Unreal Engine 4 for $19 a month

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Hunter

BeyondUnreal Newsie
Aug 20, 2001
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...Behind You...
www.unrealfans.com
Not to be out done by Unity 5, Unreal Engine 4 is now available (including access to the full source code) for $19 a month on subscription.

For $19 you get access to everything including the Unreal Editor which is ready to go, and the C++ source code hosted on GitHub. With the idea being that it will open it up for collaborative development.

Unreal Engine 4 is also getting OSX Support and viewing the source code also reveals work being done on Linux, Steam Machine and Oculus Rift support. With in browser support already announced by Mozilla.

Note, that any game published commercially will warrant 5% of gross sales being 'lost' to Epic Games. Much like a percentage lost to Apple/Google/etc on App Stores.
 

SkaarjMaster

enemy of time
Sep 1, 2000
4,870
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Sarasota, FL
Well, I think we kinda already knew that. So, guys, do we have enough people with enough time to make UT4? Wouldn't that have a great ring to it? UT4 by BUF.:) Or we could get a bunch of guys together from various forums and call it the UT4 Development Team. I would only be able to review and look at stuff though.
 
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M^uL

New Member
Nov 16, 2009
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Well, I think we kinda already knew that. So, guys, do we have enough people with enough time to make UT4? Wouldn't that have a great ring to it? UT4 by BUF.:) Or we could get a bunch of guys together from various forums and call it the UT4 Development Team. I would only be able to review and look at stuff though.

The previous EULA for the UDK disallowed that but with their new subscription model, it might be time to reread the EULA.
 

GreatEmerald

Khnumhotep
Jan 20, 2008
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Lithuania
This is nice. I would like to see an Unreal Engine 4 Runtime to check it out before having to shell out $20, though.

Also, apparently they have plans to port the development tools to Linux as well (this was stated by one dev on Twitter), which is amazing.

As for UT4, eh, Unreal III should be a priority :)
 
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I would be interested in working on a UT4 / Unreal Tournament 2014 project. I doubt Epic would let you use the Unreal name in the title but realistically nothing prevents anyone from making a multiplayer FPS that essentially mimics and expands upon UT's gameplay.
 

SkaarjMaster

enemy of time
Sep 1, 2000
4,870
8
38
Sarasota, FL
Well, we need to drop the 2014 part anyway. How about UT4: The Ultimate Multiplayer Experience or UT4: The Only Multiplayer Bonanza (i.e. - UT4: TOMB for short). OK, so another word besides Bonanza needs to be used, but you get the idea.:)
 

DeathBooger

Malcolm's Sugar Daddy
Sep 16, 2004
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:(

And so the era where a kid can mess around in a game editor he found on his PC and make giant dick grenades has come to an end............

:(

We're in a Flappy Bird world now.
 

Arnox

UT99/2004 Mod Crazy
Mar 26, 2009
1,601
5
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Beyond
:(

And so the era where a kid can mess around in a game editor he found on his PC and make giant dick grenades has come to an end............

:(

We're in a Flappy Bird world now.
sitdow10.jpg
 

GreatEmerald

Khnumhotep
Jan 20, 2008
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Hmm, this does bring up a point, though. How will modding work now? Can developers actually make it so some parts of their C++ code are open for modding? The latest moves by Epic have been more of "all or nothing"...

EDIT: Looking at their answer place:
Our current thinking is that folks who want their game to be extendable via a tool-set, will have their users download Rocket to build game extensions, not package the editor with that game.
( https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/6518/request-package-editor-with-game.html )
With "Rocket" being the codename for UE4 ( https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/12918/what-is-rocket.html ).

Which still doesn't say much. You can't just download UE4...
 
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WGH

New Member
Jan 22, 2006
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Hmm, this does bring up a point, though. How will modding work now? Can developers actually make it so some parts of their C++ code are open for modding? The latest moves by Epic have been more of "all or nothing"...

EDIT: Looking at their answer place:

( https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/6518/request-package-editor-with-game.html )
With "Rocket" being the codename for UE4 ( https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/12918/what-is-rocket.html ).

Which still doesn't say much. You can't just download UE4...
Even if you can't ship entire source code, you can probably release kind of SDK, that doesn't contain the entire source, but merely headers and the editor. AFAIK, they actually did release headers for UT titles before UT3.

Another concern is security. If you're building an UT-ish game that allows content to be downloaded from untrusted sources, like game servers, it's certainly bad idea to blindly execute machine code. You might be able to devise a system that sandboxes it somehow, perhaps something like Google's NaCl, but that's not an easy task. You could also create something like intermediate bytecode, but that would be reinventing UnrealScript again.

They could force everyone to write mods in Blueprints, but this idea is just terrible.
 

GreatEmerald

Khnumhotep
Jan 20, 2008
4,042
1
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Lithuania
Hmm, headers, that's a good point. And I agree with Epic in that bundling all the tools with the game isn't that good of an idea (on Linux, each package is always divided into regular and -dev(el) versions, the latter provides the development tools and doesn't just stay there if the user has no need of it).

Still, there will have to be some sort of a hook mechanism, like there was with mutators, GameRules and interactions. It's probably possible to do that (I thought of doing something like this myself when developing my game, Arcomage Clone, but ended up using a scripting language – Lua – instead), yet the problem will be that every developer will have to manually include the hooks, instead of them being there by default as in UE3.

And if each developer will need to make a hook mechanism manually, then we can forget about any game modding until the next game in the Unreal series.
 

moonflyer

Member
Jun 2, 2003
402
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Shanghai,China
lichong.blogbus.com
Well, I think we kinda already knew that. So, guys, do we have enough people with enough time to make UT4? Wouldn't that have a great ring to it? UT4 by BUF.:) Or we could get a bunch of guys together from various forums and call it the UT4 Development Team. I would only be able to review and look at stuff though.

Count me in!
:D

I would be interested in working on a UT4 / Unreal Tournament 2014 project. I doubt Epic would let you use the Unreal name in the title but realistically nothing prevents anyone from making a multiplayer FPS that essentially mimics and expands upon UT's gameplay.

Exactly!
 

ambershee

Nimbusfish Rawks
Apr 18, 2006
4,519
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Nomad
sheelabs.gamemod.net
I've been working with it for two years, now I can finally talk about it if anyone has any questions :D

I also intend to get a couple of indie projects up and running (ok, I actually already have one project in the works). I'm tempted to do a multiplayer shooter and already began prototyping. It doesn't work like UT though, I wanted to work with more organic rather than rigid mechanical systems.
 

WGH

New Member
Jan 22, 2006
237
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31
Moscow, Russia
wgh.ath.cx
I've been working with it for two years, now I can finally talk about it if anyone has any questions :D
A couple of random questions then.

Are there any signs of modding support? For example, are maps and other assets downloadable from the game server? What about the code?

Is demo recording and playback supported? If yes, is there any improvements regarding package version compatibility?

Can you selectively replicate actors? Currently, you can replicate them either to everyone or just the owner. Can you do it more flexibly now?

Is garbage collector that sets actor references to null once they're destroyed still there?

Is C++ that's used in the engine pure, or it's augmented with code generation or something?

Are there any signs of GameSpy? :lol:
 

ambershee

Nimbusfish Rawks
Apr 18, 2006
4,519
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Nomad
sheelabs.gamemod.net
Most of your questions are sort of redundant; it's a game engine, not a specific game:

Are there any signs of modding support? For example, are maps and other assets downloadable from the game server? What about the code?

You would implement this on a per-game basis as your needs require. Epic doesn't force you to use the 'UT' style setup, and doesn't provide anything either, because they know little about your server setups or what middleware you're using. There's likely some existing functionality you can leverage, however.

Is demo recording and playback supported? If yes, is there any improvements regarding package version compatibility?

It's up to you to determine what demo recording and playback actually means. There's a framework class provided to get you started that does a lot of the grunt work.

Can you selectively replicate actors? Currently, you can replicate them either to everyone or just the owner. Can you do it more flexibly now?

You can do whatever the hell you like, you have the source code.

Is garbage collector that sets actor references to null once they're destroyed still there?

Garbage collection still exists. It's a critical system in any modern game engine.

Is C++ that's used in the engine pure, or it's augmented with code generation or something?

It's C++. It has to be to run on multiple platforms.