can get you banned from their platform.
- Grazester 6y ago
  Is Sweeney the lead programmer with Unreal still? Carmack seemed to care more about the technical side of things and programming. I think to him ID Software just served for allowing him to just do what he loved to do.
  - troughway 6y ago
    I faintly recall an interview with one of the developers not too long ago, maybe a few years ago or so, where they said Sweeney still touches some 80% of the code base. Also, there's always this old gem that HN should get giddy about: https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced... I just think JC/Abrash/etc have an aura/cult of personality that doesn't seem all that impressive when you get someone who is a powerhouse of tech and business acumen like Sweeney next to them.
    - bananabiscuit 6y ago
      What makes those slides so special?
klmadfejno 6y ago
I've been waiting for this for a while. Congrats on the release. I'm a little concerned the new physics will be buggy but whatever, I'm upgrading my project. The really cool stuff in my opinion is the water system, the sky system (beautiful volumetric clouds!), and the full body solver for ik animation. The last one isn't a new thing for game engines, but the first two far exceed any free nature rendering tools I've ever seen. The hair seems really cool but I get the sense it may be hard to get into. The accessibility of making high quality looking games is very good these days. That makes a big difference in terms of maintaining a willingness to keep plugging away at a project. Especially if one lacks the artistic skills to make up for it at the beginning.
pjmlp 6y ago
> Removed: OpenGL Desktop Rendering And so it starts.
- lazypenguin 6y ago
  That caught my attention as well. Godot made the same choice: vulkan for all and opengl es2 for mobile/legacy. I just hope that engines keep making the effort to maintain a backwards compatible renderer for a few more years. Not every game is a high fidelity behemoth and not every player has a beefy machine. I would hate to exclude players from a simple game just because their machine is older.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Agreed, yet if you watch some Vulkan talks that seems to be the direction that is being pushed, with OpenGL being a library on top of Vulkan. The problem is that not everyone actually needs Vulkan, and for those middleware seems to be the only way to avoid going into Vulkan low level programming.

Unreal Engine 4.26

74 points by dagmx 6y ago

modeless 6y ago

The volume of stuff here is bonkers. Is every Unreal point release like this?

tomc1985 6y ago
It's not a point release. The '26' can be thought of as the major version number, and point releases will be like 4.26.1 Think of 4.26.1 as "Unreal Engine 4, version 26, revision 1"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
It's pretty much par for the course for game engines and 3D software to have a ridiculous number of features and advancements every year. Honestly puts almost all other creative tools, especially the likes of Adobe to shame.

elevenoh 6y ago

I - and many I know - won't spend the majority of our waking lives developing atop an engine that's now 40% owned by Tencent. Why? Because my users trust me. So I won't make decisions that increase the likelihood of my users being exploited. User exploitation is something tech folks doesn't seem consider, for now, anyway. But thankfully folks are waking up, and it's effecting valuations. Sad to see that Epic sold out. Tim Sweeney (epic CEO) acted short term out of the allure of $. It'll be hard to look into your employees & children's eyes not deeply regret this. I've shifted to Unity. Turns out it's remarkably better, so I can't complain about this impetus for the switch.

echelon 6y ago
Why didn't Tim Sweeney try to get funding elsewhere? It seems like he had a tech company and could have gone with any VC firm. Did he want to keep it private?
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Supposedly Tim Sweeney saw the writing on the wall in 2012 as Epic sold off the Gears franchise to Microsoft that "free-to-pay" "Games as a Service" were the future of the industry and decided to shop around for expertise in that area. Tencent already had expertise in that area (both homegrown in China with several successful "GaaS" games and in already owning Riot Games at that time), and the investment was also supposedly a signifier of a bidirectional exchange of expertise sharing. One primary source linked from Wikipedia: https://www.polygon.com/a/epic-4-0/the-four-lives-of-epic-games https://www.polygon.com/a/epic-4-0/the-four-lives-of-epic-ga...
nuclearcookie 6y ago
Out of legitimate curiosity, 1: What are you afraid of, now that the engine is partly owned by Tencent? The engine is OSS after all. What paths do you see for potential break of trust? 2: What are your use cases that you need a game engine for (making mobile games, console games, PC games, arch viz, ...) 3: What points make you feel like Unity is remarkably better? I'm asking these last 2 points because I'm in the field myself and I do have some different experiences regarding choice of engines. Thanks! * And what do you
- AntiRush 6y ago
  Unreal, while source available, is not open source software. [1] 1. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/publishing
- jayd16 6y ago
  For the first 80% of a game, Unity feels great. It becomes a pain during the 2nd 80%.
  - purple-again 6y ago
    I hope that second 80% wasn’t a typo because it made me spit my tea out in laughter. I’ve tried my hand at a few indie games like probably every programmer/gamer and wow does that last mile to “done enough to say done with a straight face” seem to stretch on into infinity.
    - ortusdux 6y ago
      Having worked at a startup who's product was built around unity, that 2nd 80% is a killer.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
Tim Sweeney is the majority shareholder of Epic. https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/1181944951686488066?lang=en https://twitter.com/timsweeneyepic/status/118194495168648806...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
cleansy 6y ago
I’m curious to know why exactly is Tencent‘s share in Epic relevant while unity is VC funded and has the same pressure of making money?
klmadfejno 6y ago
I doubt your users give a crap. My experience with unity, as a free user, was it creating a TB of log files of nothing but it complaining that it couldn't connect to the internet to phone home its telemetry. I don't think either engine's approach here is particularly noteworthy though.

echelon 6y ago

I'm just getting started with Unreal, and I've got an overwhelming amount to learn. It feels like embarking into an entirely new field. I know Google works for these questions, but I'd like to hear opinionated responses if people have experience: How do you manage / version assets? Git? Git LFS? ...? How do you import photogrammetry assets? Do you need to process them in other software first, and is there a desired format to put them in? What's the best way to import and version them? Is networking support for multiple players something that works out of the box? Or do you have to hand roll this and the server code? Are there tools for integrating sensors like VR tracking and Kinect? What about adding real time point cloud data into the scene? How do you tweak shaders? Is there a good guide to shader development that is Unreal Engine aware? How do you delve into raw C++? Is Rust supported? How might I find people with experience to work with, review my code, or potentially hire?

momothereal 6y ago
For versioning, you can look at this plugin released/improved by Project Borealis: https://github.com/ProjectBorealis/UE4GitPlugin https://github.com/ProjectBorealis/UE4GitPlugin
jayd16 6y ago
I have more experience with Unity and I'm going to ask you to just Google most of this but... Git LFS is fine. Many shops use Perforce (although I hate it). >import photogrammetry assets? Depends what you have. The standard pipeline is to use a tool like Maya or Blender for model work and import into the engine as obj or fbx files. Unreal is supposed to have a pretty good out of the box network setup. Yes every VR platform seems to have an SDK for Unity and Unreal. Shaders and shader dev are a very deep topic that you should google.
offtop5 6y ago
I use Git LFS with my Unity projects. Other systems exist, like Plastic SCM, but their much much harder to use. I had issues with a contractor who couldn't figure it out and it partially lead to us abandoning that version of the project ( on v3 now, had to change direction though). Unreal is significantly harder than Unity, unless you stick to blueprints. Unreal's C++ is a harder language than Unity's C#. Plus I find Unity's community to be much more newbie friendly. Unreal tends to heavily tilt towards massive projects. Unity treats mobile as a first class citizen and it's very easy to get started. Then again, I've been using Unity since 2012 roughly, had I started with Unreal I might have a different opinion.

troughway 6y ago

I find it a curiosity that John Carmack is perpetually touted as the whiz kid even though Tim Sweeney has done far, far more from both a technological standpoint and a business standpoint. But then again I'll never understand the fawning to begin with so there's that.

IronRanger 6y ago
Because Tim Sweeney is just not as charismatic, unfortunately. Great guy though.
- fullstop 6y ago
  Rocket League used to have Linux support before he came along. Now playing it in Linux can get you banned from their platform.
Grazester 6y ago
Is Sweeney the lead programmer with Unreal still? Carmack seemed to care more about the technical side of things and programming. I think to him ID Software just served for allowing him to just do what he loved to do.
- troughway 6y ago
  I faintly recall an interview with one of the developers not too long ago, maybe a few years ago or so, where they said Sweeney still touches some 80% of the code base. Also, there's always this old gem that HN should get giddy about: https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced-fp/docs/sweeny.pdf https://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/edu/seminare/2005/advanced... I just think JC/Abrash/etc have an aura/cult of personality that doesn't seem all that impressive when you get someone who is a powerhouse of tech and business acumen like Sweeney next to them.
  - bananabiscuit 6y ago
    What makes those slides so special?

klmadfejno 6y ago

I've been waiting for this for a while. Congrats on the release. I'm a little concerned the new physics will be buggy but whatever, I'm upgrading my project. The really cool stuff in my opinion is the water system, the sky system (beautiful volumetric clouds!), and the full body solver for ik animation. The last one isn't a new thing for game engines, but the first two far exceed any free nature rendering tools I've ever seen. The hair seems really cool but I get the sense it may be hard to get into. The accessibility of making high quality looking games is very good these days. That makes a big difference in terms of maintaining a willingness to keep plugging away at a project. Especially if one lacks the artistic skills to make up for it at the beginning.

pjmlp 6y ago

> Removed: OpenGL Desktop Rendering And so it starts.

lazypenguin 6y ago
That caught my attention as well. Godot made the same choice: vulkan for all and opengl es2 for mobile/legacy. I just hope that engines keep making the effort to maintain a backwards compatible renderer for a few more years. Not every game is a high fidelity behemoth and not every player has a beefy machine. I would hate to exclude players from a simple game just because their machine is older.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Agreed, yet if you watch some Vulkan talks that seems to be the direction that is being pushed, with OpenGL being a library on top of Vulkan. The problem is that not everyone actually needs Vulkan, and for those middleware seems to be the only way to avoid going into Vulkan low level programming.