Unreal Engine 4.8 Released

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-48-released

by mariuz • 11 years ago

167 98 11 years ago

JTon• 11 years 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• 11 years 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/17921228474/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/vasiljevich/17344409903/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelus_sk/17506176714/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/17890196732/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/100603905@N03/18175649019/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wakeupmrfreeman/18058537158/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/71866538@N04/18032189865/

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• 11 years ago

The quests and the voice acting are epic too. Best RPG I've played in ages.

mcmahoniel3• 11 years ago

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

krisdol• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

For sure. This is the main reason I use UE4.

5424582• 11 years 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.

mcmahoniel3• 11 years 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.

penprogg• 11 years ago

Isn't it possible with a little bit of work to get Unity content working on UE4?

TillE• 11 years ago

If you're just doing 2D, it's really bloated and clunky. The UI stuff isn't great either.

I imagine this will gradually improve, but for now it's really not an appropriate engine for that class of games. Anything from LÖVE to Unity works much better.

christoph3• 11 years ago

For UI you really should check out BLUi. It's free and beats the commercial offering from Coherent in our experience.

We got some pretty complicated HTML/JS/CSS up and running and nicely integrated (js talking to blueprints and vice-versa) in under 30mins. It's fully backed by Epic now through a grant.

It handles video and audio nicely as well. There's little reason to consider using the inbuilt UI stuff when it's so easy to leverage existing HTML skills to build it out.

andrewmcwatters2• 11 years ago

Grid is suppose to be a lightweight engine solution on top of LÖVE as it's framework. I feel that Unity is comparable to UE4 as far as 2D games go: overkill. LÖVE doesn't solve any boilerplate issues for you, and you end up reinventing the wheel.

A few of us from the Valve development community, EA, and Blizzard wrote this as a side project.

http://www.andrewmcwatters.com/grid/ https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk

Hortinstein• 11 years ago

what is your best resource for beginners?

monk_e_boy• 11 years ago

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

jameskilton• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

It isn't multiplayer video, it's actually a replay that is played back in-engine.

Narishma• 11 years ago

Multiplayer demo (or replay), not video.

wtallis• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

The name of a basic exercise for time travel ninjas: "wax on, wax off"—but on a temporal surface instead.

eric_h• 11 years ago

It's when you remove unseemly characters from history - e.g. going back in time and killing Hitler

vvanders4• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

mcmahoniel3• 11 years 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).

robertfw2• 11 years 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

dylanz• 11 years 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.

robertfw2• 11 years 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.

Zancarius• 11 years ago

Projectile physics were one of my favorite points (besides the open environment). You had to be aware of your own motion vector if you wanted to accurately place a shot with most weapons. Sadly, later installments (T:V, I'm looking at you) never quite had that same feeling. That was probably part of what made it relatively unfriendly to newbies from other shooters, but I felt it made the game a bit more intense and required a bit more focus rather than strictly mindless button-mashing.

MrZongle2• 11 years ago

Amen to that. And hopefully in a traditional standalone, non-free-to-play/non-MMO format. Just take my money and give me the ability to set up my own servers and mod the game.

ghuntley2• 11 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P-18S7E1nE&list=PLM9jdoijSd...

vmp• 11 years ago

There's Tribes: Ascent - http://www.hirezstudios.com/tribesascend/home

ripdog• 11 years ago

T:A is the game which is being left to rot. Devlopment has been abandoned, the community ignored, and the game heavily incomplete. Management, when it existed, was incompetent.

unoti• 11 years 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?

shadowmint5• 11 years 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.

ValleyOfTheMtns2• 11 years 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?

moron4hire3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

christoph3• 11 years ago

Fully agree.

Once you get in to the mindset, blueprints really aren't that tricky. They aren't the best way to tackle all problems, but they certainly make doing a lot of things very easy once you accept how they function, their limitations, the workarounds and commit some time to learning/practicing working with them. There's certainly an overhead in discovering how different elements of the engine talk to each other and behave together. Really it's no different to any other programming language.

On a multi-monitor set up, the real time debugging is pretty sweet for seeing what's going on and where it's going wrong.

egypturnash• 11 years ago

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.

This is far from unique to video game tools, sadly. There's this growing perception that people greatly prefer video tutorials. Which makes people who would rather read and think a little bit go crazy.

Every time there's a new release of Illustrator (my main tool), I end up pulling out my hair trying to find text descriptions of the new features rather than slow video overviews. And then there's Astute Graphics, who makes great AI plugins that they ONLY documented as videos for a while. Now they grudgingly have blog posts that sort of tell you how they work. Sort of.

liveoneggs• 11 years ago

do you use ogre3d?

vvanders4• 11 years ago

That's because these tools are targeted at content builders not developers.

Back when I was in games on a 70 person team we might only have 10 or 12 developers so the majority of the focus was making sure that your content builders were effective(and they cost less than getting developers to build content).

greggman2• 11 years ago

I'm old school like you? I've been programming since TRS-80/Apple II,Atari 800 days.

I know C/C++ and OpenGL, DirectX and can certainly get a simple game running faster with my own code than with Unity or Unreal at this point.

But... I also go to game jams and watch the guys using Unity or Unreal run rings round those coding from scratch. I see many of my favorite games of all types being created with Unity (Threes, Monument Valley, Crossy Roads, Ori and the Blind Forest, Cities Skylines, Besiege)

I also see the amount of time I'd save. I've written 6 game engines, animation systems, exporters, font renderers, image loaders, serialization systems, spooling systems, memory management systems, input systems, localization systems, etc etc etc. I've ported my engine to various systems. I don't want to do that anymore.

What the hell ever happened to writing code?

If that what you like doing then do that but me I just want to get to the game. I can see very clearly learning one of these engines will get me there quicker. Sure the first time there will be learning curve but after I'm quite sure I'll be much more productive.

moron4hire3• 11 years ago

No, I'm not really talking about not-implemented-here-syndrome. Yes, you are right, all of those things can be fun to write for fun's sake, but I agree that it's stupid to try to write all of that yourself if your goal is to be productive and complete a game.

My point is, why do I have to use their dopey editor to get at it? Why aren't these things libraries, dependencies that I manage just like any other project I've built since the dawn of time?

For Unity, I can definitely see the appeal of a good "game builder" type application. Game builders have been around forever. Traditionally, game builders were crap, so to see Unity create something that can be used to make games that people are selling, for real money, is pretty cool. Unity was never going to be my cup of tea, but that's fine.

But for UE4, Epic has been a long-time vendor of AAA-quality game engines. I expected a series of libraries for doing the vast majority of things, plus workflow tools for things like baking lighting into textures. That's what I mean about "what ever happened to writing code?" The way you used to wire up a game engine with your models and your gameplay scripts was to write code, not draw boxes in a flowchart editor. Command-line oriented build tools for processing scripts and packing textures and encoding audio and cross compiling could be abstracted through a GUI, but were still available to plunk down on a build server so you weren't wasting cycles on your workstation. I still get the feeling that that is in there somewhere. But where? I just can't imagine a professional game dev house using the UE4 editor.

bhouston• 11 years 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

keyle• 11 years 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!

Negative12• 11 years 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.

alextgordon2• 11 years ago

This is why we need unions!

dfbrown• 11 years ago

I would imagine the crunch is significantly lower on a game engine as opposed to a game where you are usually contractually obligated with your publisher to release a final product on a specific date.

cm3• 11 years ago

What's your source for that? Do you know someone at Epic or have you worked there?

jmspring• 11 years ago

I would hope not. But, hey, the gaming industry (even game engines) asks a lot.

vvanders4• 11 years ago

Sounds like the game industry to me!

(Thank god I got out of that industry)

gavanwoolery• 11 years ago

Team size is around 100-150 IIRC, although I believe much of that is dedicated to Unreal's games, not just the engine.

sho_hn• 11 years ago

And this is all C++??

C++ is far from perfect, however: What else? I can't think of any other language this project could realistically operate as efficiently in between suitability, availability, tooling and talent pool.

pjmlp7• 11 years ago

C++ without C copy-paste compatibility warts can be quite good.

A big problem has been the C mentality that has prevented the existence of frameworks at the same level of .NET and JVM, although the language is quite capable.

This has been mostly caused by the language support level across compilers/platforms and the need to write portable code.

Now modules are a TS post C++17, :( .

danr4• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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/) 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-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#Unr...)

shadowmint5• 11 years 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-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.

shadowmint5• 11 years 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.

vvanders4• 11 years ago

No rtti or exceptions is because most console platforms don't support them.

shadowmint5• 11 years ago

I'm not arguing, I'm just pointing out it makes integrating 3rd party libraries troublesome.

pjmlp7• 11 years ago

Thanks for the overview.

However what is you opinion about being able to use C++, eventually C++14, versus the C# 3.5 Unity keeps on using?

Just curious.

shadowmint5• 11 years ago

Modern C# is a powerful and compelling language; C# vs. C++ on that front is an open debate... one the internet has a great number of easily found topics on.

The old runtime unity uses, despite using newer class libraries and so on from the open source C# stuff from microsoft... well, its terrible. I mean, its usable, but its like C# lite, with none of the features or optimizations from you know, the past 5 years.

C++11 in UE4 is hands down better. C++14 will be even better.

...but their tooling sucks at the moment. Right now, despite the unity runtime, its still a better system to work with as a developer.

In the future, who knows?

Maybe unity will use a new version of C#? (deeply unlikely)

Maybe the UE4 tooling will improve a lot? (very likely)

My advice is 'watch this space'; the UE4 engine has great potential, but right now, despite the good parts, the bad parts are so bad I couldn't recommend using it professionally.

...but hey. Thats just my oppinion. Its free. Download it and try it for yourself. If nothing else, the code is a facinating read in C++ learning.

breezydon• 11 years ago

great company.

gusfoo• 11 years 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.

Unreal Engine 4.8 Released

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