[HN Gopher] Unreal Engine 5 is now available
___________________________________________________________________
Unreal Engine 5 is now available
Author : laurencei
Score : 275 points
Date : 2022-04-05 15:36 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.unrealengine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.unrealengine.com)
| rudedogg wrote:
| What are your options for creating addons/plugins for Unreal
| Engine? Do they have to be written in C++?
| tomatowurst wrote:
| Pretty much. It's not for everyone but here's the nice thing
| about Unreal: If you pay for it using Paypal and it turns out
| the plugin is not as described, you can get your money back.
|
| Good luck of that ever happening with Unity. I was promised
| refund by Unity support for a totally non-responsive and
| outdated plugin that was on sale. They delayed and delayed
| until I could no longer get a refund.
|
| Having said that I do not recommend Unreal Engine for solo
| indie development but Unity also feels weird with confusion
| around which version you need to start with, DOTs etc.
|
| Unity seems like it is it for indie developers but its
| increasingly a cluttered landscape with lot of shoddy plugins
| Jyaif wrote:
| The matrix demo project requires 100GB of disk space!
|
| While uninstalling games to free up space to download the
| project, I noticed that there was no correlation between a game's
| disk space usage and the amount of fun it provided.
| drusepth wrote:
| With cloud gaming gaining in popularity at the same time asset
| detail/sizes are ballooning in size, it certainly feels like
| we're now ~1-2 generations away from games/experiences being so
| large most people won't bother installing them locally.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Would raw project files be larger than a compiled game? I
| assume yes. I'm not sure by how much.
| stonith wrote:
| By an absolute bucketload. Valley of the Ancients was a 100GB
| project that went down to 25GB packaged if I remember
| correctly.
| lvl102 wrote:
| If Epic were public, I'd park all of my retirement funds in
| there. I've watched this UE5 development and actively developed
| in it as a non-gaming dev! They're thinking 5-10 years ahead.
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| In 10 years, I think we'll all be using 3D engines like this to
| develop everything the same way 3D cards were once for
| gaming/animation only. The tooling has demanded so much and
| Unreal has pretty much nailed it. If they can make their engine
| more generalized, it's going to become a killer app.
| lvl102 wrote:
| In 10 years, I'd imagine you can create an all digital movie
| or a game within days. Simply by typing a few descriptive
| words.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| Post-NeRF world: Google Maps and Waymo would've mapped the
| entire world, every city, road, terrain, crowd everything
| you can think of with any range of artistic tones,
| lighting, weather effects.
|
| It would be just a matter of paying Google a license fee to
| use their environment in a film or games.
|
| "Hey Google, generate a GTA V clone with cel-shading
| located in Liberia with Final Fantasy 7 characters but not
| enough to infringe on US copyright laws."
|
| "Sure, here is the link you can share or the downloadable
| executable to submit to Steam"
|
| "Good, you go ahead and submit that to Steam and let me
| know when it hits 10,000 downloads"
| terafo wrote:
| You should note that I'm an amateur that toys with different
| game engines from time to time, but I don't think that any of
| their competitors is even close to be able to catch up with
| UE even if they have 10 years(not talking about current state
| of UE, but about state of UE 10 years from now).
|
| Unity does have some nice ECS things going, but overall their
| tech isn't good(prime reason why is that they don't make
| games, they make engine).
|
| Main branch of CryEngine is dead as engine that anyone aside
| from CryTek is using, but Amazon invests a lot into their
| fork(but it lacks vision TBH).
|
| Godot is good for 2d, but they aren't really going for that
| kind of experience.
| ladyattis wrote:
| The Matrix demo is close but the facial expressions are still a
| bit off like the person who's doing mocap is wearing a mask even
| if they're not. It'll be quite interesting when they finally get
| those issues resolved and when developers also try to make more
| unreal (pun intended) looking effects that interact more with
| realistic looking settings or characters. Having the freedom to
| make such a disjointed thing in a 3d renderer like how
| surrealists use to do with oil paints and the like it something
| underutilized in cinema and games imo.
| guidedlight wrote:
| Its possible that the Matrix demo was railroaded in the late
| parts of development by the purchase of Weta Digital by Unity.
| baby wrote:
| The only thing that matters is that it's better than previous
| gen
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| Recently Unity released a video with quite impressive facial
| animations. Unlike unreal, this version is not yet ready to
| actually try yourself yet unfortunately.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=eXYUNrgqWUU
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Yeah that one is surprisingly good, even if the eyes move in
| a way that feels like the character can't see. I'm not sure
| why I feel that way, but something seems empty.
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| The demo was great, but it really fell apart any time the mocap
| models moved. Despite the animation being great, the movement
| is still stilted and fake.
|
| The next step change will have to be some form of advanced
| kinematic rigging that creates advanced motion granularity akin
| to the graphical fidelity of nanite graphical tech.
|
| UE5 is a step in that direction, but there is still lots of
| work to be had.
| Xenixo wrote:
| Absolutely true.
|
| I still want to comment because your comment doesn't do that
| demo justice.
|
| It's the first time I expierienced that awkward feeling
| looking into reality while watching the video of that city.
|
| We are Eye opening close to cross over uncanny valley after
| reaching it that soon.
| thirdwhrldPzz wrote:
| These tools are still going in the direction of making a
| person sit in a chair all day.
|
| What will really be a game changer is AI that can generate
| the bulk structure having been trained on our best of the
| best hand built models and we can iterate on the emotional
| details.
|
| I'm working on the "bulk structure" part, training models to
| generate random game worlds that roughly adhere to the rules,
| look and feel like everyone favorites right now (while
| avoiding copyright issues).
|
| After that my goal is empowering consumers directly to nudge
| the styles in their preferred direction.
|
| I'm mostly motivated by the MBA-ifying of everything. My goal
| now is to just have AI produce new content for me, even if
| such a thing puts game developers out of a job. I'm starting
| to experiment with cartoons as well. Optimizing for myself
| like we do.
| psyc wrote:
| Horizon Zero Dawn has the best facial expressions I've seen
| yet. First I noticed the lip synching was very good. Then I
| noticed it also seemed to be doing procedural micro expressions
| as well as small eye saccades. Paired with subtle and
| expressive voice acting it's remarkable.
| room500 wrote:
| Do you mean Horizon Forbidden West? Zero Dawn didn't have the
| greatest animations, but Forbidden West was a huge leap
| forward.
| psyc wrote:
| I mean HZD. Haven't gotten to HFW yet. I think the
| animation below the neck is subpar, but not the faces. On a
| hunch I checked Last of Us 2. To the best of my
| observation, the eyelids, circular muscles, and nostrils
| don't micro-twitch, and the eyes don't regularly saccade.
| That's what I'm talking about.
| ladyattis wrote:
| Forbidden West is going to blow you away. Even subtle
| sarcasm of characters comes through.
| ladyattis wrote:
| Forbidden West has some of the best mocap with voice acting
| I've seen in a while since the God of War 2016 game. It's one
| of those things that's part art and part technology really,
| but making better tools will get this over the hurdle I
| think.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| Are you being serious? Don't get me wrong, HZD is an amazing
| game, but man the faces are absolute robots. That's not the
| team's fault though - any open world game with lots of
| dialogue will pale in comparison to hand animated faces.
| psyc wrote:
| I'd be happy to view video from a game you think does it
| better. Also see my other reply.
| vvillena wrote:
| Uncharted 4 comes to mind: https://youtu.be/KdDHJnqS32E
|
| That said, I agree eye movement is a great way to convey
| feeling, and Horizon Zero Dawn did it well (and its DLC
| even better). Yakuza 0 is another example of doing a good
| job. The exagerated animation style also shows in the
| characters' eye movements. A great sample is this
| sequence that, very conveniently, shows a blind character
| that lacks eye expression.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfVqfelfYHo
| terafo wrote:
| Last of Us 2, Death Stranding
| outworlder wrote:
| > any open world game with lots of dialogue will pale in
| comparison to hand animated faces.
|
| Pretty sure this won't age well - or that it's already aged
| out. There's only so much animators can do. In the film
| industry algorithms often augment an animator's work. Often
| they do the bulk of the work, and animators will fine-tune
| to get the exact effect envisioned.
|
| Also, artistic animations can look great, but they can also
| be very inconsistent. Even more so when you need multiple
| people to work on thousands of lines of dialogue. It also
| requires an enormous budget - not all studios will have
| Gollum-like funding for every single NPC.
| dkersten wrote:
| For me, HZD (and most games really) facial animations really
| fall flat when the characters smile. They look so.. plastic.
| dom96 wrote:
| Brilliant! I've been waiting for them to release this together
| with the Matrix sample. It looks like they have done so but have
| stripped a lot of the Matrix-specific assets.
| Animats wrote:
| Nice. Now to download and wait out the hours-long build.
|
| The city from the Matrix demo is available for download. I want
| to try that.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Perhaps it was just a forlorn hope but an announcement of the UE4
| tech demo of Unreal Tournament 4 updated for UE5 would have been
| nice.
| snarfy wrote:
| They crapped all over their community so much I have little
| faith. We basically finished UT4 for them and they wouldn't
| even merge the changes in.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Any details? I haven't followed UT in some years and wonder
| if a "community edition" exists.
| snarfy wrote:
| UT4 is still a free game with some community content.
|
| With no scripting support, adding content like vehicles is
| pretty much impossible. Blueprints are not sufficient for
| such a task. A few people implemented them but requires C++
| and the game doesn't support downloadable c++ mods. The C++
| mods would have needed to be incorporated into the native
| side of the game but it never came. There is enough content
| there collectively for a new game but it would need Epic to
| lead the way. It's a bit too late now for that.
|
| I play UT4 and UT2004 and UT2004 has a bigger community
| today, 16 years later, than UT4 does.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Gotcha. I'm going to a LAN party this weekend and was
| wondering if it would be worth it for the gang to
| install... otherwise we'll end up playing a few hours of
| UT2k4 ONS-RedPlanet with the extended vehicles mod.
| jcelerier wrote:
| the time I spent on ONS-Valarna and RedPlanet... thanks
| for the good memories and have fun !
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| There was a community led Unreal Tournament working in
| collaboration with Epic, but it's basically been abandoned.
| unixhero wrote:
| I am thinking of changing careers because of this engine and this
| release - so that I can use it to solve things. Very excited to
| learn it.
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| The Quixel integration is going to help devs quickly build out
| gorgeous concepts. It will also usher in a new era of asset
| flippers building garbage that also looks beautiful.
| snarfy wrote:
| No mention of Verse script.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| This was disappointing. But I have hope
| [deleted]
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| > First off, there's Lumen--a fully dynamic global illumination
| solution that enables you to create believable scenes where
| indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting
| or geometry--for example, changing the sun's angle with the time
| of day, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door.
| With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for
| lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; you can simply
| create and edit lights inside the Unreal Editor and see the same
| final lighting your players will see when the game or experience
| is run on the target platform.
|
| Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this basically a
| software-based implementation of NVIDIA's hardware-based RTX?
| teraflop wrote:
| As mentioned by others, not really. Lumen can _use_ either
| software or hardware raytracing as one of its components, but
| it uses them for different purposes. (One of the downsides of
| hardware raytracing is that you 're limited to the very
| specific kinds of acceleration data structures that are
| supported by the GPU.)
|
| This documentation page covers some of the differences between
| Lumen's software and hardware raytracing modes:
| https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/lumen-technical-deta...
|
| And if you want a ridiculous amount of technical detail about
| how Lumen works, check out this talk:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdV_e-U7_pQ
| Melatonic wrote:
| Sounds like they have finally put in Global Illum - catching up
| to what CryEngine had years and years ago
|
| Unreal is really starting to actually be the best of the best
| vhgyu75e6u wrote:
| Unreal was already the best engine purely on being easy to
| work with, support from third party programs and community,
| none of those things can be said about CryEngine.
| ericlewis wrote:
| I would be surprised if it didn't _require_ an RTX to be
| useful.
| neogodless wrote:
| Two things: while Nvidia's implementation of hardware ray-
| tracing is older and arguably superior to AMD's, they both
| have it.
|
| And the Lumen / Unity demo was on a PS5, which is using
| (relatively low-end) AMD hardware.
|
| So it isn't particularly logical to think you'd need Nvidia-
| specific ray-tracing for the feature.
| ericlewis wrote:
| Apologies, I meant hardware accelerated being required. The
| parent comment made it sound as if it were software
| rendering.
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Lumen doesn't need any hardware implementation. It can
| use one if available, though.
| cercatrova wrote:
| It has a software implementation as well.
| tedunangst wrote:
| The PS5 demo looked useful.
| terafo wrote:
| PS5 demo did have hardware ray-tracing acceleration though.
| terafo wrote:
| RTX is basically marketing term for Nvidia's hardware that can
| accelerate ray-tracing. Previously you had to interact with it
| through proprietary Nvidia APIs, but now there is DXR and
| Vulkan Ray-tracing, which allows to interact with other
| hardware or software implementations of these standards. AMD
| have hardware accelerated ray-tracing now(but it's quite slow
| tbh) and Intel just released their GPUs with hardware RT. Lumen
| is GI algorithm that builds on RT APIs. You can learn about
| it's inner workings here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GYXuM10riw
| nulld3v wrote:
| From https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-
| engine-5-0-re...:
|
| "Lumen implements efficient Software Ray Tracing, allowing for
| global illumination and reflections to run on a wide range of
| video cards, while supporting Hardware Ray Tracing for high-end
| visuals."
| shock-value wrote:
| RTX provides hardware primitives from which one could build
| portions of a global illumination solution. Lumen is such a
| full-featured, turn-key solution which I believe can run in
| "software" (as in not using dedicated ray tracing hardware
| functions) or can take advantage of hardware raytracing,
| including RTX, for some portion of its calculations.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I only play with game dev at a hobby level, so can someone help
| me understand if nanite is an automatic LoD solution?
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Yeah, but they had to go through hell to make it happen. It
| took a lot more effort than you might think.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eviSykqSUUw
|
| Some highlights: Seam staggering between
| levels for smooth swaps Current hardware rasterizers
| chug on small polys so they made a GPU software rasterizer (!)
| Actually it's a hybrid rasterizer, and gnarly features like
| derivatives are supported on both sides The GPU
| scheduler chugged so they abused Z-test wave repacking
| Streaming compression
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Not only is it automatic LOD, it also avoids multiple draw
| calls for a single pixel. If your geometry is so complex that
| multiple polygons would render to a single pixel in the end
| (say, a very complex fractal viewed from far away), Nanite also
| manages to crunch all these polys into one. Effectively, it
| makes rendering massive scenes a much more constant amount of
| draw calls.
| rflec028 wrote:
| Yes.
| teraflop wrote:
| Yes, that's essentially what it is. It runs a preprocessing
| step on meshes to generate a hierarchical LOD structure, and
| then at runtime it uses a custom software rasterizer running on
| the GPU(!) to dynamically render whatever level of detail is
| appropriate. The term "virtualized" in the description
| indicates that chunks of geometry are fetched on demand
| (analogously to virtual memory), rather than loading the entire
| fully-detailed mesh up front.
|
| The biggest limitation is that Nanite currently only supports
| rigid, non-deformable meshes, so it's mainly intended for
| scenery rather than characters.
| scotty79 wrote:
| What about the meshes deformed/animated by the vertex shader?
| teraflop wrote:
| To be honest, I'm not sure. I watched the Nanite tech talk
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMorJX3Nj6U) because I
| find graphics technology fascinating, but I don't have any
| experience actually using Unreal Engine.
|
| My understanding is that the Nanite renderer completely
| bypasses the normal shader pipeline, and therefore
| deformation using vertex shaders isn't supported. This
| doesn't mean you can't have deformable meshes in your scene
| -- they just have to be rendered in a separate pass that
| doesn't use Nanite.
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| This is how I understand it as well. Currently, you can
| think about it like those old cartoons where parts of the
| background that were to be interacted with were a
| slightly different color to help the animators know what
| they had to work with.
|
| Since we are so early in the stages of Nanite tech, I
| expect UE6 will tout some sort of deferred and active
| Nanite rendering to allow for handoff for deformation.
| M4v3R wrote:
| Note that you can use Nanite for almost all models in your
| scene and if at some point a model needs to be deformed you
| can swap-in a traditional mesh in its place to handle the
| deformations. That's how cars in the Matrix Awakens demo
| work, you can check that out if you enable the Nanite view
| and try to crash some cars.
| terafo wrote:
| That's pretty slow solution, matrix demo lags every time
| car crash occurs. I hope someone will figure out the faster
| way.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Is Nanite "just" software? Was there something that prevented
| it being invented 10, 20 years ago? Is it that its choices of
| detail would not be as good as what artists had to manually
| choose? Or does it rely on modern hardware, and if so, what
| specifically?
| terafo wrote:
| We got much more programmable GPUs over the years, but
| first consoles with GPUs that could conceivably run Nanite
| came out only in 2013. And Nanite really loves streaming of
| a lot of small data packages from drive, and for this SSD
| is really instrumental. That's why Nanite wasn't really
| feasible before(you don't really make fundamental AAA
| engine tech that runs only on PC if you are not Chris
| Roberts).
| MBCook wrote:
| I wonder when the first UE5 based games will be released. I can't
| wait.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| While more of a tech demo than a game, there was "The Matrix
| Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience"[1] that came out in mid
| December. It's free on the latest gen consoles.
|
| [1] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/wakeup
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Man that uncanny valley keeps getting uncannier. I wonder why
| not PC.
| terafo wrote:
| Because that was alpha version of an engine and it is far
| easier to ship demo to three SKUs than to a limitless
| permutations of PCs(and you shouldn't forget that most PCs
| won't be able to run this with adequate performance).
| Matrix Demo is available as UE5 project right now and you
| can download it and build it(it weighs 90 gigs though).
| unixhero wrote:
| Corporate captive consumer strategy approach.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which PC hardware setup?
|
| There is a reason why game studios love consoles so much.
|
| It is mostly the same during 5 years.
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Fortnite has been using UE5 for a few months now.
|
| Although I'm sure there could be a better display of the
| technology.
| terafo wrote:
| They haven't enabled Lumen and Nanite yet, they are doing
| some kind of smooth migration.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| graphics is not the only part of an engine
|
| - deployment to multiple platform with ease
|
| - easy scripting to make live services easier to iterate
|
| - easy assets cooking, so you don't have to spend too much
| time to make different kind of assets for different platforms
|
| - collaboration, so your team can work on the same project
| with ease
|
| - then all the other systems audio/input/networking/terrain
| stuff etc
|
| Fortnite is available on every platforms in the market (minus
| the web), their ability to add content and update it quickly,
| across all of their supported platforms at the same time is a
| great showcase
|
| Just like Genshin Impact is a great showcase for Unity
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| This sort of engine is a vast new vista of computing
| possibilities- apart from games and films, the opportunities for
| such 3D environments in many businesses is large (maybe huge!)
|
| So as someone who has never touched game dev, what is the
| learning curve like - exponential? What is "basic competence"
| once past "hello world"?
|
| Thanks :-)
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| I jumped into game development earlier this year because I too
| feel that there are plenty of business use cases for a game
| engine to power business intelligence applications; especially
| in VR/AR. It was not only my first time doing 3D, but also my
| first time using a real IDE. Results have varied.
|
| The first thing I'll tell you is that the tooling for building
| enterprise apps is woefully inadequate out of the box. The
| things that come easiest to you, specifically CRUD app
| building, are much more difficult in a game engine. There are
| no native UI elements, no theming in the way we've come to
| expect, and the workflows are all completely different. I was
| used to building database connected backends, and switching to
| a state machine model really threw me for a loop. If you have
| experience building native apps, you're probably going to have
| a much better time than I did.
|
| As far as learning the interface, that's not so bad. Follow
| some of the tutorials and you'll be able to get up and running
| in no time. The rabbit hole for me was understanding WHY things
| were doing what they were doing, as opposed to figuring out how
| to do it. Except in those times which I COULDN'T do something
| natively that I was expecting to be able to do...which happens
| a lot.
|
| My recommendation is to set up the game engine of your choice,
| learn how to build to multiple targets, and then craft
| something you've already done elsewhere to see how you like it.
| Once you get that going, you should have a cursory
| understanding that will allow you to flex some creative muscle.
|
| Good luck!
| oneoff786 wrote:
| A lot of it is learning the engine api and how different parts
| interact. The basic competence level requires a pretty large
| body of knowledge. Can you, for example,
|
| Extend a character class, give it a skeleton, an animation
| blueprint with some animation states that read the character
| state, hook it up to player inputs, make it do some sounds, and
| add a bit of flair to some actions it can take?
|
| Can you build a basic ai behavior tree? Run some line traces to
| interact with colliders so your guy can interact with an
| object?
|
| Shoot a gun and spawn some bullets that can damage another
| unit?
|
| Etc.
| Stevvo wrote:
| From an art workflow perspective nothing even comes close. Just
| put down your models in the scene, place the lights and your
| done. All the additional scene setup and art passes that are no
| longer required really set artists free to actually work on the
| art instead of optimization and fake lighting. No baking
| lightmaps, no baking LODs, no hours spent placing 'fake lights'
| to simulate GI.
| lbj wrote:
| Just amazing what these guys can do. The UE team and the Nvidia
| guys are doing 99% of the interesting work in graphics these
| days.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Congratulations epic games team. Extremely impressive. Can't wait
| to update
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| Can someone that has experience with Unreal Engine give some sort
| of approximation of what is required to sort of achieve minimum
| competency as a developer in it? Like, with web stuff, you can
| get up and running fairly quickly and slowly scaffold your way to
| more intricate projects... can the same be done with something
| like this or is the initial learning curve a bit steeper?
| imnotlost wrote:
| Good tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanLaley
| snarfy wrote:
| There is a learning curve but it's not too bad. It took me
| about 6 months to go from zero experience to winning prizes in
| their 'make something unreal' contest for unreal engine 3. If
| you have any development experience it should go pretty fast.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| I saw the launch trailer back when early access came out last
| year. I had been playing VR pretty often but had never even
| considered anything in 3d dev because it seemed too hard.
|
| After seeing how far unreal had come and downloading it to test
| it out I finished up the consulting project I was on I started
| looking into making VR games.
|
| Initially I messed around with some other projects too but for
| maybe the last 5 or 6 months I've been working on pretty much
| just this.
|
| It was a lot to learn but once you understand the core concepts
| it does not seem that different to me that normal software
| development.
|
| I'm currently learning how to use c++ instead of blueprints.
| Each thing I learn makes the engine seem easier and like any
| other piece of software. There is some cruft but less than you
| might expect.
|
| I watched a bunch of courses and videos but looking back I
| think the best place to start would have been the docs. For
| unreal and blender. They took me a while to work through and I
| had to stop and Google terms constantly but they were really
| helpful for understanding some of the basic mental models and
| terminology in the space.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Yes, unreal is quite easy to get started in. You start with a
| scaffolding immediately when you start a new project. It
| literally has template options for different game types. It's
| very friendly to artists as nearly all the art tools are gui
| driven. Blueprints are okay, I didn't love them for all things
| but for a lot of things it was okay. Code is harder, you have
| to read their implementations of things if you want to do
| anything sufficiently complex. There's not a lot of
| comprehensive technical material for the internals. Using
| unreal engine as a programmer feels like the using "enterprise"
| software in terms of scale and bloat except that it was built
| by seriously competent engineers.
| realusername wrote:
| That's kind of the issue I have with those engines as a
| programmer not coming from games.
|
| Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of
| "bootstrap" of video games?
| ThalesX wrote:
| > Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of
| "bootstrap" of video games?
|
| There's so many starter kits out there, for Unity at least,
| even for older platforms such as Ogre3D and SDL, that I
| think the highest barrier of entry for any programmer is
| the fun idea.
| Ardon wrote:
| There are engines across the spectrum, but you might like
| Godot.
|
| I find it does enough for you that you can jump right in to
| programming your actual game, while giving you access to
| the nitty gritty if you want it.
| tomatowurst wrote:
| easy to get in but way tougher to finish a product. You are
| literally stuck to using forums and dealing with out of date
| and incomplete C++ documentation which is a non-starter for
| anybody without gaming dev experience. You really can't rely
| on blueprints alone, and it feels way more work than it
| should be for simple things you could just write in C# in
| Unity.
|
| Unity isn't exactly perfect either, there's just confusion
| about which version to start out on but the one that has the
| most amount of tutorials and userbase seems to be the answer.
|
| Absolutely correct that UE C++ is daunting. You just have way
| too much responsibility and you absolutely need experience
| with C++. It also takes more developers who are harder to
| find compared to Unity devs.
|
| Unreal Engine really isn't it for indie or small studios. It
| just takes so much longer to make something on it, and you
| almost certainly end up working with C++ to fix performance
| issues, debugging, etc.
|
| For large studios especially film studios using it to create
| 3D environments? It's perfect and those are UE's target
| market since they are guaranteed to have revenue income that
| can pay UE since it works on percentage of revenue generated
| and small studios, indie devs, the risk is far greater.
|
| This symmetric financial incentives mean the indie, small
| studios are always sidelined as they don't pay the bills.
| That's where Unity really shines.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Yeah I would pretty much assert the opposite of everything
| stated here.
| joshcryer wrote:
| One of the things I saw when playing with it is that they
| emphasize searching and intellisense reliant style
| programming with autocomplete, ie, make a guess and let
| intellisense tell you the object/type/whatever you're playing
| with. So you don't technically have to read their
| implementations, if you know how to leverage intellisense
| properly. In fact Microsoft specifically sped up intellisense
| with Unreal Engine (but the changes affect all intellisense
| users): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/18x-faster-
| intellisen...
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Blueprints are very good in this regard. It makes the
| engine api super discoverable.
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| Apologies, but I made a comment on u/lifeisstillgood that
| should help answer your question. If you need further
| elaboration please let me know.
| lvl102 wrote:
| It is a lot because the platform is now so expansive. I mainly
| use it for my AI/DL projects and it took me about 6 months to
| get up to speed. There are many Youtube tutorials. It helps if
| you know how to use Blender and other DCC tools such as
| Houdini.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| I've found unreal to be expansive as well but I'm surprised
| to hear you're using it for AI. Simulations?
| drak0n1c wrote:
| The keynote presentation that came out today covers all the new
| features:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZLibi6s_ew
| xmly wrote:
| Unreal or Unity, which one is easier for a programmer with zero
| experience on 3D gaming creation.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| I found Unity to be easier to start with but led to a lot of
| garbage.
|
| Unreal has a steeper initial learning curve but the system
| itself is more pleasant and the built in components are much
| more helpful. I switched to unreal after a couple years of
| Unity and strongly advocate others to do the same.
| dafelst wrote:
| I use Unreal in my day job and I am very familiar with it, and
| I found it much more difficult to learn and operate than Unity.
|
| Even as an Unreal "expert", for personal projects I still use
| Unity, it is just much easier to get stuff up and running and
| iterate.
| dummydata wrote:
| Did they ever get around to building a stable OpenXR toolkit? It
| seemed like an afterthought last time I checked..
| ChikkaChiChi wrote:
| Anything specific that isn't working for you? I've had great
| luck with it.
| FloatArtifact wrote:
| how moddable is unreal engine without express support of the
| developers of a given title?
| tehnub wrote:
| Nice announcement, but I really can't wait for an Apple Silicon
| build of the Engine. Would love to develop games on an M1 device.
| andreasley wrote:
| The release notes [1] state that "preliminary support for
| native Apple Silicon for macOS targets" has been added.
|
| Also, there's now an "Import Xcode GPU Debugger Plugin for
| Mac".
|
| [1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/unreal-
| engine-5_0-re...
| tehnub wrote:
| I may be wrong, but I think that is talking about creating
| games that run on Apple Silicon, not building the
| editor/engine itself for Apple Silicon (i.e. the dev setup).
| Regarding the XCode GPU plugin, that is cool; didn't see
| that, thanks!
| tezza wrote:
| "Large World Coordinates (LWC)" - fantastic.
|
| My projects use Unity and any time the camera gets 1800m from the
| world (0,0,0) the camera begins to shake. By 2000m the shake is
| too violent to use.
|
| So you have to reset the coordinates by a hack if you want a
| world scale 1:1 map
| oneoff786 wrote:
| Ue4 used to rely on the world origin shifting hack too. But
| this has significant problems, especially in multiplayer.
| imnotlost wrote:
| I just created a new scene in Unity 2020.3.5 and terrain going
| out to 6000 and a simple camera fly-script to fly around and it
| all looks good to me - no shaking.
|
| Using 32-bit floating point you'll have 0.1 accuracy up to
| 100000 at least.
|
| Edit - I just realized 10cm accuracy is not great (and that I'm
| talking to myself) so I tested with 0.001 and that's stable up
| to 9000.
| yodon wrote:
| Has anyone spotted discussion of WebGL render targets?
|
| UE4 could target WebGL but for UE5 I'm just finding a few
| hobby/fanboy forum posts not anything official from Unreal.
| astlouis44 wrote:
| Our venture backed startup is actively working on integrating
| web support back into Unreal Engine, as we see a huge
| opportunity for a easy cross-platform export target for
| developers.
|
| We're working on a WebGPU backend right now for both UE4 and
| UE5, and have already upgraded UE4 to support WebGL 2.0 from
| 4.24-4.27, as support for HTML5 was removed back in the 4.23
| release.
|
| Another major innovation is we've imported a more improved
| compression format (Basis) as part of our pipeline, we've also
| created an asynchronous set fetching that only grabs the
| required data that a user needs to see at any given moment,
| streaming the rest of the assets in the background as
| necessary. This dramatically reduces load times, which was one
| of the biggest complaints with Unreal on the web previously.
|
| Website for more info - https://theimmersiveweb.com/
|
| Our Discord: https://discord.gg/cFJV6Yu
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| Conjecture 1) unreal is overkill for web and I feel ue5 is
| more, you can make a 500mb web game, but I don't play it 2) web
| makes no money, except in China, but point 1 still applies
| lfowles wrote:
| The HTML5 target has been deprecated for several versions now.
| pjmlp wrote:
| You are better off with PlayCanvas and BabylonJS.
|
| WebGL 2.0 is stuck in 2011 hardware, something like Unreal is
| overkill.
|
| No wonder they decided to use pixel streaming with server side
| rendering instead.
| programmarchy wrote:
| As mentioned, official support was dropped and the community
| supported extension hasn't been updated in ~2 years. If you
| need to target WebGL, then Unity is a better bet.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Even Unity isn't much better, the only good ones are the
| engines designed for Web specially like PlayCanvas and
| BabylonJS.
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