I know, I sound like a back seat child, asking: “Dad? Are we already there?”^^
But this plugin is just too tempting. So will there be an open beta under the christmas tree? O:-)
I don’t know open beta but i’m still waiting for next closed beta invitation. Really want to try and how it works.
We’ve decided to go with Russian Orthodox Christmas and have something for you on Jan 7. For those of you who don’t celebrate on that day - keep the decorations up until then! 
We are extending the closed beta period and will be giving out a new round of copies of on Jan 7.
Open beta will follow - but we can give the plug-in to people following this post and those signed up on the Skookum mailing list. We’ve received a lot of good feedback so we are integrating those enhancements before we move to an open beta.
We’ve brought on more people and will work through a good chunk of the holidays.
We realize that many of you just want to check Skookum out and see if it fits with your future plans.
So mark January 7, 2015 on your calendars as day.
Are we still on track for January 7th Closed Beta? Really looking forward to hearing more.
Closed Beta #2 Still on Track for January 7
Yes!
An email will go out on Jan 7 to everyone who has signed up to give details on getting the plug-in.
There should be lots to play with - it is a simple drop in to any existing project and there will be an example project with some sample code.
There are still more bindings and integrations into Unreal forthcoming and not nearly as much as we would like in the way of instructional documentation - though all the libraries are documented.
Afterwards, we will be sending out as much instruction, examples and support as we can manage.
We also plan to give regular updates as the Closed Beta progresses into Open Beta and then the official Release.
Great to hear! Looking forward to it.
An email for those signed up with a desire to participate in the UE4 Plugin Closed Beta will be going out shortly.
I’ll post here again when the email has gone out…
Sent out the email for participating in the UE4 Plug-in closed beta to those people who have signed up.
If you would like to participate in the closed beta you can still sign up and we will periodically check for new sign-ups and resend invitations.
Looking forward to getting into peoples hands!
Great! Any estimate on how long the approval process might take?
We want to move forward quickly so we will have the initial list for new closed beta participants by the end of today (Jan 8) by the earliest and by the end of tomorrow (Jan 9) at the latest in Pacific Time.
We’ve had lots of submissions so far - thanks for all the interest.
When do you expect the closed beta stage to end?
It depends on how well the closed beta goes of course - but we are planning open beta for end of spring.
Thanks for the reply.
Unfortunately my motherboard died the same day the invitation to apply for closed beta arrived, and I still don’t have a functioning PC to do anything, so I missed out. I look forward to the open beta.
Pretty fun to start playing with, but how might I go about embedding a little in-game console? Alt-tabbing causes framerate differences with the default setup on my machine, and stops sounds playing. (I don’t think it’s a problem with my hardware, it’s pretty decent.) Plus I just don’t like alt tabbing. I like having the console output on my second monitor though.
Right now I’m testing with a Blueprint setup, but I don’t mind using C++ for it if I have to.
Glad you are finding interesting. 
Right - forgot to mention in the instructions that you should toggle a few settings in the Unreal Editor to get a better experience:
In the Unreal Editor menu select Edit -> Editor Preferences…
Then in that dialog make sure that General -> Miscellaneous -> Performance -> Use Less CPU When In Background ] is unchecked.
Also make sure in the same dialog that Level Editor -> Sound -> Allow Background Audio is enabled.
This assumes that all the other settings are default. There are lots of other Unreal Editor settings - I recommend exploring around in there and see what else looks interesting to tinker with.
We normally hook up the IDE to the World Editor so that tilde ~ or Ctrl+~ toggles the Skookum IDE just like many game consoles. We will be hooking up into the Unreal Editor with the plug-in in the near future.
You can get the best power and productivity from the scripting system and the editor having greater integration.
Being able to edit scripts on a separate monitor from the game / editor is totally awesome. It is especially nice when doing stepwise debugging.
If you look at the typical workstation setups on other projects everyone has two monitors. It still works with just one monitor of course.
Hello,
Signed Up for the Beta. A programmer buddy of mine was wondering about the speed vs Blueprint.
Could you give some real world comparisons of speed with a Blueprint of equal functionality?
Something that would help us see the speed improvement over BP alone?
Also,
Will the beta provide more docs such as integration docs and examples?
is fast - on past projects it didn’t even register on profiles. is also efficient with memory - you can even selectively load portions of code based on game progression etc.
We haven’t done an extensive comparison of to Blueprints.
has been compared to Lua in the past and was more than 40X faster.
The comparisons with and Blueprints so far have been in terms of features and workflow. We think that it can be much faster to work with .
We’ll be sure to have more comparison examples between and Blueprints and other languages - both the code/logic and the speed in the future.
The beta has more docs and examples for sure.
The supplied and online docs and examples will grow significantly in the next weeks and months - we now even have a writer on staff.
has there been any testing with mobile platforms yet?
We haven’t tested on mobile platforms for a while.
Closed beta is focusing on Windows PC - mainly to target Unreal Engine integration and the IDE.
Open beta will expand to more platforms.
This shouldn’t be too hard - the runtime is fairly platform independent, has run on a number of platforms in the past and should work on any system capable of compiling 32-bit or 64-bit C++.