Hi everyone, tune into today’s livestream to get the scoop on our latest release - Chicken for iOS, Android and HTML5. The app is propagating to the App Store and Google Play now, and www.unrealengine.com/html5 is expected to be up by 2pm ET. That’s right, it’s just a 404 until then.
We’ll show you how to build a lightweight app using UE4 Blueprint, no coding required. We’ll also walk through steps taken since the 4.0 release to get the app ship-ready, and explain how we’re making it easier for developers to deploy fully featured games for mobile and web browsers.
WHAT Chicken, Blueprint and Art Discussion – Live from Epic HQ
Principal artist Shane Caudle and senior engine programmer Michael Noland talk about making a simple game for iOS, Android and HTML5 with Unreal Engine 4. The development discussion follows news updates and the weekly community spotlight. We’ll have giveaways for the live Q&A this week!
Personal Question: Who currently holds the highest Chicken score?
Professional Question: How would ad revenue royalties from mobile/html5 applications be calculated? Would it follow the same principles as regular app/game sales? What about in-app purchase royalties, such as custom player/weapon/etc skins? Would the same principle apply to PC/Console games as far as in-game store purchases?
Chicken
What are the current package sizes for the apps on iOS/Android? Are you still working on reducing mobile package sizes and what is the optimum that you could imagine for a game like Chicken?
I didn’t research this much, but how do you create the flat SMs for a 2D game? Is it (or will is be) possible to just drag in an image file into the Content Browser and import it as some sort of an asset that can immediately be used in a 2D game?
Is it possible to somehow package an iOS game from UE, then take it and “embed” it in a custom iOS app to be able to implement Game Center, iADs on top of it, or some other crazy new iOS 8 feature that the engine doesn’t support yet?
Was developing for ios and android any more difficult than deving for the normal pc. As in setting up key bindings for detecting taps vs just using a mouse click. Also would like to know if you guys were exclusive cpp or if you used blue prints?
Ask questions about below for the chance to win swag.
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Is it possible to change the flap function so instead of going up/rotating a certain amount and then falling to the ground it goes up higher the longer you hold it and then falls/drops when released?, I have tried everything I could think of but none of what I did worked and was just wondering if its doable.
this is just out of curiosity but why are the meshes so big?
I didn’t research this much, but how do you create the flat SMs for a 2D game?
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they are just planes that use 8UU’s per pixel of texture.
@chicken: If I understand correctly, it is possible to 3d-ify chicken by replacing the ummm… billboards with actual 3d-content. The REAL question: Is there an easy way to mass-update/replace assets, be it for chicken on something else?
Didnt want to make a second post so this is a 2 parter
i have a small blueprint based game i have made in UE4 however it will not run on my Galaxy Note 2, ive tried the various android build options you have and still no luck. After playing chicken which you released today i found it runs fine on my device, however when i go to UE4 and package the chicken game you provided with the engine myself, this too does not work. Did you use a more recent build like 4.2 to package the game you released on Google play? or am i doing something wrong?
How have you placed advertisements in the Chicken game you released today? any info on this would be great.
(BTW hats off to the guys at Unreal, UE4 is proving to be a great piece of kit for us indies )
I think we hit most of these in the live stream, but to recap:
Any HTML5 browser with WebGL support. The latest version of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera should all work (see the HTML5 FAQ for more details). I’ve run it in IE11 before as well, which has beta WebGL support, but the experience isn’t ideal (takes IE11 about 5 minutes to JIT the javascript before you can start playing, and IIRC text rendering was broken).
A GPU capable of OpenGL ES 2 is necessary to run UE4, but I’m not aware of any Feature level 9 devices that don’t support ES2 to be honest (some don’t support it fully or bug free…). We’ve got it running at 60 fps during gameplay on most Android devices and all supported iOS devices.
Note: The following section is from memory, so I might have gotten a device name wrong: There are a few fairly old devices where performance isn’t as good like Nexus S at 30 fps, and one device was around 20 fps (Fascinate S). I’ve asked someone from QA to post actual measured numbers from our device test matrix, which should happen in the next couple of days. We’ll continue to improve mobile performance over time as well.
What are the current package sizes for the apps on iOS/Android? Are you still working on reducing mobile package sizes and what is the optimum that you could imagine for a game like Chicken?
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The final shipping sizes for the various platforms are listed below:
HTML5: 9.4 MB
Android: 26.8 MB (OBB + APK combined)
iOS: 28.2 MB
The actual Chicken game content is under 2MB, the rest is basically a fixed overhead for the engine that won’t increase as you add more content to your game. We’re still optimizing this overhead; expect to see further size reductions in future releases. Even so, you can ship a much larger game with dozens of times more content than Chicken and still fit into the OTA download size for the various stores (typically 100 MB).
If you’re willing to compile some C++, you can get Chicken on iOS size down by around 10% by changing the iOS build cs to optimize for size instead of for speed, which should be fine for a game like this, and you can shave about half a meg off of iOS or Android by replacing a couple of unused but referenced engine textures with 1x1 replacements (we did this for the shipped version of HTML5). We’re going to start a wiki article talking about optimizations like these that can be made as well.
There haven’t been many big changes here in 4.2, we’ve been more focused on improving compatibility and performance on device. We hope to work on this more for 4.3, although you can use UnrealRemoteTool right now (most people at Epic use this path rather than using a Mac), it’s just not a polished workflow yet.
The game is entirely done in Blueprints.
You need a supported mobile device, and a PC for Android, or a Mac for iOS. You can do either of those using the launcher version of UE4, but HTML5 currently requires using the GitHub build.
Once you’ve done the initial setup to get the platform SDK installed and provision your device, it’s really no different to making a game on the PC. You can go ‘mobile-first’ and implement only touch controls, and have the PC version emulate touch input when the mouse is clicked (it’s a project setting under the Input tab). I’d also recommend using the ‘Play on PC mobile preview’ setting from the editor to double-check that your materials are working as expected when iterating on effects or materials, but otherwise the regular PIE works fine most of the time and you only really need to deploy to device to check performance or get a feel on the small screen.
The shipped versions of Chicken were created from a branch made off of master, which roughly corresponds to 4.2. All of the fixes made in the branch have been merged back to master and will be in 4.3, and most of them also got merged into 4.2 but not all of them. I’d give 4.2 a try when it comes out.
You can use the ShowAdBanner or HideAdBanner Blueprint nodes. There are some setup things you have to do per-platform as well (e.g., enable iAd support in iTunes Connect or add the API key for AdMob on Android), which we’ll go into more detail on in a future blog post once 4.2 has been released.
Chicken does not currently use Paper2D. It will be updated to use it when Paper2D is a bit further along. You can check out progress in the Paper2D thread, on the trello roadmap, or directly by looking at GitHub commits to the master branch. My current aim is to get Paper2D to a point where an ‘early adopter’ can start using it in earnest in 4.3, but no promises yet.
@Michael and Shane - In the future please move the microphone farther away from your throat. The drinking and swallowing is really loud on the Twitch recording.
I didn’t notice that. But there was also an annoying white noise. When you were talking it was alright, it was mainly in the pauses. It sounded like the mic was set too sensitive or to auto sensitivity (I really have no idea… ) Wasn’t terrible, just a little distracting.
Drinking and swallowing is not something you want your audience to hear during a recording session. The best thing to do is drink grapefruit juice or water with lemon before you go on set to cut down on throat phlegm.
