things for tim sweeney to buy(and make them free)

Community Off-Topic
1

recently epic has bought too many gamedev companies and made products free. However, pardon me if I seem greedy but I want epic games to buy the following and of course, make softwares free later :stuck_out_tongue:
take this seriously but not too seriously, please.

terrain builder- one thing unreal lacks. please buy world machine or terra sculptor or others, so making terrain from real world is easy. this will actually increase your profit because many industries are still using unigine because of huge terrains.

city builder- buy out kitbash3d, modular cities in unreal will be easier.

double precision- buy out some middlewares to compete with unigine’s huge maps.

3d- blender, it’s open source so you can’t really buy it, but you can buy out blender institute.
autodesk is a billion dollar company, not feasible to buy.

sculpting- zbrush and others

character and animation- character creator 3, or just make a new character creator, right now there are not many tools for epic to create huge rigged-dragons.
mixamo has been bought by adobe, find some new rigging software to buy. i think there are several topology and rigging out there. so finally we can get game of thrones fan game with dragons.

bump maps- awesomebump is open source already, however epic can appoint separate teams for bumping, which will directly work with ue4 optimally.

uv unwrapper tools, procedural generation tools, visual and particle effects, 3d models from photos/panorama etc.

photoscans and stuff- i had an idea for epic to buy quixel and substance, but quixel has been bought and adobe bought substance.
buy some new tech that can shrink material data in games to save storage.

photo editing- gimp/kritainkscape, they are already open source though.

video editors- i know unreal is developing their own cg videos with sequencer, but they can buy simple editors like vegas etc.

marketplace- sketchfab and others.

server meshing tech- spatialos

middlewares- buy out things that are used to make the engines, like buildtools that export unreal source to binary and stuff.

c++ workflow- buy visual studio x and other plugins. i am surprised epic games have not bought enough middlewares yet. i honestly thought you gonna buy middlewares first.
buy incredibuild.

languages- buy out python foundation they develop python, although it’s not needed. it’s already free.

os- buy out linux foundation, or develop some new linux distro

3d api- buy out the foundation behind vulkan. tim sweeney already hates windows, claiming windows 10 will be a monopoly with uwp format.

sli- buy out some tech middlewares to work on sli. even though most aaa gamedevs hates sli, vr market gonna grow. and unreal ‘technically’ support nvidia vr sli.
competitor unigine and cryengine supports sli.

vectors and ray tracing- but out foundations which certify avx and other vector methods, so making more destruction is chaos will be easy in future.

version control- to improve other gamedev’s workflow buy perforce or other svn, buy gitlab or other gits. or invent some protocol to combine svn and git for gamedev.

vr - buy htc for vive, or new vr startups. this can push archviz to mainstream, even more than now.

devices- if you want to really fight apple, buy some device making company, say, produce a 200$ phablet, which connects to iphone’s bluetooth to communicate fortnite data over the internet.

gdpr middleware- epic online doesn’t store purchase information, so gamedevs have to store those info, but epic can come out with a separate storage service which stores sensitive customer information and also be gdpr compliant.

lobbying- lobby or bribe politicians to say apple and other stores have monopoly and store royalty has to be reduced or something.

shopping malls- buy and have fortnite events in shopping mall or something. epic already does this, owns shopping mall in canada and usa.

isp- well, net neutrality is still a thing, if it’s not, then buy out isp’s and make other stores pay more for bandwidth.
don’t hate me guys i love net neutrality btw.

apple’s middlewares- well, apple and epic are rivals, so buy out middlewares apple use to hinder their software experience, but is that even legal?

patent- get a patent on social score games, like china has seasme score based games. then neverever use the patent so we don’t live in black mirror.

activision and other companies have gamedev patents like, ‘players will be encouraged to purchase weapons to fight superior opponents in the next match, and others will watch what you are buying in the lobby.’ innovate similar patents, then neverever use them.

social media and streaming- buy out twitter and periscope maybe. all the tech giants have their video streaming, youtube, twitch, mixer, but you don’t have anything.
buy out vimeo or other video hosting sites. youtube is censoring game streamer, specially tactical shooters streamer.

voice chat- buy out discord or something,
apparently ps5 will store everybody’s voice chat, so buy some voice chat softwares to counter that. if the software runs from phone, people can talk on phone to their friends while gaming.

vpn- i don’t know, buy out something. although what for? maybe if china bans certain games in epic store.
maybe buy out hamachi; tunngle and others are dead though.

payment gateways- umm, this is not feasible, but buy out something so people pay easily in games.

game- buy out start citizen, so the saga finally be over, for godsake. or maybe don’t complete the game, continue to get fan money selling jpg haha.

3

So you basically want Epic to buy out everything and be monopoly in game asset creation. And not only that. Next thing we know is “Epic is evil they bought everything!”

So far I am happy that they make competition for steam (however not so much about how they do it), but imo that is more good than bad.
Going to court against apple, even if epic loses this will raise some controversy about 30% cut.

Epic is going in similar direction nvida did years ago. They are trying to conquer corporate and industry markets, with unreal engine as game engine being just secondary/niche.
So maybe instead of buying everything left and right, we ask for unification of tools under epic, ie. whole pipeline for creating assets and code from single company.

4

I hope they buy Reallusion character creator, now we only have Quixel for the maps, but we need characters to move through them.
And to be able to buy clothes, armor and hair in the unreal marketplace.
That would be a giant leap when it comes to creating games and movies with Unreal.I hope they buy Reallusion character creator, now we only have Quixel for the maps, but we need characters to move through them.
And to be able to buy clothes, armor and hair in the unreal marketplace.

That would be a giant leap when it comes to creating games and movies with Unreal.

6

Let them fist support UE4 editor in other platforms properly before buying or making a distro.

They had promised in 2014 that linux will be first class citizen.
If Mr. Sweeney hate windows and ‘love’ other platforms make the team implement vulkan properly first of all ! Their directx and console implementations good. Outside windows and consoles you need proper vulkan.

In ~5 five years x86 will be outdated ( performance wise) because of arm and risc-v. They could be many cpu vendors selling performace cpu. Even a:m.d/i:n:t:el might probably make risc-v processors. With a.p.p.le arm ma.cs this year and medium tier arm a78c laptops coming next year a lot of of new users will be on linux/android/chrome or unix based platforms. So with too much dependance on windows and vcc++ ue is digging a pit for for itself.

Do these before giving money and buying other companies if they want to be still relevant in five years
1.Make vulkan perform at same level as directx,
2. make ue compiler agnostic (support atleast gcc, icc, llvm-clang (properly) along with present vcc).
3. Make it possible to compile for windows and other supported platforms from linux x86, Linux Aarch64, Unix, mac, etc (with vulkan as RHI. I know that directx compilation is not possible from non windows platform)
4. make unreal c++ library better/standardize(maybe even open it like E.A. games did with EASTL!) or switch to STL with unreals own customizations;
5. Focus on quality before features. May be stop developing new things for 1 year like u.ni.ty. has decided and focus on fix the engine and reccuring bugs.

Else they could become the next ‘3dfx’ along with mi:cro.so.ft & un.it.y! Obsolate ! If you look at history you can see top company can become obsolate in few years. Also they are yet to have monopoly with the engine, In few years godot and uni.gine might capture a portion of gaming industry.

(I know vulkan is very hard. But if their vulkan was proper, I shouldn’t have been studying vulkan to fix the engine’s vulkan memory bugs. I am loosing game dev time!) Edit: Most of Unreal crash especially on Linux is caused by nvidia drivers. Found by lot of debugging the editor

It is good choice. But it might be difficult as it is a large and private company which had been there for 20 years.

PS: I say these because I want ue to be remain the best in the future too

7

3D:
The universe

Metaphysical:
God

In all seriousness though, the only thing I’ve really always wanted attached to UE is a Visual Studio alternative or some type of VS-UE license. I get that UE C++ was done with VS in mind, but I think it’s sometimes off putting that you have to get a VS license still. I mean of course that’s down to it being from Microsoft (not a knock at MS, I mean more that it’s a separate company). It just feels weird that such a huge component of UE is technically not free like the engine is. VS isn’t that expensive, but it’s still another license that you need to buy and frankly when developing larger games I do feel like it’s a need. It’s just kind of funny that you can make a game in UE without touching VS though; in a way VS needing a license is good incentive to go for a Blueprints-only game.

It’s been a really long time, but does anyone remember the paid version of UE4? Was VS “free” with that or was it still licensed?

I know I’m technically complaining about not getting more free content, but a man can dream haha. I think it’s just the fact that VS is kind of a funny standout right now. UE4 has free modeling, texturing, animating, etc. software associated with it. And one of the most amazing moves Epic made was offering Quixel content to UE4 users. It feels like the C++ side is the hold out.

9

You know I honestly had no idea Blueprint only projects require external software. That’s a really odd choice…

Actually, you’re right too. I completely forgot that UDK allowed you to have Kismet and USCRIPT simultaneously, but didn’t require any paid-for licensing of extra software.

10

I wonder how many people out there are unaware that you can’t use Visual Studio Community version for anything commercial if you are a team larger than 5…
And the actual license is around $2k usd for each.

I bet many Unreal/Unity users are ignoring that.

12

First thanks goes to Mr. Sweeney** for doing the things he has already done in an effort to change the Indy space but buying companies is not really necessary as a means to support UE4. **

Blender makes for an excellent as to how much Epic has already invested in an application by providing dev grants in the millions that with out there is no way Blender could have been a usable application as a competitive alternative to Max and Maya. Millions was provided just to improve Blenders FBX pipeline to bring it up to date as to the acceptable standards necessary and such improvements has only benefited Epic with out having to claim ownership.

Partnership is a better path for Epic as to committing millions as an investor than spending billions required for ownership.

I think the better question would be what companies should Epic invest in next?

13

Epic has already invested in Realllusion with a Dev Grant.

How far it will go let’s wait and see.

15

Heres what I think about all that (Yes i know that is a joke post. I am bored.)

terrain builder- one thing unreal lacks. please buy world machine or terra sculptor or others, so making terrain from real world is easy. this will actually increase your profit because many industries are still using unigine because of huge terrains.
They can just make their own, plus external tool likely would not play nice.

city builder- buy out kitbash3d, modular cities in unreal will be easier.
Very unlikely.

double precision- buy out some middlewares to compete with unigine’s huge maps.
A non-issue.

3d- blender, it’s open source so you can’t really buy it, but you can buy out blender institute.
autodesk is a billion dollar company, not feasible to buy.
Your making a solution with the same problems that your trying to solve.

sculpting- zbrush and others
Why?

character and animation- character creator 3, or just make a new character creator, right now there are not many tools for epic to create huge rigged-dragons.
mixamo has been bought by adobe, find some new rigging software to buy. i think there are several topology and rigging out there. so finally we can get game of thrones fan game with dragons.
They can just make their own.

bump maps- awesomebump is open source already, however epic can appoint separate teams for bumping, which will directly work with ue4 optimally.
They can just make their own, should already be integrated, but there likely is a plugin/bp already.

uv unwrapper tools, procedural generation tools, visual and particle effects, 3d models from photos/panorama etc.
Too much to ask for, product doesnt exist yet to such an immense scale (I think)

photoscans and stuff- i had an idea for epic to buy quixel and substance, but quixel has been bought and adobe bought substance.
buy some new tech that can shrink material data in games to save storage.
https://www.capturingreality.com/ Also oodle is owned by epic games so thats both of your wishes

photo editing- gimp/kritainkscape, they are already open source though.
Why?

video editors- i know unreal is developing their own cg videos with sequencer, but they can buy simple editors like vegas etc.
Wtf? No.

marketplace- sketchfab and others.
You already named a marketplace ue4 has.

server meshing tech- spatialos
Fair.

middlewares- buy out things that are used to make the engines, like buildtools that export unreal source to binary and stuff.
Too vague.

c++ workflow- buy visual studio x and other plugins. i am surprised epic games have not bought enough middlewares yet. i honestly thought you gonna buy middlewares first.
buy incredibuild.
Already good enough.

languages- buy out python foundation they develop python, although it’s not needed. it’s already free.
Not even an option, plus python is relatively slow, theres a reason they dropped unrealscript, and only support C++

os- buy out linux foundation, or develop some new linux distro
Your joking, right?

3d api- buy out the foundation behind vulkan. tim sweeney already hates windows, claiming windows 10 will be a monopoly with uwp format.
Too much to develop, not worth the time.

sli- buy out some tech middlewares to work on sli. even though most aaa gamedevs hates sli, vr market gonna grow. and unreal ‘technically’ support nvidia vr sli.
competitor unigine and cryengine supports sli.
That isnt even theoretically possible or sensible. Though, software multi-gpu support, hmmmmmmmm…

vectors and ray tracing- but out foundations which certify avx and other vector methods, so making more destruction is chaos will be easy in future.
Vectors? What? Raytracing? Already avalible.

version control- to improve other gamedev’s workflow buy perforce or other svn, buy gitlab or other gits. or invent some protocol to combine svn and git for gamedev.
Gotta agree on this one.

vr - buy htc for vive, or new vr startups. this can push archviz to mainstream, even more than now.
Epic is a software company.

devices- if you want to really fight apple, buy some device making company, say, produce a 200$ phablet, which connects to iphone’s bluetooth to communicate fortnite data over the internet.
Epic is a software company.

gdpr middleware- epic online doesn’t store purchase information, so gamedevs have to store those info, but epic can come out with a separate storage service which stores sensitive customer information and also be gdpr compliant.
Reasonable.

lobbying- lobby or bribe politicians to say apple and other stores have monopoly and store royalty has to be reduced or something.
Thats not epic’s goal.

shopping malls- buy and have fortnite events in shopping mall or something. epic already does this, owns shopping mall in canada and usa.
Joke suggestion.

isp- well, net neutrality is still a thing, if it’s not, then buy out isp’s and make other stores pay more for bandwidth.
don’t hate me guys i love net neutrality btw.
Joke suggestion.

apple’s middlewares- well, apple and epic are rivals, so buy out middlewares apple use to hinder their software experience, but is that even legal?
Joke suggestion.

patent- get a patent on social score games, like china has seasme score based games. then neverever use the patent so we don’t live in black mirror.
activision and other companies have gamedev patents like, ‘players will be encouraged to purchase weapons to fight superior opponents in the next match, and others will watch what you are buying in the lobby.’ innovate similar patents, then neverever use them.
No opinion on this.

social media and streaming- buy out twitter and periscope maybe. all the tech giants have their video streaming, youtube, twitch, mixer, but you don’t have anything.
buy out vimeo or other video hosting sites. youtube is censoring game streamer, specially tactical shooters streamer.
Joke suggestion.

voice chat- buy out discord or something,
apparently ps5 will store everybody’s voice chat, so buy some voice chat softwares to counter that. if the software runs from phone, people can talk on phone to their friends while gaming.
Already built in.

vpn- i don’t know, buy out something. although what for? maybe if china bans certain games in epic store.
maybe buy out hamachi; tunngle and others are dead though.
Joke suggestion.

payment gateways- umm, this is not feasible, but buy out something so people pay easily in games.
Joke suggestion.

game- buy out start citizen, so the saga finally be over, for godsake. or maybe don’t complete the game, continue to get fan money selling jpg haha.
Fortnite.

16

I would build our own data center and quit being milked by Amazon AWS.
I’m sure Epic is aware of NVidia’s new hardware they are creating for new data centers…