
Unreal Engine 4.8 Released - mariuz
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-48-released
======
moron4hire
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
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
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.

~~~
fsloth
Sorry, are you advocating UE or Unity? (I presume it is the former).

~~~
christoph
Actually neither specifically.

I prefer UE4 - it seems to have a better technological core and I prefer their
approach to many different elements in the engine.

Unity is great as well, don't get me wrong, they've had a lot of money for
licences/upgrades out of us over the years.

I personally struggle to see how they will keep up with UE4 long-term unless
they address some of their built-up historic technical debt quickly. I think
even though they are both to some extent 'free', competition is still healthy
and should be actively encouraged.

~~~
greggman
I feel the technical debt is in UE's court. They're an engine designed for
100+ person teams where they assume you're a AAA developer and have lots of
programmers to support your artists/designers.

Unity is an app for making games.

The difference in approach leads to vastly different experiences. It will be
far easier to make Unity pretty than for Unreal to start being good at
editing, good for small teams, good mobile, .. basically good at the things
Unity currently does better than Unreal

------
JTon
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
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_la...](http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_the_witcher_3_wild_hunt_lands-34742_en.html)

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

~~~
scotth
Have you tried Divinity? Brought me right back to my Baldur's Gate days.

~~~
qznc
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=PLKUZkQKe2mplbFbec0rFz...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKUZkQKe2mplbFbec0rFzVU04nVTBYrAs)

Witcher:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuQirEnvqkU&list=PLj_Goi54wf...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuQirEnvqkU&list=PLj_Goi54wf0f2NXPeIvJqtLBSG9_nBTMM)

------
keyle
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
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.

~~~
cm3
What's your source for that? Do you know someone at Epic or have you worked
there?

~~~
speeder
Dunno if what he said is true or not, but when I was a member of IGDA, I left
after the board refused to kick out Tim Langdell (that is a trademark troll)
and Michael Capps.

Michael Capps is Epic president, and he ended admitting he joined IGDA board
in first place to stop IGDA from forcing studio hands in fighting crunch, when
Capps joined, IGDA most high profile work was to try to fix the crunch
culture, Epic felt threatened, and pulled that stunt (send Capps to join IGDA
and undermine the efforts against crunch)

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

~~~
dylanz
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.

~~~
Zancarius
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.

~~~
tgb
Didn't they have a weird compromise in terms of projectile physics and the
player's motion? I remember reading about it and thinking that doing so would
make it harder to use than doing it physically accurately but I forget the
details.

------
danr4
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.

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

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

------
unoti
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
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
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
Unity. I just switched to it and the workflow is great for us (2 dev team)

------
bhouston
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)

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

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

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

~~~
542458
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
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.

~~~
542458
I love blueprints, but I've never actually touched the C++ part of UE4. I
might have to take a look at that to see if it's as good as you say!

------
nutjob123
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
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-
surviva...](http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2015-06-09-ark-survival-
evolved-has-already-generated-usd10-million)).

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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_4))

~~~
shadowmint
...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...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?72345-Ark-Survival-
Evolved-Low-fps-becaue-of-UE4-or-due-to-no-optimizations)

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.

------
gusfoo
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.

------
breezydon
great company.

