12 ms·

Unreal Engine 4.8 Released

167 points by mariuz 11y ago

JTon 11y ago
I'm happy to see an emphasis on grass and foliage systems for open worlds. I have a soft spot for open worlds after discovering Morrowind in my teens. I don't think I completed more than a couple main quest items; just snuck and thieved my way to god status /nostalgia
- bd 11y ago
  You may like Witcher 3. Probably the best open world foliage out there today: gorgeous colorful world that feels alive. https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17906407432/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17906407432/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17921228474/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17921228474/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17344409903/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17344409903/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelus_sk/17506176714/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelus_sk/17506176714/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/17890196732/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/17890196732/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/100603905@N03/18175649019/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/100603905@N03/18175649019/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakeupmrfreeman/18058537158/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakeupmrfreeman/18058537158/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/18032189865/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/18032189865/ http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_lands-34742_en.html http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_la... Screenshots and videos don't do it justice, you have to see it in motion, with sound effects, real-time uncompressed, with things moving in the wind, full of animals, changing daylight and weather.
  - st0p 11y ago
    The quests and the voice acting are epic too. Best RPG I've played in ages.
    - scotth 11y ago
      Have you tried Divinity? Brought me right back to my Baldur's Gate days.
      - qznc 11y ago
        The best way to look into such games imho is to watch a Youtube Lets Play and jump a few episodes in. Official gameplay videos by the producer usually show Best Of scenes, which does hide the boring parts. Search for "$GAME lets play". Filter for "playlist". Watch. Divinity: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKUZkQKe2mplbFbec0rFzVU04nVTBYrAs https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKUZkQKe2mplbFbec0rFz... Witcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuQirEnvqkU&list=PLj_Goi54wf0f2NXPeIvJqtLBSG9_nBTMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuQirEnvqkU&list=PLj_Goi54wf...
mcmahoniel 11y ago
It's getting harder and harder to recommend anything other than UE4.
- krisdol 11y ago
  Though it usually requires compiling from source -- the editor works pretty well on linux these days, which I can't say for any of UE's competitor
  - xnxn 11y ago
    For sure. This is the main reason I use UE4.
- 542458 11y ago
  I don't think that's quite true yet. While I vastly prefer UE4 to Unity (and would recommend UE4 in most cases), it would be a mistake to underestimate the value of the huge amount of paid and free content that exists for Unity. Furthermore, UE4 gives the option of Blueprints (which many find insufficient or clumsy) or C++ (which can be very intimidating). UnityScript/C#/Boo sit between the two, making it preferable for those who want to write actual code, but don't want to deal with C. Furthermore, UE4 is still very developing expected features. Until 4.8, you couldn't do SSR on translucents, couldn't do graphics profiling on OS X, and couldn't switch splinesmeshes from being open to closed without corrupting your maps, etc. I love UE4, but it's still got a lot of ground to cover.
  - mcmahoniel 11y ago
    You're absolutely right about the content and tutorials available for Unity, that's a humongous boon. But that's a gap that will rapidly close, especially after UE4 dropped the subscriptions. I was very wary of Blueprints, but after playing a bit and seeing just how they work, I was sold. Same with using C++ natively; it seems daunting, but you're calling the same methods your Blueprints do, it's almost drop-in easy. Definitely it's gonna need to make some progress, but the gap is closing.
monk_e_boy 11y ago
What the heck is time scrubbing? Both serious and amusing answers required.
- jameskilton 11y ago
  The time bar and "current location" elements of a video player are commonly called the "scrubber". Thus, when you record multiplayer video, you have full control over playback. Or maybe you mean the tool that lets you rewrite your miserable failure with no kills and make it look like you won the match with no deaths.
  - kcbanner 11y ago
    It isn't multiplayer video, it's actually a replay that is played back in-engine.
  - Narishma 11y ago
    Multiplayer demo (or replay), not video.
- wtallis 11y ago
  Scrolling back and forth through time, rather than a spatial axis, and sometimes also with the ability to pause at arbitrary places. I usually see that usage in the context of video editing.
- westoncb 11y ago
  The name of a basic exercise for time travel ninjas: "wax on, wax off"—but on a temporal surface instead.
- eric_h 11y ago
  It's when you remove unseemly characters from history - e.g. going back in time and killing Hitler
- vvanders 11y ago
  Fun fact, most game replay infrastructure is built on networking(if it exists in the game). Replay is usually as easy as just timestamping packets(or storing input if you're running a lockstep sim) and playing it back when viewing the replay.
coupdejarnac 11y ago
I'd love to see a nice Tribes clone, given the license holder is leaving the franchise out to rot.
- mcmahoniel 11y ago
  I can see it happening, I've even given it some thought. I have a feeling as more and more resources start appearing that are UE4 specific, we'll start seeing some really cool revivals like that. Right now, a huge portion of the community is still in Unity, we're only just now starting to see documentation and videos really coming out strong (probably fueled by UE4 dropping the subscription fee).
  - robertfw 11y ago
    The skiing physics are hard to get right. No Tribes sequel has replicated it out of the box - it took several iterations of mods to get it right in Tribes 2, and Vengeance/Ascend were pretty garbage imo
    - ghuntley 11y ago
      The physics are well documented - https://floodyberry.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/tribes-1-physics-part-one-overview/ https://floodyberry.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/tribes-1-physic...
- dylanz 11y ago
  Same here. Tribes 1 was one the best games I've played, to date. It was extremely fast paced, had an amazing team dynamic, and the character movement (skiing and flying) was beautiful. I haven't found anything comparable since.
  - robertfw 11y ago
    Tribes 2 was pretty crap when it came out but the Classic mod gave it much the same feel as Tribes 1. I lost several years to the competitive scene. There were organized competitions as recent as a year or 2 back, and there is still a public server with enough of a population to play at most times.
unoti 11y ago
Is their story on mobile deployment any better yet? I switched off of Unreal Engine because it required overly beefy phones, outrageous download sizes, and slurped down huge amounts of battery, even for something trivial like Tappy Chicken. Is this situation getting better yet? Is Unreal Engine a good choice yet for someone focused on mobile deployments?
- shadowmint 11y ago
  No. Well, yes. Now you can actually build for ios and android, which wasn't possible before with modifying the UBT and sacrificing 3 goats. However, its still no real improvement in workflow or speed.
  - ValleyOfTheMtns 11y ago
    What's a good engine to build on for cross-platform support these days? If you wanted to dev a game that worked on smartphones, tablets, and PCs?
    - fnayr 11y ago
      Unity. I just switched to it and the workflow is great for us (2 dev team)
moron4hire 11y ago
Am I the only one who finds massive friction trying to learn the heavy GUI editors of both Unity and UE? I've been a hobbiest game programmer for 15 years, I studied computer graphics in college, I could probably write a software rasterizer in my sleep. I've been using Blender for quite some time, even in some semi-professional work. I've lead numerous projects from start to finish in all kinds of industries, including a few in raw, physical simulation. I've even built my own video game controllers. But whenever I start one of these programs and start trying to go through their tutorials, they want you to go through some convoluted set of menus and toolbox windows to basically do nothing but edit a scene graph. And they have their own terminology for everything. And then I go cross-eyed. And it's not even "terminal vs. GUI" talking, I actually like Visual Studio. I just want to model in Blender, export models to game-friendly formats, write code, and import them in the game, like every other project I've ever done, like a normal game project. But even UE's "Expert-mode, C++ template" involves heavy, heavy use of their GUI, which might be relatively stable today, but it's still a hog on resources and terrible buggy compared to even Visual Studio, which itself is no lithe figure. I tried exiting out of the editor and loading the solution directly from Visual Studio and running a build just seems to... open the UE editor again! I'm not a beginner, I don't want beginner's tutorials, and I especially hate video tutorials. I want something I can read that isn't just "click this menu, now open this tool window". What the hell ever happened to writing code?
- hesdeadjim 11y ago
  I make games for a living and for a hobby and the switch to Unity in both contexts has been painful for all the reasons you mention. A foreign and often confusing UI, arcane and undocumented interfaces (at least UE4 has source), and tutorials that assume you don't know how to read. The last point has been especially frustrating because what takes 45 minutes to learn from a video tutorial I could accomplish through reading in five. All that said, after getting over the learning curve and embracing the technology somewhat (even Blueprint/Playmaker over code sometimes!), I've found that the power available to me is well, well worth the cost.
  - christoph 11y ago
bhouston 11y ago
Any details on what the improved Depth of Field affect achieves? I just implemented a physically accurate DOF effect for WebGL here: https://clara.io/view/d328427e-70de-491c-bc1f-8c6bc661b74f https://clara.io/view/d328427e-70de-491c-bc1f-8c6bc661b74f
keyle 11y ago
What is the size of their team? How do they operate to produce so many features / fix every release? Larger team usually have tons of issues in terms of individual efficiency. This is clearly not the case. And this is all C++?? This is madness!
- Negative1 11y ago
  Massive crunch culture where Tim checks the lot for cars late at night and on weekends and complains when there are not enough cars there.
  - alextgordon 11y ago
    This is why we need unions!
    - cookiecaper 11y ago
      We don't need unions. There are plenty of non-evil employers in the tech space. If an employee doesn't like the way his employer is run, he is free and generally very able to go find another employer. Unions are a nightmare that we don't want or need in an in-demand field like software.
      - pyrocat 11y ago
        You're conflating the tech industry with the video game industry. Not all unions are a nightmare, they're there for employee protection. If you specifically are in a privileged enough position to not need a union, you have still benefited from the existence of them.
        cookiecaper 11y ago
        That is certainly one perspective, and this may come as a shock to you, but there are those that argue unions are not a universal good. [0] A tech workers' union means not only the mandatory imposition of dues (don't need any more little cuts out of my paycheck), fixed hiring qualifications that are pretty likely to evolve into full-blown licensing (i.e., the end of the self-taught professional), removal of the right to independently negotiate, and affirmative action, but also a large, opaque body that engages primarily in political activities like lobbying and negotiations with very little oversight or transparency. The benefits of a union are protection from predatory employment policies. That may be necessary in some fields, but in programming, it isn't. Most devs I know can have a new job within a few weeks if they don't like their employers' policies, and most employers I know appreciate the difficulty in sourcing good software talent so they don't want to do much to piss them off. [0] https://www.unionfacts.com/article/crime-and-corruption https://www.unionfacts.com/article/crime-and-corruption
danr4 11y ago
1. What a huge update. 2. Not related to the update, but was wondering what do people who have worked with UI frameworks in C++ (i'm not one of them) think about Unreal's Slate UI Framework. Seems pretty slick to me (Coming from web dev and win forms) and highly customizable, though rather verbose.
nutjob123 11y ago
Are there any current games using unreal engine 4? It seems this has been hyped for a long time but no real games have come out.
- Impossible 11y ago
  The engine is pretty new, so most games that use it are currently in development. The current #1 seller on Steam , ARK (http://www.playark.com/ http://www.playark.com/) is UE4 based and it's already generated $10 million in revenue after being in early access for 1 week (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-09-ark-survival-evolved-has-already-generated-usd10-million http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-09-ark-surviva...). Some high profile games that haven't shipped yet include Fable Legends, and the new Gears of War from Microsoft, Flood in the Flame, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7 and Eve Valkyrie. Epic is working on at least two games, the open source community driven Unreal Tournament and Fortnite. It's pretty successful for an engine that has only been widely available for a little over a year. Wikipedia article with full list of notable games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unr...)
  - shadowmint 11y ago
    ...but with trail blazing on a new engine, come some pain points, as this post about ARK's terrible performance points out: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?72345-Ark-Survival-Evolved-Low-fps-becaue-of-UE4-or-due-to-no-optimizations https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?72345-Ark-Sur... To be fair; if you're not a AAA developer with a good team running a multi-year cycle, I'd be pretty hesitant to recommend UE4 for a project right now.
shadowmint 11y ago
I've spent a fair amount of time with UE4 now, and there is good... and bad. good: - You can debug everything. - If you dont know how something works, you can step into the source and see right away (unlike unity, where performance issues are a mystery). - Its really pretty. - The material editor is powerful and amazing. bad: - Everything else. - Compiling C++ of a small project for a single file change can take 20 seconds. - C++ should be fast right? This engine is slow as balls on every platform without a brand new graphics card and cpu. The reflection system, GC and blueprint interaction is powerful...but speed was a major disappointment for me. Use on next gen consoles only. - Poor cross platform support. Hot reload (ie. reload the DLL with your project code in it while the editor is open) works on windows and 'kind of' on other platforms; and not with plugins (that means if you change a C++ file you have to restart the editor). Some features (eg. 2d physics with box2d) are only implemented on windows; there no way of telling what is implemented for what platform short of reading the engine source. - Integration of 3rd party C++ libs should be the killer feature... but its not. The build toolchain (UBT) requires every header file to have the same first include. Rtti and exceptions are disabled by the build tool. Fork fork fork, edit edit edit. Dynamic linking and runtime DLL loading should work, but it doesnt (everyone just links to .lib files, see point above...). - There are plenty of other little annoyances, but probably the only really major one is building a 'production' target. The build toolchain is a massive sprawling mess of C# code (yes, all the UE4 build scripts are C#), which often obscure linker and compiler flags dropped in via command line arguments (but only from that platform) or hardcoded. ...but if you change any of the UBT source code to customize your build, or even add some debug logging... you have to rebuild the entire engine from source, which can take 40ish minutes. To be fair, if all you use is visual blueprints and you never have to do a build, you miss a lot of these pain points. For designers, its great. There's a lot of love out there for building things using blueprints; but someone has to do the hard work of the low level C++ to support that. ... if you work with this engine as a developer, you have my sympathy. Hit up #unrealengine on freenode. At least you'll have the rest of us to cry along side with.
- vvanders 11y ago
  No rtti or exceptions is because most console platforms don't support them.
breezydon 11y ago
great company.
gusfoo 11y ago
Still the prohibition on use in gambling applications, just as Crytek does. And Unity is $200K/year for gambling. I use Unigine instead. It's absolutely great. Rough edges but it looks great and is easy to use.

167 points by mariuz 11y ago

JTon 11y ago

I'm happy to see an emphasis on grass and foliage systems for open worlds. I have a soft spot for open worlds after discovering Morrowind in my teens. I don't think I completed more than a couple main quest items; just snuck and thieved my way to god status /nostalgia

bd 11y ago
You may like Witcher 3. Probably the best open world foliage out there today: gorgeous colorful world that feels alive. https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17906407432/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17906407432/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17921228474/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17921228474/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17344409903/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17344409903/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelus_sk/17506176714/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelus_sk/17506176714/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/17890196732/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/17890196732/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/100603905@N03/18175649019/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/100603905@N03/18175649019/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakeupmrfreeman/18058537158/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakeupmrfreeman/18058537158/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/18032189865/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/18032189865/ http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_lands-34742_en.html http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_la... Screenshots and videos don't do it justice, you have to see it in motion, with sound effects, real-time uncompressed, with things moving in the wind, full of animals, changing daylight and weather.
- st0p 11y ago
  The quests and the voice acting are epic too. Best RPG I've played in ages.
  - scotth 11y ago
    Have you tried Divinity? Brought me right back to my Baldur's Gate days.
    - qznc 11y ago
      The best way to look into such games imho is to watch a Youtube Lets Play and jump a few episodes in. Official gameplay videos by the producer usually show Best Of scenes, which does hide the boring parts. Search for "$GAME lets play". Filter for "playlist". Watch. Divinity: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKUZkQKe2mplbFbec0rFzVU04nVTBYrAs https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKUZkQKe2mplbFbec0rFz... Witcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuQirEnvqkU&list=PLj_Goi54wf0f2NXPeIvJqtLBSG9_nBTMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuQirEnvqkU&list=PLj_Goi54wf...

mcmahoniel 11y ago

It's getting harder and harder to recommend anything other than UE4.

krisdol 11y ago
Though it usually requires compiling from source -- the editor works pretty well on linux these days, which I can't say for any of UE's competitor
- xnxn 11y ago
  For sure. This is the main reason I use UE4.
542458 11y ago
I don't think that's quite true yet. While I vastly prefer UE4 to Unity (and would recommend UE4 in most cases), it would be a mistake to underestimate the value of the huge amount of paid and free content that exists for Unity. Furthermore, UE4 gives the option of Blueprints (which many find insufficient or clumsy) or C++ (which can be very intimidating). UnityScript/C#/Boo sit between the two, making it preferable for those who want to write actual code, but don't want to deal with C. Furthermore, UE4 is still very developing expected features. Until 4.8, you couldn't do SSR on translucents, couldn't do graphics profiling on OS X, and couldn't switch splinesmeshes from being open to closed without corrupting your maps, etc. I love UE4, but it's still got a lot of ground to cover.
- mcmahoniel 11y ago
  You're absolutely right about the content and tutorials available for Unity, that's a humongous boon. But that's a gap that will rapidly close, especially after UE4 dropped the subscriptions. I was very wary of Blueprints, but after playing a bit and seeing just how they work, I was sold. Same with using C++ natively; it seems daunting, but you're calling the same methods your Blueprints do, it's almost drop-in easy. Definitely it's gonna need to make some progress, but the gap is closing.

monk_e_boy 11y ago

What the heck is time scrubbing? Both serious and amusing answers required.

jameskilton 11y ago
The time bar and "current location" elements of a video player are commonly called the "scrubber". Thus, when you record multiplayer video, you have full control over playback. Or maybe you mean the tool that lets you rewrite your miserable failure with no kills and make it look like you won the match with no deaths.
- kcbanner 11y ago
  It isn't multiplayer video, it's actually a replay that is played back in-engine.
- Narishma 11y ago
  Multiplayer demo (or replay), not video.
wtallis 11y ago
Scrolling back and forth through time, rather than a spatial axis, and sometimes also with the ability to pause at arbitrary places. I usually see that usage in the context of video editing.
westoncb 11y ago
The name of a basic exercise for time travel ninjas: "wax on, wax off"—but on a temporal surface instead.
eric_h 11y ago
It's when you remove unseemly characters from history - e.g. going back in time and killing Hitler
vvanders 11y ago
Fun fact, most game replay infrastructure is built on networking(if it exists in the game). Replay is usually as easy as just timestamping packets(or storing input if you're running a lockstep sim) and playing it back when viewing the replay.

coupdejarnac 11y ago

I'd love to see a nice Tribes clone, given the license holder is leaving the franchise out to rot.

mcmahoniel 11y ago
I can see it happening, I've even given it some thought. I have a feeling as more and more resources start appearing that are UE4 specific, we'll start seeing some really cool revivals like that. Right now, a huge portion of the community is still in Unity, we're only just now starting to see documentation and videos really coming out strong (probably fueled by UE4 dropping the subscription fee).
- robertfw 11y ago
  The skiing physics are hard to get right. No Tribes sequel has replicated it out of the box - it took several iterations of mods to get it right in Tribes 2, and Vengeance/Ascend were pretty garbage imo
  - ghuntley 11y ago
    The physics are well documented - https://floodyberry.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/tribes-1-physics-part-one-overview/ https://floodyberry.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/tribes-1-physic...
dylanz 11y ago
Same here. Tribes 1 was one the best games I've played, to date. It was extremely fast paced, had an amazing team dynamic, and the character movement (skiing and flying) was beautiful. I haven't found anything comparable since.
- robertfw 11y ago
  Tribes 2 was pretty crap when it came out but the Classic mod gave it much the same feel as Tribes 1. I lost several years to the competitive scene. There were organized competitions as recent as a year or 2 back, and there is still a public server with enough of a population to play at most times.

unoti 11y ago

Is their story on mobile deployment any better yet? I switched off of Unreal Engine because it required overly beefy phones, outrageous download sizes, and slurped down huge amounts of battery, even for something trivial like Tappy Chicken. Is this situation getting better yet? Is Unreal Engine a good choice yet for someone focused on mobile deployments?

shadowmint 11y ago
No. Well, yes. Now you can actually build for ios and android, which wasn't possible before with modifying the UBT and sacrificing 3 goats. However, its still no real improvement in workflow or speed.
- ValleyOfTheMtns 11y ago
  What's a good engine to build on for cross-platform support these days? If you wanted to dev a game that worked on smartphones, tablets, and PCs?
  - fnayr 11y ago
    Unity. I just switched to it and the workflow is great for us (2 dev team)

moron4hire 11y ago

Am I the only one who finds massive friction trying to learn the heavy GUI editors of both Unity and UE? I've been a hobbiest game programmer for 15 years, I studied computer graphics in college, I could probably write a software rasterizer in my sleep. I've been using Blender for quite some time, even in some semi-professional work. I've lead numerous projects from start to finish in all kinds of industries, including a few in raw, physical simulation. I've even built my own video game controllers. But whenever I start one of these programs and start trying to go through their tutorials, they want you to go through some convoluted set of menus and toolbox windows to basically do nothing but edit a scene graph. And they have their own terminology for everything. And then I go cross-eyed. And it's not even "terminal vs. GUI" talking, I actually like Visual Studio. I just want to model in Blender, export models to game-friendly formats, write code, and import them in the game, like every other project I've ever done, like a normal game project. But even UE's "Expert-mode, C++ template" involves heavy, heavy use of their GUI, which might be relatively stable today, but it's still a hog on resources and terrible buggy compared to even Visual Studio, which itself is no lithe figure. I tried exiting out of the editor and loading the solution directly from Visual Studio and running a build just seems to... open the UE editor again! I'm not a beginner, I don't want beginner's tutorials, and I especially hate video tutorials. I want something I can read that isn't just "click this menu, now open this tool window". What the hell ever happened to writing code?

hesdeadjim 11y ago
I make games for a living and for a hobby and the switch to Unity in both contexts has been painful for all the reasons you mention. A foreign and often confusing UI, arcane and undocumented interfaces (at least UE4 has source), and tutorials that assume you don't know how to read. The last point has been especially frustrating because what takes 45 minutes to learn from a video tutorial I could accomplish through reading in five. All that said, after getting over the learning curve and embracing the technology somewhat (even Blueprint/Playmaker over code sometimes!), I've found that the power available to me is well, well worth the cost.
- christoph 11y ago

bhouston 11y ago

Any details on what the improved Depth of Field affect achieves? I just implemented a physically accurate DOF effect for WebGL here: https://clara.io/view/d328427e-70de-491c-bc1f-8c6bc661b74f https://clara.io/view/d328427e-70de-491c-bc1f-8c6bc661b74f

keyle 11y ago

What is the size of their team? How do they operate to produce so many features / fix every release? Larger team usually have tons of issues in terms of individual efficiency. This is clearly not the case. And this is all C++?? This is madness!

Negative1 11y ago
Massive crunch culture where Tim checks the lot for cars late at night and on weekends and complains when there are not enough cars there.
- alextgordon 11y ago
  This is why we need unions!
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    We don't need unions. There are plenty of non-evil employers in the tech space. If an employee doesn't like the way his employer is run, he is free and generally very able to go find another employer. Unions are a nightmare that we don't want or need in an in-demand field like software.
    - pyrocat 11y ago
      You're conflating the tech industry with the video game industry. Not all unions are a nightmare, they're there for employee protection. If you specifically are in a privileged enough position to not need a union, you have still benefited from the existence of them.
      - cookiecaper 11y ago
        That is certainly one perspective, and this may come as a shock to you, but there are those that argue unions are not a universal good. [0] A tech workers' union means not only the mandatory imposition of dues (don't need any more little cuts out of my paycheck), fixed hiring qualifications that are pretty likely to evolve into full-blown licensing (i.e., the end of the self-taught professional), removal of the right to independently negotiate, and affirmative action, but also a large, opaque body that engages primarily in political activities like lobbying and negotiations with very little oversight or transparency. The benefits of a union are protection from predatory employment policies. That may be necessary in some fields, but in programming, it isn't. Most devs I know can have a new job within a few weeks if they don't like their employers' policies, and most employers I know appreciate the difficulty in sourcing good software talent so they don't want to do much to piss them off. [0] https://www.unionfacts.com/article/crime-and-corruption https://www.unionfacts.com/article/crime-and-corruption

danr4 11y ago

1. What a huge update. 2. Not related to the update, but was wondering what do people who have worked with UI frameworks in C++ (i'm not one of them) think about Unreal's Slate UI Framework. Seems pretty slick to me (Coming from web dev and win forms) and highly customizable, though rather verbose.

nutjob123 11y ago

Are there any current games using unreal engine 4? It seems this has been hyped for a long time but no real games have come out.

Impossible 11y ago
The engine is pretty new, so most games that use it are currently in development. The current #1 seller on Steam , ARK (http://www.playark.com/ http://www.playark.com/) is UE4 based and it's already generated $10 million in revenue after being in early access for 1 week (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-09-ark-survival-evolved-has-already-generated-usd10-million http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-09-ark-surviva...). Some high profile games that haven't shipped yet include Fable Legends, and the new Gears of War from Microsoft, Flood in the Flame, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7 and Eve Valkyrie. Epic is working on at least two games, the open source community driven Unreal Tournament and Fortnite. It's pretty successful for an engine that has only been widely available for a little over a year. Wikipedia article with full list of notable games (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unr...)
- shadowmint 11y ago
  ...but with trail blazing on a new engine, come some pain points, as this post about ARK's terrible performance points out: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?72345-Ark-Survival-Evolved-Low-fps-becaue-of-UE4-or-due-to-no-optimizations https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?72345-Ark-Sur... To be fair; if you're not a AAA developer with a good team running a multi-year cycle, I'd be pretty hesitant to recommend UE4 for a project right now.

shadowmint 11y ago

I've spent a fair amount of time with UE4 now, and there is good... and bad. good: - You can debug everything. - If you dont know how something works, you can step into the source and see right away (unlike unity, where performance issues are a mystery). - Its really pretty. - The material editor is powerful and amazing. bad: - Everything else. - Compiling C++ of a small project for a single file change can take 20 seconds. - C++ should be fast right? This engine is slow as balls on every platform without a brand new graphics card and cpu. The reflection system, GC and blueprint interaction is powerful...but speed was a major disappointment for me. Use on next gen consoles only. - Poor cross platform support. Hot reload (ie. reload the DLL with your project code in it while the editor is open) works on windows and 'kind of' on other platforms; and not with plugins (that means if you change a C++ file you have to restart the editor). Some features (eg. 2d physics with box2d) are only implemented on windows; there no way of telling what is implemented for what platform short of reading the engine source. - Integration of 3rd party C++ libs should be the killer feature... but its not. The build toolchain (UBT) requires every header file to have the same first include. Rtti and exceptions are disabled by the build tool. Fork fork fork, edit edit edit. Dynamic linking and runtime DLL loading should work, but it doesnt (everyone just links to .lib files, see point above...). - There are plenty of other little annoyances, but probably the only really major one is building a 'production' target. The build toolchain is a massive sprawling mess of C# code (yes, all the UE4 build scripts are C#), which often obscure linker and compiler flags dropped in via command line arguments (but only from that platform) or hardcoded. ...but if you change any of the UBT source code to customize your build, or even add some debug logging... you have to rebuild the entire engine from source, which can take 40ish minutes. To be fair, if all you use is visual blueprints and you never have to do a build, you miss a lot of these pain points. For designers, its great. There's a lot of love out there for building things using blueprints; but someone has to do the hard work of the low level C++ to support that. ... if you work with this engine as a developer, you have my sympathy. Hit up #unrealengine on freenode. At least you'll have the rest of us to cry along side with.

vvanders 11y ago
No rtti or exceptions is because most console platforms don't support them.

breezydon 11y ago

great company.

gusfoo 11y ago

Still the prohibition on use in gambling applications, just as Crytek does. And Unity is $200K/year for gambling. I use Unigine instead. It's absolutely great. Rough edges but it looks great and is easy to use.