
Unreal Engine 4.9 Released - mminer
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-49-released
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stesch
I'd say at least a week just to write the release notes. Perhaps even a month.

This page doesn't end.

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zubspace
I don't know if this is a blessing or a curse. 3D games are very complex. It
takes years to grok all the concepts from linear algebra, to scene management,
occlusion culling, shaders, physically based rendering, network
synchronization, scripting and ai, game design and thousand other things.

I think a large part, why smaller, "indy" engines like haxeflixel, godot,
cocos-2d etc are surviving is because of the much lower entry level. I wonder
if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse sometime
under their own weight... How are they even adding all those new features
without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me most.

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daenz
> I wonder if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse
> sometime under their own weight...How are they even adding all those new
> features without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me
> most.

I haven't looked at their code, but I would bet they have fantastic regression
tests. Something I've added to my own engine in the past year is "pixel
perfect" tests: for a given test scene employing specific effects (soft
shadows, reflections, refraction, etc) the renderer should produce an image
that is a pixel perfect match with a known correct image. If you begin
optimizing shaders and rendering code, regressions are caught very quickly, in
an automated way. Sometimes the images are close enough to be acceptable (for
example, if an optimization changed floating point precision, resulting in a
color that is a shade different). In that case, the test fails, and you can
replace the test image with your new rendered image, after you've vetted that
it "looks correct" manually.

It's not anywhere close perfect in testing all code paths, but the payoff is
rather large for the effort put into creating the test.

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zubspace
Things get interesting when the number of possible code paths increase. One
such beast is the Unity Standard Shader. There are dozens of combinations
depening on Metallic/Specular PBR, Multi-Texturing, Shadows, Light Types,
Light Baking, Forward/Deferred Rendering and so on. Combine this with
different backends (OpenGL, OpenGL ES, DirectX, Vulcan) and graphic card
abilities and at some point adding new stuff gets quite complex.

I guess they simply throw money and play testers at this problem. (Unreal
probably more so than Unity) But how long can you scale this up?

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cwyers
It's fascinating to me that they've already hit 4.9 and we've yet to see a
major AAA title running UE4 -- all the big Unreal titles we've seen so far
this year (Batman: Arkham Knight, Mortal Kombat X) have all been UE3.

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arca_vorago
AAA titles dont get done in a year, which is about how long UE4 has been out.
On top of that, I would say UE4 is just now getting to a place where it would
be ready to be used in an AAA pipeline, so unless they spent a ton of time on
asset creation before hand, I wouldnt expect to se any AAA titles for at least
another year or even two.

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Paul_S
All the mainstream engines now support a linux target (and in fact UE
supported it for donkeys years) but so few developers release it, partly due
to a dependency on an external service or framework. But I'm hopeful now,
especially if that service is steam.

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CmonDev
_> Microsoft's engineers added support for DirectX 12 to UE4_

Don't you love it when everyone is competing on a level ground?

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pmalynin
AMD Engineers could have added support for Mantle just as well.

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socceroos
AMD has 'discontinued' Mantle in favour of OpenGL Vulkan. Vulkan borrows
heavily from Mantle.

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Narishma
It's called Vulkan, not OpenGL Vulkan. It's not related to OpenGL, other than
being made by the Khronos group.

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socceroos
Well, it used to be referred to as the "Next Generation OpenGL Initiative",
but yes, its not technically the old OpenGL API any more.

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Scuds
There's an entire section for Playstation 4 improvements but only a few scant
mentions of Xbox One. Are consoles done in parity, or is UE4 favoring PS4
development over XB1?

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venomsnake
I would say that MS once again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and
the latest sales trends were not good for the xbox.

[http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselli...](http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselling-
the-xbox-one-by-almost-2-to-1-and-that-s-the-good-news--1298498)

Engine vendors follow where the install base is.

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DarkTree
I've never programmed with Unreal before, but I'm just curious:

What method does one use to wade through such a large list of changes? Do you
look for something specific, or read the whole thing, or just assume the
changes will bleed flawlessly into your project?

Very impressive update, congrats.

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brandonwamboldt
They specifically publish upgrade notes at the bottom, so that helps (as many
changes won't break your project).

I'm only working on a small hobby project, but I read the bulk of the notes. I
mostly look through the subsystems I use most often, and skip over others that
aren't super important to me.

As always, the most important notes are at the top. Also, if you follow the
live streams, you're aware of some of the bigger changes far in advance (same
if you use the preview builds).

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unoti
How is mobile support now? I'm interested in making simple mobile titles, but
Unreal seems targetted at making super high performance games on high end
mobile devices, rather than simple games that most devices can run. Tappy
Chicken would make my phone get super hot and destroyed my battery-- and
that's about as simple as a game can get. Is Unreal a good choice now for
making straightforward mobile games? A year ago, I felt like Unity was a
better choice for that, but wonder if that's still true today.

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kitsunesoba
How Blender and OS X friendly is Unreal these days? I'd like to dabble with
it, but I heard that its Mac support started off rocky. I also don't feel like
learning an entirely different 3D tool when I'm already familiar with Blender.

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Voltage
I use it on OSX just fine. I also work sharing content with colleagues across
filesystems.

Regarding Blender, Unreal accepts FBX file format, and I've had no issues with
imports from Blender.

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hacker_9
That is an epic list of changes!

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santaclaus
Don't you mean... an Epic list of changes?

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moron4hire
The rendering engine is good, for sure, but you need to give it the right
stuff to make look good. If you don't have the budget for art assets, Unreal
isn't going to magically make your game look awesome.

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brandonwamboldt
I mean, that's kind of goes without saying, doesn't it?

No game engine will make your game magically look awesome if you don't have
the budget for art assets and don't have an artist on your team.

That said, the tools make it very easy for artists with no programming
experience to make fantastic looking games with in depth game mechanics
without using programming, so thats a plus.

The marketplace has quite a few high quality art assets, but they are pretty
expensive, with each bundle ranging from $20-80 basically. The marketplace is
lacking content for sure though, especially compared to the Unity asset store.
More content gets added each week though.

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moron4hire
Judging from the number of people jumping on to Unreal and Unity, I don't
think it does go without saying. And if you use the marketplace assets, you're
going to end up with a game that looks like everyone else's game that also
uses assets out of the marketplace.

It makes certain aspects of connecting art assets with gameplay code _easier_
, but I don't think it at all makes it "very easy". We're still talking about
a non-trivial amount of programming here. If you're not a programmer already,
gameplay code is still going to be a struggle.

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deelowe
uhh... What's your point? Game development requires knowledge of game
development and that you won't have a good looking game without decent art
assets?

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lupinglade
Go Epic! Everyone should check out the new Unreal Tournament pre-alpha too,
very fun games to be had!

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rancur
any benchmarks on this? this will be the next game I upgrade my GPU for

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brayton
What are the best VR experiences built with Unreal?

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soylentcola
What, like most demanding/nicest looking? Or most entertaining and fun? I
believe the DX12 "Elemental" demo works with the Oculus dev units. I haven't
gotten around to testing it but this thread has reminded me to give it a run
after work.

As far as most entertaining, that'll probably depend on what you're looking
for and what your platform is. I've only got a Rift DK2 so I don't know about
GearVR or Cardboard or Vive, etc.

