i’m thinking about paying for one month of unreal engine to test the waters, because i’m a serious noob when it comes to this stuff… i’ve messed around in Blender, Unity free, and even made maps for CS:S back when it was popular, so i’m not completely in the dark here. i’ve even spent a few hours teaching myself C++ from a book (i know, you can’t do much in just a couple of hours lol)… i realize that i’ll temporarily lose (until i re-subscribe) access to the marketplace, access to the Epic Github, access to regular updates, and the ability to publish games for profit, which i don’t think is a big deal for me… i understand the marketplace (similar to Unity’s Asset Store), the update releases, and the licensing. but i have to ask, what is github? what benefits does it provide? would i (a beginner) really need it that much? how is it different from the marketplace?
Github is a website that hosts program code, so the full source code of UE4 is available there for those that have a UE4 subscription. On Github you can get access to builds before they become available in the launcher, but you have to download the source and compile it yourself.
In laymen’s terms, github is a repository of code. It’s very useful for collaboration because, since code is just a bunch of text, it can merge changes that multiple users made to a single file. So if I were to edit the player code on my machine, you edit something else on yours, we won’t overwrite each other’s changes.
Github also tracks revisions of files, basically giving you access to all previous edits of the file, keeping a history of all modifications (making it virtually impossible to lose work).
Note that the actual protocol is just called Git, Github is just the most popular site utilizing it. There’s also Bitbucket, GitGud and a few others.
Personally though I’d never use Github for a game as it just isn’t that good with binary data (read: images, 3D models, sounds etc.) and it ***** itself when the project exceeds ~4GBs. In case of games, I’m a Perforce fan, but it requires you to host it yourself.