so it seems ue4 has cornered the indie market, but for android it just runs and looks terrible, if it runs at all.
is really the best we can hope for?
(absolutely no offense meant to games developers)
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scgames.TappyFootball
it looks far worse than even a unity free game (which i didnt think was possible lol) and not anything like a ‘next-gen’ engine at all
cheers
You have to get a vision to get next-gen first.
You claim one of the indie games within Unreal is worse than one of the indie games within Unity in Android market ?
So what ?
You really think you can make a Battlefield 4 with one person ?
So if you claim you can achieve better results with just one person within Unity, you are right.
But if you have a professional and bigger team, you will achieve better results with Unreal.
Because Unreal is not mainly an indie game engine, you can of course create an indie game but it’s main vision is to create top class AAA and even GOTY games.
The same situtation also goes with CryEngine.
im talking about the visual quality and performance, not how many people are in a team or the scale of a game.
i know the performance and device compatibility is an ongoing process (even though there has been little obvious progress made so far), but the render quality is really bad.
im asking, is game a good representation of ue4’s current mobile capabilities?
No it is not, it depends on the person/team making the game, not the engine itself. There is still need for improvement, but is running on Android from back in June:
And so it begins…
Last year I said on Unity forums that Unreal would lose a LOT of its prestige amongst gamers because noobs would start to make **** things with it and call 'em “game powered by super great Unreal Engine 4”.
Doesn’t matter which toolset you use if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Eventually the rule of thumb for gamers will be “Unreal Engine 3 is amazing, UE4 is shiit!”. Why?! Because now ‘anyone’ can have hands on UE4 (even if not paying anything) while UE3 was used mainly by serious studios making ‘real’ games.
+1…
wow thats impressive but i see a massive catch
how many people actually have that setup i wonder
does the game in the op look like that so it will run on more devices?
meaning to cover as many devices as possible the game is forced to look bad
Is april fool?, or really ou are mix up the quality of the textures with the quality of the render,
Yeah not many have one of those yet I totally agree with that, it’s been a few months since they released them so there should be some out there though. But I don’t think the previous hardware would be such a huge leap backwards in graphics, even if it looked half as good as that demo it would still be more impressive than the op.
To me the op looks like they either wanted it to work on almost any old device, or just rushed it to market. It does have the word Tappy in the title, maybe he was going for FlappyBird’ish graphics… 
so its deliberately made to look flat?
are there any other 3D games you know of made with ue4 to compare?
There are a quite a few in the Released section of the forums, here is a search for all Android games from the forum:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/search.php?searchid=936460
There are a few pretty decent looking games in there. Reflections (student project) looks pretty good, is 2.5D, but sorry I’m a bit busy atm so can’t go through them all… Check out some of the ones in that link, it should show only Android games.
thanks for being the voice of reason 
they still dont look all that great but yes the op game is pretty bad in comparison thankfully. might be worth doing a few tests myself.
@anonymous_user_9c39f750 others who responded
hostile responses based on presumptions and misconceptions is in no way helpful to anyone, answering the question would be a better way to go
Just noticed post and as the guy who made the game thought I should comment
First some background: no previous developer or graphic artist experience - never used any other game engine
Now that is out of the way my goal of Tappy Football 3D: To see how long it takes and learn how to release an android game with UE4 - after watching a blueprint tutorial I was sold on trying it out in the limited free hours I have in a month to learn how to export to android setup, leaderboards, achievements etc. - the game itself did not matter to me I just wanted it to run on my old Samsung S2 - However since had made the game without knowing what mobile optimization was needed all I did to make it work was to strip out all the cool and lighting, and in many places instead of textures using a plain color material. project was still a success in my eyes, as I very quickly learnt the entire workflow of the engine to actually pressing the publishing button in the store.
From the TappyFootball3D learnings I just released my second game: A Maze Ball 3D https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scgames.aMazeBall3D
Still another simple game as I wanted to try a few different things - but since time I knew the workflow and how to optimize the game engine from the beginning I could spend more time on the materials to make it look nicer and do the optimization things from the beginning so game runs much better than TappyFootball3D on my Samsung S2! I’m sure you’ll agree it looks much better ?
Anyway long story short, people start out different ways, some people start with their dream game and get stuck on optimization later in the project, realize too many changes are needed and give up - others start just by doing something easy and simple - making it work - learning from it and making the next better and slightly more engaging. Lots of other guys have done the same thing here so in short TappyFootball3D should not be used as any sort of ‘reference’ for the engine - just how it looks if you mostly just use plain color unlit materials! 
(but I have to say while in screenshots it looks bad - in animated 3d it doesn’t look too bad - some people got addicted enough to finish some of the achievements )
Still a long way to go - ultimate goal is for own VR experiences however all these has been great steps to learn the engine!
Any questions and feedback on A Maze Ball 3D appreciated Post in the releases thread: [Android] A Maze Ball 3D - Game Development - Epic Developer Community Forums
hey thanks for the reply aussieburger
i really didn’t intend to single your game out, it was the only 3d one i could find at the time (which is good for you :)) and was worried that might be the state of ue4 on android, flat, no shadows ect.
now i understand why you did what you did and thanks again for clearing it up, the ball game does indeed look better.
the very best of luck with all your games!
Unreal games on Android can look beautiful, however the problem is that it requires a modern mobile GPU, plus the generated APKs are ginormous. So my options using UE4 are, just deal with the size bloat (about 80mb) and make a rather simplistic game lighting-wise to ensure it will run on the largest number of devices, or to go all out on the fancy lighting and shaders and require a practically brand new device. It’s not ideal. Then you have something like Unity which provides the ability to make decent-looking games (e.g. specular, cubemaps, vertex lighting) that will still run on low-spec devices. Plus you have the Amazon ecosystem completely ignored by Unreal for the moment, leaving it up to you as a developer to figure out how to implement those APIs yourself. Even the Google Play implemented features are missing IAPs (as far as I can tell), although it does have achievements, leaderboards, and ads. As sad as is, even Unity does not come with such features built-in… however, there are many plugins which enable all of those features on Amazon, Google Play, Windows Phone, iOS and whatever other mobile platforms they support. I would happily pay more money to have these features in UE4 (and I have already done so with Unity)! As it stands now, Unreal is more betting on the future, but it’s putting a lot of people (myself included) off. I really wish they would dedicate some resources to , as I would love to make games in UE4 for Android.
It’s a sad day when we see people slamming Indie developers…
The game linked isn’t lacking in graphics capability, as it does have the full power of UE4 behind it, it’s the art chosen for the project that makes it look overly simply in appearance. You’re gonna see some absolutely top-notch android apps hit the market powered by UE4 over the next few years. You’ve gotta remember, even the AAA studio devs are still learning UE4 and dev of a solid project takes time. No disrespect to Unity and all, but comparing Unity to UE4 is like comparing a Corvette to a Volvo, on any platform lol. Different tools for different things.
thanks everyone, im still in 2 minds to use ue4 for mobile or not.
so assuming lower spec/older device support for things like dynamic shadows and reflections does not get any better, (btw the other engine i use can easily do on a galaxy s and an old chinese tablet)
would you go all out and make it look pretty and hope higher spec devices become more common,
or would you do as aussieburger and allow your game to run on things like an s2 at the expense of visual quality
?
That becomes more a matter of your target demographic. For a free/freemium game I would get the game running on as much hardware as possible at the expense of some visual fidelity. For a premium game (buy to play the game), it’s more likely that demographic would have better hardware.
Tegleg you ok? Everytime I look on these forums (which isn’t that regular these days) you’re always having a moan. Last thing I read you’d ditched UE4 and gone to Unity because the car physics were rubbish now you’re moaning about the mobile stuff?
You used to be such an optimistic chap and a great source of knowledge on the UDK forums chin up man
hello savagebeasty and thanks for the concern 
im having a hard time finding a decent engine atm
unity looks terrible so i will not use that. i started learning project anarchy and got some way into making a game, but it looks like it might have been abandoned so the 64bit ios requirement will not be met. udk has been abandoned and can no longer export to mobile.
so that leaves me with ue4.
im not a fan of the general workflow of the engine to start with, then there’s the buggy car physics, and then there is poor mobile performance and ridiculously inadequate device compatibility.
so what about pc, i started making the next Teg’s Playground with ue4, it already comes out >5gb and there is nothing in it yet. i dont think people would be willing to download 20+gb of a game they never heard of.
so im just wasting huge amounts of time on nothing and that i don’t like, i like to be productive.