

Epic Games launches Unreal development grants - bluesilver07
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/epic-launches-unreal-dev-grants

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fnayr
Unreal is really winning a lot of points in my book. First with the engine
pricing and now this. If I ever step up my mobile game making to 3D I'd
definitely use them over Unity.

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binarycrusader
Nevermind that their offering is superior in terms of long-term product
maintenance and potential platform offerings since you get complete source
access.

Unity's advantage remains in the asset area with its pipeline and arguably
easier to approach editor, but source code access is a huge win for any
developer that has the skills needed to maintain a product long-term.

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laeus
Having worked in games for 13 years, at studios large and small and projects
of the same variety, source code access has almost never blipped on the radar.
The few times when we had issues with various engines for which we didn't have
source, our support contracts gave us the changes we needed to ship on time.
On occasion we modified the engine, only to be hit by tricky merges with
subsequent releases. In general, I've found that modifying an engine should be
done by engine programmers (and if a game company does enough engine
development to have such specialists, it's probably not licensing any of these
options).

The latest Unreal is a wonderful piece of engine software. Their blueprint
system as well as their material editor and best-in-class renderer really are
something to talk about. They also have a gigantic learning community. And I
think their licensing terms are a good approach.

However, Unity has blazing fast compilation time on the order of seconds, a
properly built play-in-editor mode, large asset and plugin ecosystem, seamless
asset pipeline, and support for a modern programming language in C#. Each of
these could arguably be considered a game changer in isolation, but in
aggregate they are an efficiency avalanche. Nothing makes a better game,
faster, than being able to go from idea to prototype in five minutes rather
than two hours. It's possible to try more things, to discard ten or even fifty
bad ideas for every good one, and still come out ahead. This is what it all
comes down to, in my experience. And when you're done, you can port your game
to over a dozen platforms (in some edge cases by simply changing a dropdown
value).

That said, I'm happy that both engines are so good, because it means neither
will rest on its laurels. Unreal's marketplace and Unity 5's renderer are no
accidents.

~~~
binarycrusader
I understand what you're saying, but as someone that has followed various game
developers closely, especially those that do porting work, source access is a
huge win in many cases.

Imagine your game shipped on a version of Unity that's no longer supported but
you want to continue using it for projects or bring back an old game to a new
OS platform. Without the source, your only option is to port the game to a new
version of Unity. That's not so great.

But again, I'll readily admit that all of this is only a win if you have the
right team with the right skillset. There are definitely tradeoffs involved.

~~~
archagon
I think at scale, that's true. But what if you're a small team, or a solo
developer? Let's face it: there's no way you'll be able to port Unity or
Unreal to a new platform by yourself, so that might as well not even factor
into it.

~~~
binarycrusader
I think Ryan Gordon (aka 'icculus') is proof that the right solo person can do
such a port :-) Nevermind Casey Muratori or others I could name...

There are many small, talented indie developers that definitely have the right
set of skills to bring an engine to a new platform, or to one that's just
slightly different.

For example, porting an engine from Linux to FreeBSD or some other UNIX should
be trivial, but impossible without source code access.

Now I doubt many games are going to be ported to those platforms, but imagine
a 3D walkthrough program for an architectural client or manufacturing
facilities where UNIX is still found.

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archagon
Anyone have experience working with UE4 on older iOS devices, such as the iPad
3? Specifically, can you make a game that still runs at 60fps on that device?
I'm thinking mostly 2D, but with polygon-based meshes instead of sprites for
my graphics.

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arca_vorago
I'm very excited about this. I have been keeping my project under wraps and
hope that I can get the prototype ironed out a bit more before I try for this.
Just a few thousand dollars to pay for licensing fees of software and maybe a
dev machine or two and some marketing.

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VikingCoder
WOW. I wonder how frequently the grants will be awarded.

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_random_
Unity3d is eating it alive starting with legs :).

