
Unreal Engine 4.17 Released - Night_walker
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-4-17-released
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ksec
Not into Gaming Development, but could anyone tell me why All Unreal Rendered
Games Graphics look alike? You could literally tell it is Unreal engine if it
has those Shiny Rendering Graphics on Metal or Rocks. And they dont look
great. There is something about its Light Reflection rendering that i think is
"Trademark" of Unreal. And they dont seems to have improved over the many
iteration of releases.

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markatkinson
Yes, just to comment on this Unreal Engines lighting is considered really good
(and it is imo). The reflections you see in game are actually the
responsibility of the creators of the games not the engines.

A newer game that has pretty decent lighting is PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds.
Check it out, you might see less of those aggressive reflections.

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thrownblown
I go back and forth on the looks PUBG, sometimes its gorgeous, sometimes the
buildings don't load.

There will be moments where the landscapes and vistas are almost as impressive
as Witcher 3 and then I get shot.

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Kiro
Feature packed as always. I love Unreal Engine's patch notes. 4.16 was
released at the end of May and was equally impressive so it's pretty insane.

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ksec
I asked everytime but never get an answer.

How did Unreal manage to evolve so quickly? If it was just one patch notes
then may be just a coincidence, but they have manage to do it every time for
the past months or years. I cant think of a single software / middleware that
has this pace of development. And Games Development were suppose to be hard?

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taw55
They also a have ton of licensees which are AAA game studios with qualified
profesionals often backporting fixes and features into the main branch. Appart
from that the engine is completely open sourced.

I also get the impression Tim Sweeney, the one man developer behind the first
engine, is rather good at assembling and managing tech teams.

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rtpg
Are there any major usability differences for Unreal compared to Unity for
less experienced developers? I am a big fan of Unity's ease of use when
prototyping and Unreal has always seemed more daunting

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bobsgame
Game development is hard and making anything substantial will require spending
thousands of hours in either engine, so it's more about the purpose of the
engine rather than ease of use, since you will eventually have to learn all
the ins and outs of either one.

Unreal is a "AAA" engine originally meant for large teams. It has much better
level design tools and collaboration features, but all programming must be
done in C++ which is fragile and can break the whole engine. Lighter scripting
can be done with Blueprints which is good for designers making levels
interactive. Unreal is a good choice if you are aiming to make a serious
production with a team making large detailed levels.

The Unity Asset Store has many more plugins and it's easier to put together a
sandbox type game with lots of features, since its managed code design makes
it easier to drop in scripts other people have made. There are level design
tool plugins available that mimic what Unreal does, but they aren't as
polished and collaboration is harder.

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markatkinson
Just to expand on this a bit, the Blueprints capabilities have grown to the
point were you can create entire games without learning a single line of code.

The major downside I see to blueprints is a lack of source control. This is a
pretty massive downside, and not something a professional team can forgo. But
if you are looking to learn and understand the engine as a solo person
Blueprints are a great place to start.

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Impossible
Blueprints can be used with source control, so your comment is highly
misleading. Merging and diffing blueprints is possible as well, as they are
serialized in text format and there are tools to assist with that, but merging
is unrelible. In practice Unity scenes and prefabs have the same issue.
Professional teams, including Epic of course, use Blueprints heavily and
always use source control...

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bobsgame
50 pages of fixes and features! Unreal is an amazing beacon of technology that
continues to push the limits and makes me proud to work with computers. Thank
you Epic!

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tomxor
Does anyone know what the Linux support is like these days?

I see lots of linux improvements in the release but last time I tried it was
impossible to get my hands on the really obscure linux alpha build.

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cweagans
There's a package on AUR that works pretty well
([https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/unreal-
engine](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/unreal-engine)). I can't speak to
other distros, but this package worked reasonably well on my system.

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hoorayimhelping
Can anyone recommend a good book on how to break into the Unreal Engine 4 SDK?

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lfowles
[https://www.udemy.com/unrealcourse/](https://www.udemy.com/unrealcourse/)

Not a book, but this course has been the best resource I've found. Just wait
for one of Udemy's constant discounts so you don't have to pay more than
$10-15 for it.

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hoorayimhelping
Thanks for the link! I was specifically looking for a book to read on my
commute in NYC, but the course was ten bucks so I bought it anyway, why not.

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lfowles
As you can see, the engine is evolving quite rapidly, so a book might not be a
great format. Thankfully the course has active forums at gamedev.tv and the
instructors go back to annotate videos if something is completely different.

re:Humble Book Bundle: no offense intended to Packt writers, but the books
they publish are somewhat hit and mostly miss :/

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hacker_9
Ctrl+F for the word 'fix' highlights 540 locations. Great they take the time
to fix reported errors, but I wonder what their testing strategy is in the
first place that led to this many problems being in the official release.

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SolarNet
These include all the commit logs. How many times did your first commit for a
brand new feature need zero fixing.

