I have recently started game development after a long hiatus. Previously I used Unity, but as I am starting out again fresh, I thought I would try the other two big engines, Cryengine and UE4.
I have been using Cryengine the last few weeks, and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with it, hence why I now want to try UE4.
I am making a simply open world game, nothing massive, but there will be various landscapes and interiors to explore. Cryengine has the landscapes covered (I really like the TOD), but I cant stand setting up interiors, plus I find the interface and navigation extremely fiddly and annoying.
Now for the questions:
My laptop doesn’t have a nvidia or ATI graphics card, but is pretty decent otherwise Quad i7, 8GB ram, Would UE4 run on this?
How easy is it to create landscapes?
I use Sketchup 8 free to create my buildings, can these be imported in to UE4?
Can open world games be created in UE4? If so, how big?
How easy is it to set up a building with interior? In cryengine you have to specify visareas and portals, which I find frustrating.
What does it have, then? Intel integrated graphics? No way to say for certain, but UE4 editor is heavily dependent on GPU, so the better the GPU the better the experience. That being said, if you turn off realtime display, use unlit mode except when working on lighting, and play and debug in a separate process, it’s very likely to be usable. I’m assuming Windows. If you’re on a Mac, an integrated laptop GPU is probably not going to give you good enough performance to work productively.
Unfortunately, FBX export is a paid feature in Sketchup, and FBX is the only existing model format UE4 supports. I’ve seen comments that .obj and .dae support may be added in the future, but for the time being, you need FBX. Of course, if you’re comfortable working in Sketchup, you can export an .obj or .dae, then use Blender (also free) to convert the file to FBX.
Yes, and pretty much as big as you can create. Sub-levels can be loaded and unloaded dynamically based on player position, and it doesn’t even require writing code to do it.
Very easy. You should check out Zack’s level building tutorial on the official Unreal YouTube channel. He builds an office interior with just the built-in tools. I know nothing about CryEngine, so can’t speak to visareas or portals, but I have found nothing about UE4’s level building process to be frustrating.
Yes. There are several posts in these forums talking about it. Fog is out of the box, weather like snow and rain take a little more work, but there are plenty of tutorials out there showing how to accomplish those results.
Thank you very much for the info. My laptop has Intel integrated graphics. I do have access to a desktop within work that has a dedicated card (nvidia geforce GTX 645 to be exact).
Another quick question, if I were to take the plunge and subscribe to UE4 on my laptop, could I also use it on another pc as well?