7 ms·

Unreal Engine 4 – Linux Demos

82 points by galapago 12y ago

cuu508 12y ago
FYI these are compiled for 64bit
- ekianjo 12y ago
  Seems to be a trend, even XCOM was only available for 64 bit processors.
- bluedino 12y ago
  Almost every non-budget machine has been 64-bit capable since 2007 or so (Core 2 Duo). That said, there are plenty of 32-bit OS installs out there.
  - cuu508 12y ago
    I didn't mean my comment to be judgemental. Just a heads up that there are no 32 bit builds. (I for one happen to run 32-bit Ubuntu on a non-budget, 64-bit capable machine, hence the comment)
  - panzi 12y ago
    Yeah but for Linux desktops? You can safely assume that a modern Linux desktop installation is 64bit these days. (Actually for years.)
    - bluedino 12y ago
      I wouldn't. Ubuntu, arguably the most common desktop distribution, just started using 64-bit as a default last year with 13.10.
bni 12y ago
I had no idea that the Elemental demo has been made public. Are these available for Mac and Windows aswell?
lobo_tuerto 12y ago
Really slow download speeds (around 60kb/s)
- ekianjo 12y ago
  I'm getting 1Mb/Sec here.
  - lobo_tuerto 12y ago
    1 Mb/s now, it was really slow the past days.
- doxcf434 12y ago
  Slow for me too, it looks like the downloads are linked to another site not served through CloudFront. If they were uploaded to the wiki the downloads should be faster.
jebblue 12y ago
Unreal should be a nice addition to the other games on Linux. :-) I tried the Ninja demo and it seemed fluid. Then I tried the Elemental Demo (we just watch right?) and it seemed to pause periodically through the demo. It seemed laggy in this regard and reminded me of when I play Rust even though that's a Unity game. It's still encouraging to see these companies get excited about Linux though, Linux rocks, no reason great game companies can't rock with it.
z3phyr 12y ago
Is there any more room for improvement in the video game graphics? Are we going to need more John Carmacks and Sweenys?
- mortenjorck 12y ago
  In terms of static scenes, I'd say the industry is at the end of an S-curve right now. In terms of motion, character animation, and physical interactions between objects, there's still a long way to go. You need a AAA budget just to get a character's hand to realistically pick up an object in a scene without it jumping; I think these sorts of problems are next in line for graphics engines to solve.
- bluedino 12y ago
  Someone go find Ken Silverman!
- corysama 12y ago
  Carmack and Sweeny are perhaps the most famous game graphics programmers, but they are far from the only knee pushing the state of the art. In fact, they've both been rather quiet lately. Carmack has been nose-down in VR lately and Sweeny has hired an excellent team that has been doing most of the talking for Epic. Meanwhile, check out The Order:1886 and Beyond:Two Souls for examples of the most technically impressive game graphics from studios most people haven't heard of. Game graphics have taken big leaps in the past few years. I attribute that to amazing advances in GPU tech coupled with quite a lot of open discussion and sharing of research in the game graphics community. But, we're still far from where we want to be.
  - z3phyr 12y ago
    Is fully destructible in any way and dynamic virtual environment one of the targets?
  - Arelius 12y ago
    To add to that, Sweeney hasn't really been a graphics programmer since the late 90's. He's always been much more focused on engine infrastructure, leaving graphics to other very competent programmers at Epic.
steveklabnik 12y ago
These sorta worked for me: everything was yellow... I'm just on the latest Ubuntu, nothing fancy
hansjorg 12y ago
Anyone able to get the console working? Should be possible top open with ~, but no go here. Might be some keyboard layout issue, but have tried switching to US layout. Was hoping to show an FPS counter with the "Stat FPS" command. The demos are looking great by the way, except for some stuttering in the start of Elemental.
- slacka 12y ago
  The Console key is set to ~ in input.ini but doesn't appear to work on this build of UE4. Only option that's working for me is: -fullscreen -resx=1920 -resy=1080
aw3c2 12y ago
Are those standalone or do I need a paid subscription to the engine? edit: Not sure why I ended up downvoted for asking a simple question. I downloaded one of them and they are standalone binaries.
panzi 12y ago
Tried the cave demo: had quite some tearing for me. Is there a vsync option? I tried -vsync but it didn't change anything. PS: I've a GeForce GTX 760 (driver version 331.79), 16GB RAM, Intel i7 quad core (8 threads) with 3.50GHz on Fedora 20 x86_64. So should there really be tearing?
- RussianCow 12y ago
  Tearing doesn't necessarily mean your computer isn't keeping up with the game--you can get tearing with over 60 FPS as well. It just means the frames aren't in sync with your display.
- TD-Linux 12y ago
  Are you using a compositor?
  - panzi 12y ago
    I turned the compositor off and set the graphic cards profile to "performance" (was "auto") before I started the demo. For some reason I get tearing in videos (mplayer or vlc - no matter which output module) when I don't set the profile to performance as well. I don't get tearing in flash or html5 videos (chrome, no matter if compositor or not or if performance or auto)!
gionn 12y ago
Linux apps packaged as zip? #WTF
- panzi 12y ago
  Why not? It's not something you need/want an installer for.
  - jhasse 12y ago
    zip doesn't save file permissions and also .tar.xz gives smaller file sizes.
    - panzi 12y ago
      Are you sure about that? http://i.imgur.com/BpYW657.png http://i.imgur.com/BpYW657.png Ok, .xz might be smaller but literally everyone can unpack .zip files.
      - jhasse 12y ago
        Oh, didn't know that. Well than there's only the smaller file size. I think in the Linux world everyone can also unpack tar.xz files.
        panzi 12y ago
        Yeah, but I guess it's because they come from Windows and don't know what the best compression algorithm supported by every Linux distribution of today is. They just know everyone can unpack zip and its good enough. Heck I would have guessed 7z is the best current compression algorithm... wait is 7z a algorithm or a container format? Wasn't the algorithm 7z uses called lzma or something like that? Who keeps track of this all?
        jhasse 12y ago
        7z and xz both use LZMA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xz

82 points by galapago 12y ago

cuu508 12y ago

FYI these are compiled for 64bit

ekianjo 12y ago
Seems to be a trend, even XCOM was only available for 64 bit processors.
bluedino 12y ago
Almost every non-budget machine has been 64-bit capable since 2007 or so (Core 2 Duo). That said, there are plenty of 32-bit OS installs out there.
- cuu508 12y ago
  I didn't mean my comment to be judgemental. Just a heads up that there are no 32 bit builds. (I for one happen to run 32-bit Ubuntu on a non-budget, 64-bit capable machine, hence the comment)
- panzi 12y ago
  Yeah but for Linux desktops? You can safely assume that a modern Linux desktop installation is 64bit these days. (Actually for years.)
  - bluedino 12y ago
    I wouldn't. Ubuntu, arguably the most common desktop distribution, just started using 64-bit as a default last year with 13.10.

bni 12y ago

I had no idea that the Elemental demo has been made public. Are these available for Mac and Windows aswell?

lobo_tuerto 12y ago

Really slow download speeds (around 60kb/s)

ekianjo 12y ago
I'm getting 1Mb/Sec here.
- lobo_tuerto 12y ago
  1 Mb/s now, it was really slow the past days.
doxcf434 12y ago
Slow for me too, it looks like the downloads are linked to another site not served through CloudFront. If they were uploaded to the wiki the downloads should be faster.

jebblue 12y ago

Unreal should be a nice addition to the other games on Linux. :-) I tried the Ninja demo and it seemed fluid. Then I tried the Elemental Demo (we just watch right?) and it seemed to pause periodically through the demo. It seemed laggy in this regard and reminded me of when I play Rust even though that's a Unity game. It's still encouraging to see these companies get excited about Linux though, Linux rocks, no reason great game companies can't rock with it.

z3phyr 12y ago

Is there any more room for improvement in the video game graphics? Are we going to need more John Carmacks and Sweenys?

mortenjorck 12y ago
In terms of static scenes, I'd say the industry is at the end of an S-curve right now. In terms of motion, character animation, and physical interactions between objects, there's still a long way to go. You need a AAA budget just to get a character's hand to realistically pick up an object in a scene without it jumping; I think these sorts of problems are next in line for graphics engines to solve.
bluedino 12y ago
Someone go find Ken Silverman!
corysama 12y ago
Carmack and Sweeny are perhaps the most famous game graphics programmers, but they are far from the only knee pushing the state of the art. In fact, they've both been rather quiet lately. Carmack has been nose-down in VR lately and Sweeny has hired an excellent team that has been doing most of the talking for Epic. Meanwhile, check out The Order:1886 and Beyond:Two Souls for examples of the most technically impressive game graphics from studios most people haven't heard of. Game graphics have taken big leaps in the past few years. I attribute that to amazing advances in GPU tech coupled with quite a lot of open discussion and sharing of research in the game graphics community. But, we're still far from where we want to be.
- z3phyr 12y ago
  Is fully destructible in any way and dynamic virtual environment one of the targets?
- Arelius 12y ago
  To add to that, Sweeney hasn't really been a graphics programmer since the late 90's. He's always been much more focused on engine infrastructure, leaving graphics to other very competent programmers at Epic.

steveklabnik 12y ago

These sorta worked for me: everything was yellow... I'm just on the latest Ubuntu, nothing fancy

hansjorg 12y ago

Anyone able to get the console working? Should be possible top open with ~, but no go here. Might be some keyboard layout issue, but have tried switching to US layout. Was hoping to show an FPS counter with the "Stat FPS" command. The demos are looking great by the way, except for some stuttering in the start of Elemental.

slacka 12y ago
The Console key is set to ~ in input.ini but doesn't appear to work on this build of UE4. Only option that's working for me is: -fullscreen -resx=1920 -resy=1080

aw3c2 12y ago

Are those standalone or do I need a paid subscription to the engine? edit: Not sure why I ended up downvoted for asking a simple question. I downloaded one of them and they are standalone binaries.

panzi 12y ago

Tried the cave demo: had quite some tearing for me. Is there a vsync option? I tried -vsync but it didn't change anything. PS: I've a GeForce GTX 760 (driver version 331.79), 16GB RAM, Intel i7 quad core (8 threads) with 3.50GHz on Fedora 20 x86_64. So should there really be tearing?

RussianCow 12y ago
Tearing doesn't necessarily mean your computer isn't keeping up with the game--you can get tearing with over 60 FPS as well. It just means the frames aren't in sync with your display.
TD-Linux 12y ago
Are you using a compositor?
- panzi 12y ago
  I turned the compositor off and set the graphic cards profile to "performance" (was "auto") before I started the demo. For some reason I get tearing in videos (mplayer or vlc - no matter which output module) when I don't set the profile to performance as well. I don't get tearing in flash or html5 videos (chrome, no matter if compositor or not or if performance or auto)!

gionn 12y ago

Linux apps packaged as zip? #WTF

panzi 12y ago
Why not? It's not something you need/want an installer for.
- jhasse 12y ago
  zip doesn't save file permissions and also .tar.xz gives smaller file sizes.
  - panzi 12y ago
    Are you sure about that? http://i.imgur.com/BpYW657.png http://i.imgur.com/BpYW657.png Ok, .xz might be smaller but literally everyone can unpack .zip files.
    - jhasse 12y ago
      Oh, didn't know that. Well than there's only the smaller file size. I think in the Linux world everyone can also unpack tar.xz files.
      - panzi 12y ago
        Yeah, but I guess it's because they come from Windows and don't know what the best compression algorithm supported by every Linux distribution of today is. They just know everyone can unpack zip and its good enough. Heck I would have guessed 7z is the best current compression algorithm... wait is 7z a algorithm or a container format? Wasn't the algorithm 7z uses called lzma or something like that? Who keeps track of this all?
        jhasse 12y ago
        7z and xz both use LZMA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xz