UE4.5 released...

Mods, please don't kill me for that, but the speed of their development is breath taking.

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-45-released

Looks like it becomes a valid alternative in the mobile sector as well.

 

i was quite impressed with the improvements they brought with this version,

 

I´m not sure.. or maybe i´m not fully entered about Unreal Engine, i was using it previously to Unity.. but seeing the video results on the link you gave, i can´t find a strong difference between it and Unity.... do i´m wrong ?... :O

 

Me and 80% of the population will share your view. But probably some artists will post soon about what makes the demos so amazing.

 

You'll figure out what the differences are in about a year when developers start releasing their UE4 games.
Note, they'll be the ones where people say 'Wow, this looks great' as opposed to 'yeurgh, are these Unity shadows?' (Please note I'm joking here, Unity is damn pretty, I'm just poking fun at it's relatively poor shadow cascade filtering)

 

I'm not even an artist. I'm a coder. But those shadows are *lovely*. Compare the shadow at the base of the object to the same shadow further away, and you'll see it's a lot sharper at the base, just like real life.

 

It is nowhere near as ugly out the box in every regards, from particles to lighting / post / shadows and contains a wealth of tools Unity is years away from. I didn't really realise until I opened Unity after a long while to test out a speedtree issue..

On the flip side UE4 can be a buggy mess and performance nightmare in places, you can do simple things like add trees without performance bombing through the floor or remove trees without the editor crashing on it's ass. Y'know the simple things you need to make a game. All round it's pretty sweet, needs some TLC.

 

I may read those kind of comments from others but I doubt I will ever notice "wow those shadows are amazing!". I play games to play the game. Heck I still play games on the NES and Genesis. PS3 and PC too but things like shadows are meaningless to me... unless it is part of the game play experience. Like enemies hiding or player stealth.

 

UE4.5 is simply a power graphics monstrosity that makes other engines it encounters flee for the hills. It is not capable because the word capable does not apply to it anymore. It is a pre-approved Rambo, Terminator, RoboCop, Man Of Steel etc...............................it's not Unity though.

 

Looks good.

 

Sometimes I really wonder if all these features were 80% ready a year ago, and they're just finishing them up and releasing every month to just make it look like they're adding features really fast....

 

Those shadows are beautiful. I would love to have something like that in Unity :\

 

A lot of them are user requests so not quite, although the basis of the rendering engine. Yup I gather it is..

 

I find it amusing that some Unreal 4 developers have been asking for a logo to use. Contrast that to Unity developers who typically disable it after upgrading to Unity Pro.

 

I find this amusing from a different standpoint: someone's game is so bad that they need a UE4 logo to convince their players that their game doesn't suck?

 

You cannot simply apply the UE4 logo. Epic needs to approve it.

https://www.unrealengine.com/branding-guidelines-and-trademark-usage

 

I know right? I mean, how does a team of programmers add that many features to an engine in such short time spans? Honestly, those programmers must have golden keyboards that program everything for them or something.

 

How's that a joke? It's true now already...

 

If they know what they are doing, have a well-designed clean architecture and can focus the majority of their time on coding updates it is very possible. Think of how much just one experienced person could accomplish in 40 hours per week. And how many do they have? Looks like even the user community is very involved in the development.

 

Sure, and UT's new GUI was held back for three years. I wonder why UT didn't filled the gap of these new lightning systems before. It was stated that there will no shadow improvements in the first release of Unity 5.

 

As I understood this is just a form you fill out. Basically all users will be able to use the logo imho (the approval mentioned in the link is only needed if you adapt the logos more than allowed in the style guides).

I still think the perception with gamers will be different for a long time:
UE4: "Sh*t, this game is crap despite using UE4. This developer s*cks"
Unity: "Wow, this game is good despite using Unity."

However, maybe this can change if all the noobs go to UE4 and produce tons of crap for 4-5 years. However, if Epic is smart they will start to want to have a look at the game first to carry the Logo if they see perception is about to change.

 

Don't spend tons of time Q&A'ing it is the short answer , I honestly believe they do work at an extremely rapid pace to implement new features. Doesn't mean they work right for a while (there is not a chance in hell you can Q&A that many changes in a month) there is literally hundreds if not thousands per release, there's still transparency to sort out back from the time of sabre tooth tigers.

Unity I've noticed is the EXACT opposite, it takes them years but generally tools seem to work alright. As for the GUI, I'm unsure why UMG was made in 3 months (Unreal GUI for peeps) and Unity's took three years. I agree with @0tacun it would of been prime time to work on some much needed graphical upgrades and tools to compliment.

Unity is rock solid, sometimes that's all you need. Even the Beta's I've been impressed with, only had little things to report.

 

There is a license agreement involved. I haven't read over all the details, but in theory Epic could terminate it if they wanted to and prevent you from using the logo.

 

While I admit this seems very impressive, I just see no need for someone like myself and alot of people here to ever need to use it. Most of the work I see around here is pretty simple and seems like using UE4 over Unity just wouldn't offer many advantages over what most people do.

 

The 4.5 release of UE4 is impressive, but certain features should have been in there the entire time. For example, animation retargeting, light map UV generation, and automatic C++ hot reload should have been in there the entire time.

The automatic C++ hot reload feature is not some new idea. It is literally how the thing should have been set up from the first day. Previous to adding that feature, C++ programmers had to restart UE4 when they updated their C++ scripts. Could anybody imagine how silly it would feel if we needed to restart Unity each time we updated a C# script?

The light map UV generation feature is another silly thing to brag about. The editor should be handling that for the user automatically. It is silly that previous releases of UE4 required the user to manually generate light map UV. I personally had quite a few assets that had overlapping UV. With Unity, you can import those without any problem. With previous versions of UE4, I could import them but not build the lighting until I manually created new light map UV for each asset.

Seriously, I am very impressed with UE4 overall, but I find it silly to cheer when Epic adds features that should have been in there from the beginning. This is especially true for the automatic C++ hot reload feature.

 

Well I agree it may be overkill for most scenarios, whilst I'm waiting for baking let me explain some pro's. If you are into larger games, the engine swallows polys to the GPU like there is no tomorrow.. Our terrain alone cranks around 2 - 4 Million polys with no impact, the post effects generally have no instances of latency loss. I've cranked out 11 Million via experimental parallel rendering and it doesn't make a difference, but more explanation later.

These are mainly Skylight features, so the examples show are dynamic with no GI. It's how the engine looks without any additional fancy lighting.. What does kick GPU butt is their shader models and lighting / shadows based upon it, it's not foliage friendly neither is it lightweight in any sense of the word. The issue with DTR (Deferred tiled rendering) whilst it's efficient for multi-light scene setups it runs out of steam and adds complications at points, a TOD system is pretty much a performance long term sentence. You need to hand off to a forward renderer for some specifics..

There are tools like terrain composer, but in UE4 you have the option in larger games to reset origin bounds and extensively use AI across all border tiles. Now some of these improvements are due to people jumping up and down about larger games, like ray traced shadows vs. cascaded shadow maps on average it's 30% quicker to crunch, so if you need long distance dynamic skylights (like an additional GI bump) without the costly offset there is your option. There are drawbacks some of the features pigeon hole you into DX11 and GL 4+, so if you're aiming at older crappier hardware it's not going to go well.

You can go down the route of using static lighting across the board, which is pretty much free lighting although as said that has it's drawbacks like, TOD.. Also if you're building larger scenes lightmass or baking isn't efficient enough, so dynamic solutions are required to fill the gap.

At last count we hit 36KM2 terrain and it's been tricky, four of our 2K maps sunk Unity and that's where UE4 starts to make sense. There is an option to use a weight output from WM (world machine) that allows you to import set co-ordinates of tile paint directly into a material layer, so you can avoid splatting per instance and just import a 40+KM terrain whilst you drink a cuppa. Also the lightmap generator will hopefully stop lightmass being a pain in everyones USB dongle.

Ultimately what UE does best is "corridor" levels, super shiny sci-fi type games, but one will always push it.

So for the mobile devs there is an option to just bake away and run nearly full instances on phones, not nearly that simple but that's the way it is.. The hot reload C++ feature is long overdue, also

 

unity vs unrreal' i like and chose unity over unreal because of unities building XYZ grid and they are a teaching industry not a money making industry. unreal XYZ building area sucks, they don't have one and every thing is built for you.

 

I don't quite understand what you're trying to say here. You dislike Unreal because it does more of the work for you?

 

The same could be said about plenty of Unity features

 

Yes, Unity do it for the love, not the money /rolleyes

 

Slightly off-topic, but as we already had logo discussion in this thread...
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/gameplay-trailer-for-mass-murdering-shooter-is-bey/1100-6423001/
http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/16/6989459/hatred-epic-games-unreal-engine

 

Exactly. And isn't unity what we all wanted all along? ;-)

 

Enlighten will quickly shut up the naysayers and shinies addicts, and these threads will cease to exist

But to the OP, yes I do agree, Unreal Engine is coming along nicely, and is a great alternative.

 

I never understood people coming here and saying how much they love a different game engine.
Since that makes me wonder why you are here.

 

Because I like the people here, even the quirky ones like @JamesLeeNZ .. Nothing wrong with discussing rational debate, if UE4 was the king of everything that be do you think the millions of devs still using Unitty would be here? Everything has pros and cons..

 

No there's nothing wrong with a little debate or discussion.
Just some of the comments I have seen in such threads make me wonder lol.

Wasn't my intenion to call anyone out or be offensive I want everyone to know that.

 

We're in the entertainment industry, aren't we? So ... whenever that happens, grab some popcorn and enjoy the entertainment. Aside of that, there's always something to be learned by looking at other game engines / game authoring tools. Ah, maybe that's it: It's not entertainment but edutainment. That's probably why people don't like it that much

 

It's good to see the improvements on the Unreal engine. However I hope Unity developers follow this at close feet as well. With Unity 5.0 in the making, I saw this on the Unreal website: "RAY TRACED DISTANCE FIELD SOFT SHADOWS" And then I think..... yeah... soft shadows in unity, why do they look so terrible? Then I hopefully dream... maybe Unity developers just add this feature too just before Unity 5.0 get released and say... guys... we got some extra time and we thought... aah why not, we have it too. Sorry we delayed it by 1 week, but hey... we want quality too

I know this is hard to realise, but that's what I hope sometimes. Unity isn't Unreal, but we need to keep eyes open to stay in the race for the best. I enjoy Unity 3D a lot, but when I see at what pace Unreal keeps there graphics up to date, I think Unity Developers could learn something from that too. New techniques?, bam go in research, develop and see if there's a patch to push trough to have Unity that feature too ^_^

 

But will it run on my 4850? The last time it grinded it to a halt until the render settings were set to sub-PS2 level.

 

No... but I'm quite sure your 4850 will blend quite easily

 

We're not mindless zealots. Unity isn't the only game engine worth looking at, and it's probably not the only engine that many people use. You don't use a screwdriver to pound a nail in.

 

Ha

Speak for yourself.

 

In a related topic, does anyone here know what Geomerics/Enlighten brings to the table regarding shadows?

Like if you make an objects material emit light, will this give you any shadows or just GI?

If no shadows, then how do you setup light in your scene? Do you also give an emitting mesh a light component also and turn on shadows?

 

I think the GI gives really low frequency (ie blurry) shadows. Other than that it's regular old lights.

 

As far as I know, Enlighten ray-traces shadows from directional lights. So there should be some improvement, I wish I could talk about the pro's and cons of Enlighten and Unity 5 but I don't want them stomping up and down if I say something Unity doesn't like.

 

I don't know even we can talk about some of the features in 5.0 because i think that unity may not accept what we say in the forums. or they may not want us to announce some of the features

 

I wish Enlighten's own website would actually talk about Enlighten. It isn't even remotely helpful unless you want contact info.

 

Not impressed.
I'm too used to Unity's ease of use.

 

There's been some work ongoing with Unity 5 beta shadows, and afaik it's ok for people to demonstrate those differences if they're on beta right now ie screenshots publicly etc.

The beta forum announced that providing you just show things in a positive light ie don't rip Unity to pieces it's fine because it *is* beta and not public yet

(btw this discussion about engine features is fine - any posts re price or treading old, worn out ground will simply be deleted)

 

The 5x5 PCF filtering [Unity 5 beta 9] seems cool, i just need to get back to my main pc to test them