How user-friendly is UE4 at this stage

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hey there,

I am interested in making games, and am currently considering taking the plunge on a UE4 subscription. However, in the past I have struggled a bit with previous versions of the Unreal Engine as well as the Cryengine. Is UE4 as user friendly as recent developer interviews would suggest, or is it still rather difficult to begin to learn?

Thanks,

2

It’s easier to use and more fully-featured than other engines, and it has some great editor improvements over UDK. There are some features though that aren’t quite complete yet, but it’s still being developed. It’s at a stage where big things are still being worked on–like the Unreal Motion Graphics tool that was introduced in the latest version that allows you to do a UI more easily.

3

I’m not sure what advice you expect from a UE form. :slight_smile:

You get out what you put in. There are loads of tutorials, an active forum, and a very tolerant license agreement.

I’d say you’ve a good of making what you want to, if you do make a start.

4

I haven’t used Cryengine or UDK so I don’t know how they compare, but as someone who’s new to UE4 and doesn’t have any coding experience (but I do have experience with some other visual scripting systems, like Blizzard’s RTS trigger editors), the UE4 editor isn’t necessarily hard to use, but there is a LOT to learn, so you’re probably not going to just jump in and start making games the first time you load up the engine.

I spent several weeks following along with tutorials before I felt comfortable enough to be able to start working on a real project on my own, and there are still a lot of editor features I haven’t even touched yet. Like anything, you have to be willing to put in the effort to learn, but there are a lot of resources available to help you along. I started with the tutorial videos on the official Unreal Engine Youtube channel, and I think that’s a good place to start. And, of course, these forums are a great resource if you have any questions you can’t find answers for. :slight_smile:

5

In my opinion it is and was very userfriendly. I can still imagine the day when I first did something with the ue4 beta -> I was totally amazed how easy it was to use in comparison to UDK :slight_smile: + there are tons of tutorials and documentation available that will help you + awesome and helpful community

6

Thanks for all the fast replies. I think I’m going to make the jump. The only lingering question I have is if my computer can handle it. It has a GTX 880m and 24GB of Ram, but the processor is just a hair short of of the recommended specs: ://ark.intel/products/75116/Intel-Core-i7-4700HQ-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_40-GHz

7

With a laptop you won’t get quite as good performance, but with those specs you should be able to get a decent framerate, but as always it depends how complex the scene is. So it should be just fine, the recommended specs are for getting good performance, so long as you are above the minimum specs (which you are) you shouldn’t have any problems.

To see other users PC’s and the performance they get (including many laptops and their performance numbers), have a look at thread:
https://forums.unrealengine/showthread.php?20643-Official-Hardware-Performance-Survey

Btw, welcome to the forums! :slight_smile:

8

I got it a month ago, it depends on your experience with programming and game engines. Its a little tough at the start but honestly it gets a lot easier and quick! Try to use it a lot and it becomes really easy to use.

9

Yes it will. I’m running a similar setup (GTX870M/4810MQ/16GB) and have no problems with it. I’ve run it on a 4 year old laptop as well and for most things I tired, it worked fine.

10

I took the leap. Now to see if I can make something cool.

11

Good luck Ghost, please share your progress and what you make with us!

12

Well of all the engines out there UE4 is is by far the most fun to just play with it. :wink:

Engines are boring if all they can do is make a game but UE4 motivates you into doing strange things just because you can.

13

^ .

As far as your laptop, you will have no problems being able to run UE4. I have a laptop with similar processor and RAM, but a GTX 860M GPU (way weaker than the 880) and I average 45 fps on the elemental demo. The only exception to UE4 running well on laptops is if you use it on a Mac; until it gets optimized, Mac users have to deal with lower fps than PC users regardless if the specs of both computers were the same.

14

I’d say it’s the second most user-friendly game engine out there.