Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free

Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by arikrak on Monday March 02, 2015 @12:29PM (#9133066)

If you don't need the C++ performance, my guess is it makes more sense to go with Unity and use their C# version.

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Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by brandonwamboldt on Monday March 02, 2015 @12:59PM (#9133243)

It's not as clear cut. You can use C# with Unreal Engine if you prefer, and Unreal Engine offers a lot that Unity doesn't (e.g. Blueprints).

I recommend everyone interested in the two try both. I personally prefer Unreal Engine, but everyone is different.

Unreal Engine is also moving quite quickly, adding new features, marketplace content, improving the UI, etc.

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Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by nowarninglabel on Monday March 02, 2015 @01:09PM (#9133303)

I've been trying to decide which to cut my teeth on, to build a prototype MMORPG. I'm comfortable with C++, though my colleague won't be. Any suggestion on which engine/toolkit would be better for that type of build? Graphics quality is not a big concern, mostly just want to use the tool that have the best chance of becoming proficient with.

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Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by brandonwamboldt on Monday March 02, 2015 @01:41PM (#9133490)

I don't think either engine is well suited for an MMO to be honest. You are probably better off looking at something like the HeroEngine.

Unreal Engine's built in networking systems are suitable for 64 players, maybe 128 tops. It's replaceable, but I wouldn't recommend delving into that.

I will say this though, if you have 1 C++ programmer with UE4, they can create functionality not builtin to the engine and expose it via Blueprint (the visual scripting language) for non-programmers to use. Blueprint is a fantastic and very easy to use tool. Take a look at the forums to see the incredible things people have built with ZERO programming knowledge.

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Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by Detrus on Monday March 02, 2015 @03:13PM (#9134041)

I don't know about ZERO programming. If you look at RayCast vs RayTrace here https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/GettingStarted/From... building anything complicated with Blueprint creates a massive amount of visual clutter. It looks clearer in C++. Maybe it's easier for a novice as they're building it since the autocomplete and component system hold your hand, but reading it after is a nightmare of following lines and looking at a lot of essentially commented out code.

And talking about Blueprint code is done through screenshots https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?60637-Unable-... I guess there is still no auto generated text representation you could copy paste.

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Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by hjeldin on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @02:13AM (#9136482)

It is possible to copy/paste blueprints as text only. The only caveat is that the output is kilometric (a blueprint of mine with ~60 nodes produces ~2500 lines of text).

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Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by droidist2 on Monday March 02, 2015 @03:38PM (#9134168)

Interesting. Yeah, I wonder if they have a way to import/export textural representations like Max/MSP or Pure Data patches.

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Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by WillPostForFood on Monday March 02, 2015 @07:55PM (#9135486)

To redistribute code written with Mono for Unreal Engine, you must have a commercial license to the Mono runtime. These licenses are available from Xamarin for Mac, Android and iOS online, and you can request Windows licenses through support.

https://mono-ue.github.io/about.html

If you want to code in C# it is the primary language for Unity, and a commercial third party unsupported add on for UE4.

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Re:Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free by pjmlp on Monday March 02, 2015 @12:39PM (#9133132)

Actually Unity will be compiling C# to native code via IL2CPP to avoid paying royalties[0] for more recent Xamarin versions.

[0] At least that is how I read the whole situation

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