It’s by far the most complete (publicly available) game engine out there. Just because it doesn’t have the one specific feature you need doesn’t change anything about it. Yes, the recent releases leave something to be desired in terms of stability and reliability, but you can’t really blame them for going fast and breaking things in pursuit of the leap that UE5 is. I am sure it will even out once UE5 is out and there will be significant stabilization/polish pass.
Epic is by far the most customer/consumer friendly corporation I’ve seen in my life. All the other corporation business models I’ve seen so far are based on exploiting the customer. Epic has completely unique strategy of empowering the customer to succeed and then taking a minor portion of the success, but only if the customer success is extraordinary ($1M+ revenue). Show me any other company of a corporation size that has anything close to this pro-customer strategy.
Hey mates! Thanks very much for replying. Really appreciate it!
Thanks Rawalanche! Well said mate! Often in my thoughts I compare Epic to other games companies with Proprietary Engines, such as EA and Ubisoft. EA and Ubisoft could release their engines for public use while still making their games. But they choose not to, in order to try to keep some kind of competeitive edge. While Epic decided to release their engine to the community - which helps people and also helps Epic. And in this respect Epic have a thousand times surpassed both the business and ethical model of these other companies.
A lot of people say that Epic only give away their Engine to make money, and they only give Megagrants to make money, and they only give Free Assets to make money. But to me this is an utterly stupid and scinical point of view.
I really believe that Epic Invest in developers because Epic loves Game Development and want to share that joy and exciting journey with others. And I don’t think that’s a business move (It is that too) I think it’s a Humanist move, because Tim Sweeney and the other excellent people at Epic want to share their amazing work with everyone!
If you love something. Set it free. <3
I really believe that Epic is the best Game Company cos they are really good, kind, honest, decent, and not greedy people! And from my point of view, with Unreal Engine they have given tthe community a truly amazing gift, for which I will, personally, be eternally grateful.
That being said… hehe.
To answer SavageBeasty and UnrealEnterprise. I’m not saying that Epic are perfect. Of course not. But who is?
I would love to see Planetary Terrain!! - All systems go!
And hey, I’m not a Fortnite fan. I dont play Fortnite, and it doesnt interest me personally. But I can see that Fortnite brings joy and fun to millions of people around the world. And although it’s not my kind of game, I think it’s awesome that Epic a game that is loved by so many people all over the world.
That being said, I agree with SavageBeasty, that Epic should also invest in making their own Unique IPs and Games. I’d love to see more of that. I’d love to see Epic creating and making more of their own games! Maybe Epic could make a Game out of the Female Character and tech seen in the UE 5 Tech demo.
It sure would be awesome to see Epic making their own games again!
Hey look. No-ones perfect. But I believe in Love and Kindness. And I see genuine Love and Kindness in Epic’s business model, and I think that’s awesome!
And that’s why I love Epic Games! <3
Epic Gave $1,000,000 to Blender Foundation!!
It brings me a lot of happiness to work with and work with the technology of a company who are really doing The Right Thing in Game Development.
Optimism, Positivity and Kindness can go a long way in making everything better!
Here’s Lisa Loeb (A lady Musician from Texas) Singing about Love. <3
To be fair I will say I’ll always be grateful to Epic for letting us have full access to the engine. Before ue4 the options for learning game development were usually hampered by a lack of access to proper decent game engines that the top companies were using. Unless you wanted to make your own engine or pay a million squid for a licence you were usually stuck with rubbish things like FPS Creator/rpg maker, or only having script level access like udk or Cryengine.
To give anyone full source code access is pretty mind blowing really in this age of corporate greed. Personally I’d have never attempted to learn c++ before this engine came along so I owe Epic alot. Probably learnt more in the few years ue4 has been about than I did in the all the years before it.
Can you imagine Rockstar or EA giving away any form of access to their engines let alone source code…
Majority of AAA engines suck to work with; they are convoluted, unfinished, and usually not integrated (you have to launch several executables, each for different game dev tasks)
This integrated environment is a thing that Epic have been pushing for the past decades. Also absorbing a few things from Unity along the way as well.
If you’re aspiring game developer, you would have to build your own just like everybody else who couldn’t afford a license to Unreal Engine or iDTech… I built my own frankensteins too, until Microsoft decided to back the XNA project and Unity released for Windows.
Epic’s 1M donation to Blender foundation, combined with other heavy weight supporters, kickstarted a cascade effect… Commercial DCC tools still trying to compete were forced to offer more affordable options:
I guess they are victims of their own overwhelming success. So many discussions are happening here on the public forums, that if Epic staff had to pay attention to it, they would not be able to do anything else throughout the day and the engine development would stand still. I have been very fortunate to get UDN access, and I have to say that the level of support there is incredible. Just in a past few months, I have reported several bugs all of which were promptly acknowledged, added to bug tracker and many of them are already solved.
But even if you do not have UDN access, there is still a good old bug submission form, which still works well. The thing with that though, is that you really need to put a bit of time and effort into detailed bug form description and making a good, simplified reproduction project. To make a good, detailed bug report with a good, simplified repro project can take up to 30-45 minutes in some cases, and many people are just not willing to spend that time. In that case, no wonder their bugs don’t get the attention when it’s either in the form of a forum post, which is not a proper channel for reporting bugs, or it’s in a form of a “it doesn’t work” type of a bug report.
I had quite a lot of success with many versions since 4.19. Funnily enough, I always had the most stability, reliability and performance issues with even number releases. 4.21 was great, 4.22 had issues. 4.23 was great, 4.24 had issues, 4.25 is great, 4.26 is quite a bug fest, so with a hope that it’s a rule, I am really looking forward to 4.27
To be honest, I have been here for quite a long time… maybe for 5-6 years to say the least. When I first reached here, I saw a good and thorough support from Epic toward indies in term of answerhub which many were answered in great detail by Epic staffs themselves. And I said to myself… “wow… how long can Epic maintains this kind of support?? It is very generous”. And I knew it wouldn’t be long before the support goes away…
So while it is quite painful to see the support goes away, it makes good sense to me. And it doesn’t mean all bad… it means good stuff - extremely complicated but very capable game engine still fall into the hands of indies (plus all source code to peruse on). And this forum discussion and also facebook group are all good places for us to ask, discuss and answer among each other.
xxx
Thanks very much for replying. Really appreciate it!
<3