Well if you check the EA docs released right now where they made a new light manager where can place 65000 lights in realtime in the Epic Citadel from UDK times you can notice they made there nice things, Epic don’t show any new since the 2015 GDC, so the last new things they made was in 2014, is 2017 lets see what they show in the GDC, the GDC usually show new contents and things that are modern or new coming from ideas, at this point is true Epic have huge leaks compared with any AAA engine or even Unity, Cryengine etc like Volumetric fog, volumetric light, volumetric clouds, realtime GI, proper physics and vehicle physics, the BSP system keep broken and not fixed yet, aswell the other engines start to get voxel terrain or other kind of things, the lights keep so costly and there is not negative lights support. I don’t want to drop poop but when someone is over the community for 3-4 years and keep looking Epic don’t add any of the requested things from users then get to start a bit bored, you can work with old things but don’t evolve isn’t a good signal for any.
But as said lets see what Epic show in GDC this year…
The engine isn’t in bare bones to me but I don’t know why the devs don’t focus in divide the work and fix each part of the engine, there are too many bugs and engine crashes that they don’t fix or don’t event test the contents to catch the problems looks like.
True.
I think UE4 is the only engine out there without spline decals, road tool, physical sun, ToD system, any sort of weather system, etc. There are always “workarounds” and “to-it-yourself”, which is completely invalid statements if you ask me. Majority of people are happy with UE4, there is only a short list of things left to do until is happy with UE4, but it doesn’t seem like Epic will hear us there because in the end their own needs is a priority to our needs.
While I agree those system would nice to have, I still stand by that we need more fundamental (architectural) changes to engine.
Notably multithreading on UObjects (CPUs are getting more cores, not higher performance per core), native multithreading in blueprints (something akin to .NET await, async, Task).
Then we need to have one object above Actor, and refactored component system, which will be indepedent from actor (but could be bound to new class above actor).
As side note. While there are some things missing, UE4 is still light years ahead of any close competition in terms of tooling. Lumberyard and CryEngine 5 are not even in the same league compared to Unreal.
They lack good tools for Animation for example. They don’t even have 1/4 of UE4 framework functionality, their terrain tools are subpar compared to Unreal (and that tells much, because Landscape is just old and bad at that point).
They do have advantages (ie. Lumberyard architecture is designed to be distributed if one wants it) and CryEngine 5 still excels in real time rendering.
But when summed up, Unreal still have clear advantage over any competition. In that case I’m not surprised Epic don’t really focus on external requests from community. There is no competition, so for them is better to focus on internal projects/high profile licensees.
True enough. But there are not much out of box open world engines on the market. Most of them are proprietary internal tech. The only one I can think of is Unigine.
Even in that space UE4 out of box have best support. Which is telling the state of free open world engines.
It’s not about what we have. Yes, if we look at what we have, we have more than many others. But it’s about what we don’t have, and more specifically, what we really need and we don’t have. It’s like UE4 has a thousand features that I don’t need in my daily work at all.
I am not one for open world games but can someone please point out to me which engine uses Realtime GI for that sort of thing, I mean even for “corridor” games these days i rarely hear or see devs using realtime GI and if they do, it’s only scarcely (for some color bleeds here and there like the one in the recent gears of war game, and even they had to use it scarcely because of performance issues) and Never for Key Base lighting.
One example is Decima Engine running Horizon, That’s a Brand new engine developed with maximum optimization and visuals in mind for today’s open worlds, and even they don’t have realtime GI, i mean the hardware these days is still barely running things on screen let alone Realtime GI.
Don’t get me wrong I would love to have the feature but let’s be reasonable? I would much rather see Solid IK (like Ikinema built in) and plus bug fixes etc… before something massive as GI and realtime Nvidia hair (which looks horrible by the way) or Realtime water (also looks horrible bunch of large blobs on screen with no sense of scale and they can’t increase the res outside some Nvidia tech demos running on bizzilion SLI cards because it will kill an already dead scene further), but I am for a nice ocean or water surface simulator, especially for real time water surface deformations, we’ve been working with workarounds for that feature since forever, also landscape and deformations, tessellation optimizations, that sort of stuff should be on top of the list.
Decima Engine looks like was made or created by the same devs of KZ and looks like a new version of that old game engine, and yes have realtime Global illumination in PS4 back in 2013, aswell the new games in the new engine looks like have GI too, all modern games made by Ubi and EA got realtime GI since PS3 times many of them included here Crysis with realtime GI since PS3 times and many more have all realtime GI. Even Unity have Global illumination since more than 3 years ago…
Is not about you’re here for open world games or not, the BSP tools are broken too, the UE1 BSP tools probably was way better what is total absurd, and the physics of UDK was better too.
And by the way even that KZ game that works in PS4 back 2013 have volumetric lights…
The best engine is Luminous Engine.
because built-in advanced mega blaster plus real-time hair rendering/physics; kappa
Oh someone should create a Marketplace asset called “AAA Advanced Mega Blaster Super Complete Plus Ultra Realistic something”
I’ve heard these words make asset packs sell like hot cakes!
[MENTION=434][/MENTION], Try AAA Advanced Mega Blaster Super Complete Plus Ultra Realistic Anti-Cheat Plugin. And if you sold more, what’s the problem with that?
I kind of have to agree with DamirH here, to be honest. The vast majority of people using UE4 and interacting with the community will never ship their game. That’s just how it is. UE4 makes it very easy to start a new project and make quick progress at first, but the realities of actual, commercial game development don’t magically vanish just because you’ve chosen Unreal Engine 4.
Most of the things suggested as “missing features” of the engine are, as previously pointed out, game features, and not engine features. The more you “specialize” the engine (by, for example, adding a pre-built menu system), the less appealing it is to professional developers because it mostly just makes the associated systems less flexible and those developers will usually end up replacing that system with their own version that suits their specific needs.
There are definitely things lacking at the engine level, such as large open-world support. Now that’s an area that is actually pretty barebones. “But the Kite demo!”, yeah, it’s an empty landscape that will never run on a console, but thanks.
Epic makes money when people ship UE4 games. They’re already putting a huge amount of effort on non-professional developer interaction (i.e. this forum/AnswerHub - Most professional developers never post here, they post on UDN for NDA reasons), which is fine because that effort still results in things (tutorials, etc) that are valuable to all developers regardless, but it makes no sense for Epic to focus on adding game-level code to the engine when those aren’t valuable to professional developers.
I really don’t mean to belittle non-professional developers. I think the vastly increased access to game development that UE4 brings is great for people who want to get into the industry, and I credit UE4 with allowing me to finally move from QA (6 years of it) and into development (now over 3 years). But the truth is the reality of shipping a game commercially is vastly different than working on a game as a hobby or side project, and the vast majority of people in this community are part of the latter and have a different perspective on things.
[MENTION=434][/MENTION], Try AAA Advanced Mega Blaster Super Complete Plus Ultra Realistic Anti-Cheat Plugin. And if you sold more, what’s the problem with that?
[/QUOTE]
But then I can’t share it for free anymore.
AAA Advanced Plus and… Ultra! cannot be free!!
I agree with you and DamirH. It’s frustrating to see the Answerhub and other areas be completed flooded with entry-level questions as people try to learn how to program in C++ while learning the engine (a huge task - C++ is and massive). I’ve basically given up on it, and almost completely on posting feedback since it’ll be swamped. This is no longer a place to discuss how to use UE4 between developers (I know there’s the UDN, but you need to qualify etc etc), but a place to talk about the basic building blocks (i.e. intro to C++). It’s that it’s so open and we can all collaborate, but when it comes to getting down and getting professional work done, it sometimes does more harm than good when you have to wade through it all to find questions neglected by the overworked support staff. Hats off to them. I do my best to help out people who are struggling via the Slack channel (now Discord), but it’s a massive tidal wave that’s ever-increasing.
I’d rather Epic focus their limited resources on core engine/API improvements like mentioned, e.g. threading, deterministic physics, or on rendering tech, or usability and tool improvements, as opposed to these game-specific features that developers can either create themselves or purchase from the marketplace.
4.15 is one of the biggest updates we ever had.
Community share code and free assets daily, even those trying to be “professional marketplace seller”, they share a lot of free stuff as well.
Is not true at all but is not false at all, create marketplace content make some users rater than contribute to the community release paid content, this as second part take new users that want to spend money and make something with marketplace things. There are too others users that just buy it to learn aswell. But yeah the open source communities and UDK etc when there is not marketplace get probably more free and free quality content.
Pure gold +1, not sure if dev grants but help they as they made with Blender time ago, cause will be always a need for same kind of users core engine programmers. And by the way Blender probably needs more a solution in the Unreal Engine side than with FBX. Or probably the people that give they a % of money from marketplace content at reach x $$$ can make a request for be added into the engine…
The usually replies of add what you need etc are nice if you need minimal changes, but usually they give examples of companies as the Ark devs what are semi big studios with lots of different workers in the different areas what edit the engine as they need, what is just not possible to real single indie devs or non genius like me
imho the term dev- is miss leading, if they really wanted to help the community then these so-called grants should go to the people that help here and not those that are already making money.
but if your a dev how hasn’t already sorted the money said then yes its great but don’t ask the community for help
Please, share how you can build an Open World game without throwing away millions of dollars; I’d really like to know, because then I would make one too!
