Inside Unreal: 2020 Year In Review

WHAT
It’s time for us to look back on the unusual yet exciting year that’s been 2020. We invite you to join us for the annual Year In Review livestream, where we’ll reflect on what’s happened across Epic Games and the Unreal Engine community and talk a bit about what’s to come.

WHEN
Thursday, December 17 @ 2:00PM ET - Countdown

WHERE
Twitch

WHO
Tim Sweeney - CEO & Founder - @TimSweeneyEpic](https://twitter.com/TimSweeneyEpic)
Brian Karis - Technical Director, Graphics - @BrianKaris](https://twitter.com/BrianKaris)
Grayson Edge - Senior Cinematic Designer - @GraysonEdge](https://twitter.com/GraysonEdge)
Amanda Schade - Community Manager - @amandamschade](https://twitter.com/amandamschade)
Victor Brodin - Community Manager - @victor1erp](http://twitter.com/victor1erp)

Count me in. <3

Nice, we’ll be present!

@UnrealEnterprise but I am serious!
I just cannot afford to work on it every day :stuck_out_tongue:

Thank you anyway for believing I would be anything nearly worthy of actually becoming one of them mighty Epic Staff .
Although I don’t think that’s the case LOL

Awesome! Save a seat for me.

Hopefully NEVER. Blueprints should get even more love instead.

sweet watch video

Cool yeah i should also make a video on all the progress i made

Great ! I look so forward to this when it rolls around each year and the chance to see Tim in the Live Stream !

It’s been a weird year & it’s great how ya’ll have dealt with it and kept the Live Streams and updates to the Engine going even thru all of this ordeal.

I want to thank all of you at Unreal Engine & Epic for all the work that you do and share with us all ! Thank You ! :cool:

People has been asking for years about that, not gonna happen ever. Yeah I get it! blueprints are something exclusive for UE, but the knowledge is not, I worked in unity for 5 years before coming to UE, c# and blueprint bah! it is just a tool, if someone is serious about develop a game, they should learn c++, trying to make a game without knowing maths and c++ is like fishing with yours hands, not gonna happen.

I always enjoy watching these and hearing what Tim has to say!

The countdown does a countdown to 2PM for your local time and not 2PM ET, I think it should probably be updated :stuck_out_tongue:

I guess Unreal is now… complete?!
If that is released with Unreal 5 then it is feature complete to me :smiley:

To the Unreal Verse!

Kind of agree here. Unreal Engine needs modularity badly. I guess (pulling this out of my a…) that most projects barely use half of systems unreal provides. Cannot imagine game or project that uses them all. So for most projects unreal is just bloated. Don’t get me wrong those things are amazing to play with do some indie projects for fun etc. But serious game that has 50% engine unused (but loaded to memory) esp on android and consoles i cannot see reason for using unreal in that setup. Then whole mandatory cooking (means no mod support, hard time doing patches or addons that do not require downloading 80% of files (for eg. because of bug fix (like fixing typo in gui or item name) in single utility function that created cascade of changes in almost every part of code). For now for me Godot has less kicking with horses contests than unreal, I rather code that spend days trying to go around some “features” that unreal has.

I hope unreal engine 5 will have some serious redesign on how unreal works.

About the Scripting request, Time shared a few interesting thoughts about that some time ago on reddit, check it out here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/aezhdv/it_seems_people_at_epic_are_considering_adding/edxha25/

tl, dr: Picking a language for UE is a very long term decision, so they want to get it right. Every language has its ups and downs etc.

One thing about you cannot ever compare UE to Unigine is that you have to be big corporation or just a millionaire to access their source if something needs modifications in core level. Thankfully Unreal is so accessible to everyone that even schools consider Unreal as a part of PC classes in future in my near town that i heard. Yes Unreal should be more modular in every aspect, from installation of components to cooking level of components and even when building whole engine.
NB, English is not my native language.

Wow! You guys made my year! I waited for the new scripting IL for almost two years since Epic acquired SkookumScript.

I always felt that there is a big gap between C++ and Blueprint. C++ had horrible iteration time and Blueprint can get out of hand quickly.
The end result is that, as an example, the Marketplace is littered with Blueprint project and mostly stuff that cannot be used in real production, yet they proudly advertising that it’s made 100% Blueprint. It can be a big turn off for some.
If we had a real scripting language, the Marketplace could have much higher-quality assets.

I see Python right off the bat. Python variant is a smart choice as it’s familiar to many and we can add support to existing tools easily. I was also glad to see a glimpse of SkookumScript in there; “race”. Please keep Skookum sprite going. It had versatile coroutines, iterators, and best of all, very fast dynamic compilation. One thing I didn’t like was its REPL though. Skookum REPL didn’t remember the states, not allowing us to build experiments incrementally.

I can’t wait until we can get our hands wet. Instead of waiting until it’s mature, I would really wish you would share with the community for some feedback before things are gets written in stone.

Please keep the good work!

Cheers!

Hey! Merry Christmas everyone!

Even being a long time C++ developer (not in UE), I’m one of those waiting for a scripting language. I’m starting to write complex gameplay logic in my project and it would
be nice to know from Epic if at least it’s coming or not and if it is, how advanced is it’s development state.
Hope there’s any news soon.

Blueprints are great for that :slight_smile:

I keep telling that myself for a long time now, and before messing with C++ compile times, lack of documentation or examples, yes, I prefer blueprints until I’m forced to use C++ for any specific task.
But, if you don’t have problem programming, a good scripting language would be always better by far, for all good reasons mentioned many times. Best of both worlds.
Now I’m making some arithmetic operations with a couple of variables, occupying whole screen vs 1 line of code. Just not acceptable in my head. (I know of node collapse, macros, etc but it’s not the point, you just hide and sent the spagetti to other place).