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On Github, but not really "Free" - https://www.unrealengine.com/e...

Right but you have to start somewhere, sure it might not be performant on a wide range of hardware today but that is the case with any new technology. Support is coming in the next release of Unreal Engine and the results on the highend cards are pretty impressive. If there was no hardware that supported it then no software vendors would implement it, it will gradually become pervasive over time.

Should AMD get in early or late? Well that's really up to them.

Yeah, real time ray tracing isn't really a thing yet. They haven't really built video cards powerful enough to enable it without a huge performance hit.

Actually they have. Next version of UE (4.22) will support DXR.

At no point did you argue that AMD expressed significant interest in implementing ray tracing in GPUs beyond token nod to Microsoft.

AMD helped draft the DXR specification, they will be releasing hardware when DXR becomes more widely used. If this were some nvidia-only, paid sponsorship then developers would not be using the vendor neutral DXR API, they would be using the RTX API directly which would tie them to nvidia and lock out AMD and Intel, but that is not happening. If nvidia were paying developers to use this then why would they use the vendor neutral API rather than the proprietary one?

And the current implementation is the "sorta kinda ray tracing" because it isn't actual ray tracing for most of the scene

Well they are indeed hybrid engines (I can speak more to UE than anything else), is that what you mean? In most cases things like reflections and shadows are raytraced and as the technology becomes commodified we can do even more. An RTX6000 naturally can do a lot more than say these new 2060s will be able to but we have to start somewhere.

and where it is present, it's severely limited and culled at every possible step in a desperate bid to make it light enough to be doable in real time.

Can you provide some detail on that? The beginning is hybrid engines that predominantly use rasterization but then raytrace things like shadows and reflections which is what is being done now. I'm not sure what you mean when you say it is "culled" though, can you expand on that?

Because actual ray tracing in real time for the whole scene is simply not doable in real time without a modern supercomputer.

Actually you're very wrong on that one, we're not that far off. That link demonstrates where we're getting to by using a single rtx 6000 GPU.

Improvements to visual quality are minimal to non-existent in current implementation for a massive performance impact.

Yes that is what people said about the first iteration of games that used the programmable graphics pipeline too. We do have to start somewhere, it's fantastical to just think one day we're going to flick a switch and everything is just going to magically be real-time raytraced. This is that first step just like we had with 3D accelerator cards and with programmable GPUs. Or are you trying to argue that it will just never be possible?

Ex professional game developer here. (I've shipped games on PS1, PS2, PC, Wii, DS, and helped numerous companies with their PS3 engines and toolchain. Left the professional industry in 2011 for a stable paycheck but I do my own (indie) game programming and design now, am a hardcore gamer, and help fellow game developers with advice.)

Sorry for the LONG read, but think I can lend some information that will be insightful and not inciteful. =P

> why we still haven't seen modders, foss developers and artists get together to build their own games.

We have, but on a limited scale.

TL:DR;

* Tech Hurdle
* Too many cooks in the kitchen
* Co-dependency upon the Game Engine and everything else
* Theory vs Implementation
* The "good" modders get "poached"

The LONG answer:

There are numerous reasons for this:

* Tech Hurdle

The first hurdle was the tech hurdle. Up until recently writing a "general purpose engine" was folly. Was the game 2D or 3D? If 3D, you HAD to optimize for indoor or outdoor environments for the most part with various kludges to support the other. If you notice both Unity and Unreal now offer a "2D" mode -- Unity with 2D Game Kit and Unreal with Paper2D

Examples where tech matters:

Trying to do "dense jungle environments" in a 3D shooter was basically a recipe of framerate FAIL until Crysis came along:

Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Don't do that!!

We "solved" this problem by basically throwing more money at hardware (GPU / CPUs)

How does the engine handle the "contradictory" nature of transparency?

* Opaque objects can be rendered front-to-back using the hardware's "Early Z Test".
* Transparent objects need to be rendered back-to-front so you get the correct colors.

How does an engine handle thousands of lights?

* Deferred rending "solves" this problem but doesn't work for transparency. DOH!

People are using hybrid approaches of Forward Render vs Deferred Render. If the "big boys" are STILL figuring this out, Unity 2018.1 with their High Definition Render Pipeline (HD RP) (Preview) -- what chance does amateurs have? Yes, we see engines like Irrlicht but that is a steep learning curve for non-technical people.

We've seen SOME limited success. Back when Quake 2 was popular we Cube 2: Sauerbraten as a good example of the community coming together to produce something "good."

Open Source engines have typically performed like crap. I've posted in the past

how Mike Acton reviewed Ogre 1.9's OrgreNode.cpp pointing out its horrible design and performance.

As a result Orge 2.x game up with a gameplan -- they put together a PDF of how OOP screwed their performance over.

Turns out, Mike Acton was right. They ended up with a 5x performance increase by ditching OOP and using DOD.

How many people own Jason's quintessential engine development book Game Engine Architecture? How many understand it?

* Too many cooks in the kitchen.

C++ is "good" example of "Design by committee." Everybody has their favorite pet peeve bloating the core user experience until it is an over-engineered clusterfuck.

You'll notice that almost all of the

The 5% gross fee is only after the first $3000 made per quarter. Also this royalty fee is only for the free version of unreal engine that has no monthly/upfront cost. Epic offers alternative licensing schemes if a developer would prefer to pay upfront for UE4 instead of paying a 5% royalty. https://www.unrealengine.com/c...

> I imagine that Unity and Unreal both have a plethora of off the shelf modules for doing DRM.

Nope and nope. They don't waste their time when:

a) Other people already provide solutions (e.g. Denuvo, etc.)
b) they could be working on improving their toolset instead.

> What's your experience with integrating DRM with your games in recent years? How long does it take?

Depends on which platform. On consoles you (usually) don't have to do anything.

On PC: Anywhere from minutes (Steam) to days.

Also, DRM causes you to re-test *everything*.

> I used to be a pirate, back in the days when CDROM was all the rage ... Considering the sophistication of some of the cracks I used, I'm guessing it took a hacker a considerable amount of time breaking the DRM for the game as well.

Before I became a professional game developer I _cracked_ games on 8-bit (Apple), 16-bit and 32-bit (PC). "Cracking" took anywhere from minutes to hours.

> I don't think a hacker will bother breaking DRM on a game retailing for $20.

Incorrect.

We do it for the challenge -- the price of the game is irrelevant -- although the price will tend to reflect the difficulty of protection employed. One would naturally expect a $60 game to have better protection then a $20 game.

The _fastest_ way to motivate a programmer is to tell him he can't do something.

Um... isn't UE4 free of charge for development and then once your game exceeds 3K bucks a month they will take 5% of that?

5% WHEN YOU SHIP

The 5% royalty starts after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. Pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization.

https://www.unrealengine.com/w...

The size of a modern game is mostly textures, media (video and audio), etc. The actual code is a trivial fraction of the total size; it would vary by game but the range would usually be from the low two digit to low three digit MB (anecdotally, simple arcade games using Unreal Engine 4 have had a total binary size of 30 MB; AAA titles would be larger, but not necessarily much larger; they look nicer, but the logic is rarely going to be more complicated than that of the core game engine).

BC support could just mean recompiling for the new hardware and supplying the complete packaged binary as a "patch"; the game would actually run entirely from the "patch", only loading resources from the original game disk. At modern broadband speeds, even 200 MB is only a few minutes to transfer at most, and it's a tiny fraction of a percent of the 350+ GB of usable space on the smallest Xbox One hard drive.

They probably mean the Unreal Engine 4 branch you can get on GitHub. There's another game out there in Early Access, ARK: Survival Evolved, that's currently melting GPUs everywhere with this engine as well. When the "medium" setting says you should be using a GTX 770, you know you're in for it.

Why aren't they ported to HTML5?

Uh, because they are? Hell, DHTML Lemmings is 11 years old. I don't know what you're worried about. Just play some Tappy Chicken or World's Biggest Pac-man or Pirates Love Daisies or HexGL or any of the many WebGL games out there.

Flash is in its Autumn. Mourn it not. Look at the pretty lights.

I'm not saying they can't do a good game, it's just that they're not quite there yet.

I vote with my wallet and commend them for their lack of DRM in the past. Not to mention they take care of their customers.

For cross platform I'd add Bioware and Blizzard to that. Not Bethesda, they do good games, but they seriously need more solid QA. It's sad to think that their least buggy console game on the PS3 was Oblivion

Simply criminal. A vanilla experience robbed of Bethesda's strength: mods. Bioware was once a powerhouse, Mass Effect 3? Blizzard releases are strong.

As much as that feature is appealing to some do you think that they should dedicate dev time to duplicate functionality already in other applications or the OS?

Games do this all the time, take widgets for example. Typically the engines feature media playback functionality or a sound library is licensed, and judging by the glut of media players out there, they're not exactly taxing to write. The Xbox has games that do exactly this.

How much do I have to pay for Unreal Engine 4?
UE4 is free to use, with a 5% royalty on gross product revenue after the first $3,000 per game per calendar quarter from commercial products. Read the EULA FAQ for more details.
I’m a consultant. Do I owe royalties on consulting fees?
No.

I think the reason for this is they all want to become the defacto-standard, they are all very keen to create a developer community around their toolset. Personally I like the UE4 / PhysX sales model since you don't pay until you make money from it. I'm interested in playing with these engines as a hobby but have no interest in writing a commercial game, If I was serious about developing and selling games, the license fees for any of the popular engines would be a very minor concern, it's a great example of a capitalist "win-win".

Selling model content to use in these engines is where the money is for individual devs/artists, kind of like the people who sold shovels during the gold rush. IIRC UE4 has some sort of public marketplace where you can release/sell models you have created.

What if my project requires custom licensing terms?

If you require terms that reduce or eliminate the 5% royalty in exchange for an upfront fee, or if you need custom legal terms or dedicated Epic support to help your team reduce risk or achieve specific goals, we’re here to help. See the custom licensing page for details.

Fill out that form and Epic will get in touch with you to negotiate terms for a custom licence.

Yes. A quick google search indicates there are two ways to get running on linux:

Cross-compile your game from the windows tools
Natively compile all tools in linux.

https://wiki.unrealengine.com/...

EULA

6. Records and Audits

You agree to keep accurate books and records related to your development, manufacture, Distribution, and sale of Products and related revenue. Epic may conduct reasonable audits of those books and records. Audits will be conducted during business hours on reasonable prior notice to you. Epic will bear the costs of audits unless the results show a shortfall in payments in excess of 5% during the period audited, in which case you will be responsible for the cost of the audit.

IANAL, but it looks like distributing the source code to "end users" of a compiled program is not allowed, so Stallman wouldn't be happy. Combining engine code with non-compatible licenses is also not allowed, and the GPL is expressly disallowed.

You can distribute anything to other licensees through approved mechanisms, though, and anyone can be a licensee now, so you can share your changes if you want, but no one has to.

Varies by engine, but a lot of game logic these days is specified via visual programming languages, especially at big "AAA" game companies. The engine itself and the graphics/rendering parts, along with some computationally sensitive AI bits, will be written in C++, but a lot of the actual gameplay-relevant logic and events are scripted using something like Kismet (UDK3) or Blueprints (UDK4). Partly this is because in big companies, game logic has moved more and more towards becoming the responsibility of the level and character designers, while the "programmers" have become more specialized engine/graphics coders who don't actually program anything to do with gameplay.

And, bringing it right back around to video games, Ogg Vorbis is apparently used in a ton of video game engines. Something about it not requiring a license and being better at looping than MP3s. I'm unclear on the technical merits, but apparently there are still technical merits that make it a good choice for video games above and beyond the "no license fee" thing.

I know that the Unreal Engine started using Vorbis a long time ago, and from their API docs, it looks like they still do, along with Opus.

It's $19 per month per developer for their latest engine, and 5% of all revenue once your game ships. Unreal Engine 4 ncludes source, downloadable assets, etc.

I can't get to Polygon from here, so I read the entry on the Unreal Engine blog/wiki prior to my previous post. The game code doesn't look like it'll be under some kind of copyleft, but it *does* look like access to the data will be cheap ($19/seat/month and 5% of income from games based on the engine). In the EULA (which appears to govern licensee actions with the engine and UT Project game assets), I don't see anything stopping a developer from making a modified version of the main game executable and distributing it for free (presumably, the developer would be on the hook for hosting charges, since 5% of gross income from the game would go to Epic).

You can't distribute licensed source, licensed tools, or enough to allow users to create a "standalone product". You might be able to give them enough leeway to freely create content that relies on the product that you built (and are giving away for free). I'd imagine that someone will take at least that twisted of a view of their developer license, at some point.

As per the following two links, it actually costs $19 per month for a subscription to the UI engine and it's source code. Good luck trying to develop the game without it. I really hate false and misleading advertising. When I first heard about this I was really excited. I'm a CS grad student studying AIs. Now my view on Epic Games is really poor and while I'll still probably play the game when it comes out, I'll be sure to not spend any money on it. I really hope charging your workers doesn't become the next fad.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?4624-Programmer-here-Interested-in-UT-development
https://www.unrealengine.com/

As per the following two links, it actually costs $19 per month for a subscription to the UI engine and it's source code. Good luck trying to develop the game without it. I really hate false and misleading advertising. When I first heard about this I was really excited. I'm a CS grad student studying AIs. Now my view on Epic Games is really poor and while I'll still probably play the game when it comes out, I'll be sure to not spend any money on it. I really hope charging your workers doesn't become the next fad.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?4624-Programmer-here-Interested-in-UT-development
https://www.unrealengine.com/

I think we could see a new OpenGL renaissance, because of Steam OS and OpenGL ES being used in mobile games.
I saw a post on the Unreal engine forums about how they intend to implement first class OpenGL support in the new engine. They really hate the way Microsoft tie DirectX updates with the OS. (You can see this post here -at very end: https://answers.unrealengine.c...)
Also, consider OpenGL 4.4 has had Mantle like features since last year which will only come out in DirectX 12 in 2015.

Nothing?

According to the UE4 EULA: "However, cancellation of your Subscription will not affect your rights under the License with respect to any Licensed Technology you have already downloaded under the License."

https://www.unrealengine.com/e...

From what I see the game engines are still C/C++, but are scripted in things like Python. At the same time, using the right APIs a lot of the hard processing can be handed off to specialised hardware, such as GPU, whether for graphics or physics.

BTW while JS is not generally thought of a choice for high performance games, this demo shows what may be a sign of the future:

http://www.unrealengine.com/ht...

Epic did this years ago.

Unreal Development Kit is exactly what you describe. Heck, pre-ordered copies of UT2k4 included a free license key to a stripped down version of Maya.

It sorta fell apart at step g, though.

What the fucking fuck? You can run 3D game engines completely in JavaScript, yet those bozos couldn't be bothered just to emscripten their fucking encryption code to let it run in the browser without using MS-specific technology? Sigh.

Result on Firefox 24 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS: "This browser is currently unsupported. Please download Firefox 22 for an optimal experience." This recommendation to use an older browser contradicts Epic Citadel HTML5 FAQ, which "recommend[s] the latest Firefox public release".

You must have had an *awesome* 8 MHz 8086 if it could do this: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

There are lots of java applets that implement games, graphs, and other useful things that require a real program.

Wrong. HTML5+WebGL is capable of running full-fledged applications. You can even develop in C++ and compile it directly to Javascript. Mozilla has demoed a 3D FPS in HTML5, or hell, even the Unreal Engine 3 has been ported to Javascript. Java and Flash are blights that need to die, the sooner the better.

http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

On Android your typical "native" app is written in Java and uses GL for graphics if it needs fast 3D graphics. The Java is interpreted (on older Android) or JIT-compiled (Android 2.2 and newer). And this JIT is not exactly like HotSpot in terms of the performance it produces. For audio it uses whatever the system libraries are.

On FirefoxOS your typical app is written in JavaScript and uses WebGL for graphics if it needs fast 3D graphics. The JavaScript is JIT-compiled. The output can be within a factor of 2 of the performance of C++ code for game engines (see http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ if you've missed it). For audio, it uses the browser's Web Audio implementation.

The two setups are actually a lot more similar than it seems at first glance.

Presumably many games use game engines, and those things abstract DirectX/OpenGL away and simply run on both. Unreal engine would come to mind. I mean, come on, that thing even runs in a browser (seriously).

Actually, they started the memshrink project two years ago, and the result has been dramatic improvements in memory usage.
http://www.itworld.com/sites/default/files/figure3_browserfootprint.jpg

That's from a while ago.

They also aggressively handled memory leakage in addons recently.

Their JS performance has dramatically increased recently w/ IonMonkey and the baseline compiler. They also introduced asm.js.
http://jlongster.com/s/lljs-cloth/ http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/

They also switched to multi-process and sandboxing in FirefoxOS, although apparently addon support makes that problematic on the desktop, although they do use multiple threads for various operations on the desktop. (You can of course sandbox firefox itself on most operating systems if you so desire, just like any other process)

See for yourself.

That's the Unreal Engine "Citadel" demo, running in Flash (you'll need 11.2 to run it) -- the controls kinda suck because I think they just did a quick port from the iOS version, but you'll get the idea. I don't think it's 60fps, but I assume that's an older build and still has debug code.

Less terrible technology? Abomination?

Really now. I can respect an anti-Flash opinion based on a desire for open standards (even though the SWF format is open), but saying Flash is terrible tech is just me-too ignorance. What other web framework can you composite 2d animation, advanced typography, h264 movies, native sound processing, and a 60fps native 3D rendering engine at your leisure? Try making audiotool in HTML5. There's nothing better for creating multimedia content. There are simply no IDEs anywhere near as mature for HTML5. Actionscript 3.0 is a pretty great language, a bit like Java, that encourages good coding style, but without weighing down development speed with too much cruft. It's what Javascript could have been if Microsoft hadn't sabotaged the ECMAScript 4 deliberations.

And what other web framework has let developers deliver quality games? Unity, sure, but most people don't have the plug-in. Go ahead, what do you recommend that people should have used the last 10 years for web-based gaming? Yeah...I thought so.

Do I need to remind you that Epic recently ported the latest version of Unreal Engine to Flash? WebGL can't touch what is being done in Flash.

Even though Adobe is run by fucking morons, Flash is still a great platform, and they are not giving up on Flash completely. I imagine the future of Flash is more of a Unity-style thing where you develop in Flash and then export to various platforms. Epic wouldn't have spent the time and money porting Unreal Engine unless they had confidence in Adobe's roadmap.

As I said, if someone has philosophical differences with Flash as a platform, I can respect that. But all you people mouthing off about Flash without even understanding the issues only do more harm than good.

Have you seen the next gen engine of Unreal though ? (Have a look here for some nice videos displaying total awesomeness... visually ;)

Hey! Round *is* a *shape*!

Did we learn nothing in kindergarden?

Correct me if I am wrong, but didn't this get done with a cathedral using the original unreal engine? The name of the cathedral escapes me at the moment, but I do know I downloaded it because it was an interesting virtual tour and use of the Unreal Engine.

I'm surprised nobody remembered.

Doh! Quick google search gave me this and the Nodtra Dame....Sheesh, only the most famous cathedral in the world, prolly.

I really should take the brain out of the bell tower once in a while.

Haven't found a mirror for the VISS data, tho.

The Unreal engine and their tech demo (a few months old now) whips the pants off anything Quake3 can do. Lately i've been impressed by the data you can give bots. Even Croteam is better than Q3A - I hope ID gets it together for Wolfenstein.

-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!

There was an effort to port the look and feel of Marathon Infinity over to the Unreal engine, but the last time I went looking for it, there had been no progress made beyond a couple of test screen shots.
After Marathon: Evil, you have no idea how much I was looking forward to this!

Hey! One Google search later, and you get this: Frog Blast Project
I know what I'm doing now!

Pope