Predominantly I’ve been wanting to use the engine for building a 3D portfolio and for games, though I have two other, commercial and non-commercial interests that aren’t elaborated on in the EULA I want to discuss. Firstly, one of the groups my family works with is the archaeological place of a former Roman palace - whilst the palace itself hasn’t existed for centuries, it received local funding to turn it into a museum, and the curators have expressed an interest in a virtual recreation. Though the EULA discusses the engine’s use for Education in institutions, I was wondering if the guidelines are different in respect of heritage sites.
Secondly I am attached to a scientific endeavour that, although nonprofit in nature, has links to NASA and other spaceflight firms. Again this involves the need for a virtual recreation, but is being designed for reference purposes in the future planning and construction of a multi-national launch facility. Given the simulation doesn’t involve any kind of guidance systems or navigation for aircraft, I wanted to confirm whether use of the subscription is acceptable, or if I require a custom license instead…
I think the only concern as far as the license goes is based off the royalties. Anyone can use UE4 from small developers to big studios, but the matter is if or how it makes money. If you’re using it internally to create a visualization of facility then there’s no royalty. If your company is hired to create the visualization and it’s being paid for it then I think that’s a different matter and you’d have to contact licensing to make sure what that means.
There are some clauses in section 4 of the EULA under “However, no royalty is owed on the following forms of revenue:” that read as follows:
6. Revenue from interactive amusement park rides or coin-operated arcade games which use the Licensed Technology; and
7. fees or work-for-hire fees which are non-recoupable for services performed using the Licensed Technology (e.g., an architect-created walkthrough simulation or a contractor-developed in-house training simulator).
Our lawyer has taken a precursory glance, and though he mentions that you do not provide the exhaustive details of the scenarios in which they will be used, we can state the following:
• A museum installation is royalty free assuming it’s not sold to the public (like as downloadable software).
• A NASA related virtual recreation is not prohibited by the EULA. The prohibition is on actual live real-time aircraft navigation or flight control.
Thanks for the information, Stephen. The museum’s virtual recreation will be confined to onsite, on a series of interactive terminals similar to a history exhibit.
As for the other project, it will be a long, long time before the public ever use it and will initially be a reference for architectural purposes. I will be contacting Epic for that through the custom licensing form momentarily.