Been playing my new console, Nintendo switch, and it got me thinking about the previous unit, the Nintendo Wii U.
The UI is different, but it is still something that gets me curious: they change the UI, but also the OS that runs the consoles.
So it got me thinking: could someone with experience in coding make a OS out of unreal engine and run it on a pc like Windows or Android OS? Or using mini open source boards like Udoo and raspberry pi boards to make a console computer hybrid?
Probably not. Unreal Relies on the presence of an OS to do its stuff. For instance Unreal never communicate directly with any of the hardware. It all goes through the various device drivers and HAL.
However in theory, you could add additional code which does all that - ie communicate with the various devices such as Graphics cards, USB … But all that will be hardware dependent and if you make any hardware changes, you will have update the code as well.
So to answer your question, You cannot make an OS out of UE, instead you will have to write additional code underneath UE to emulate the functions of an OS.
In theory, yes. Theoretically you can make the engine run on bare metal. The issue will be with hardware drivers though. You’ll have to either emulate OS’ capability to load and use drivers or write all the drivers yourself. For every single possible piece of hardware.
So your saying that it can run on start up on bare metal, but it won’t do much without writing all the hardware to interact with, and to react in a certain way, it will just run just like any game engine. Right?
You could make a theme like a dynamic theme for Ps4. Operating system. No. I would love to see epic team make a Linux/Debian distro though. Like a game developers Os. That would include Subscriptions to Maya, Substance, PS, Etc. Something Similar to Artist X, but premium content.
