So, you don’t know F# then. Therefore you can’t judge it, and should stay quite since you know nothing.
Yeah, they already showed a GPU accelerated lightmap renderer. Does UE4 have GPU acceleration!? I can’t remember now.
The node based shader editor is coming with the next update already. Whatever is still missing for proper high-end graphics, like LOD, will certainly follow through out 2018. LOD may come with the second update. The tech demo Book of the Dead got lots of details. They may introduce LOD with that.
You are quite a character. Where did I day, “I don’t know F#” and when did that became the point?
I can forgive your insult (remember? you called me a dim wit) and for not remembering or even bothering to check your posts from a couple of years ago. But don’t tell that you don’t even remember your own posts from a couple of days ago. They are just one click away, you know, in page 27. The knowledge of C# or F# was never the initial issue.
More seriously @ - why are you even here? For nearly two years you’ve posted literally nothing other than complaints about Unreal’s lack of C# or F# support and comparing it with Unity, and by your own admission you’re not using the engine. You are also the only proponent of F# in these forums.
I’m here to answer the question “Why is Unity the most popular game engine?”. Which, if you paid attention, is also the title of this thread. I know to a degree both engines, so I can give feedback, and compare both engines…
You just got unlucky that I’m still subscribed to this thread. And that a dim with made the bold accusation that I don’t know what I’m talking about. But hell, seems in these forums, I even have to explain to a MODERATOR what forums are for. Hmm, I’m not sure, maybe to discuss things? No? Too much logic, moderator?
Ah, I see. I’m not allowed to say anything negative of UE4.
So, what can I say… Is this all you got Epic Games? You got a game engine what will get smacked by the completion in the close future. And you got a community, and a moderation that can get easily schooled over basic things. I know that there are not so smart people in the game industry. It’s just that you don’t find this nonsense in the Unity forums. And certainly not among the moderation to such a degree.
Cool story, Epic Games. But I’ve got a better one:
Unity has been improving but every feature they add is incomplete, the lighting system is still a mess. As far as UE4 goes, there have been work by people on this forum that matches the quality of work from the Epic demos.
Yeah the demo had custom tech. Volumetric fog ain’t a native feature in Unity yet, eve now. I figure with the Book of the Dead demo, the amount of costume tech may shrink. That demo is also interactive, so it will show of Unity’s own Cinemachine that is already released. Mind that Cinemachine ain’t just a time line. It’s also real-time camera pan interpolation allowing cinematic experience fused with real-time gameplay, and cut scenes of course. If recall, UE4 only has a time line where you can put together shots only.
Some of Unity’s features are incomplete sure, but have you checked UE lately that also includes areas in Lighting. Horrible ligthbaking with ancient tech and no Area lights! I have to create reflective boxes manually to simulate one myself not to mention all the artifacts that come with it. Utter pain.
Cinemachine does look promising I’ve used it a lot. I don’t particularly care about the realtime camera interpolations, since I’d like to have full control over the camera motion myself and I prefer animating those and bringing them in. Perhaps in some RPG where you have two talking characters and a few other such scenarios that feature can find its uses if the devs want to automate things.
I like Sequencer but it’s much slower and more clunky to work with, I think it has something to do with UE’s interface as well, it feels heavy, undo doesn’t work as expected, I hold my breath every time i press that button, whenever I save the scene Sequencer resets my viewport! Speaking of saves UE is by far the only piece of software in which I don’t know if my project has been properly saved, even after I ‘Save all’ in three different places! materials scene levels etc… UE still asks me if I need to save unsaved files before quitting right after!
I spoke to Unity devs top implement more features that are currently missing in Cinemachine and it seems they have listened and are implementing those features, which is always nice to know. I mean this is the sort of thing when you know you have a company dedicated solely in making engines and you can speak to them and expect direct changes. I know Epic tries its best too but they have other priorities and if a feature does not necessarily find its use internally with them they may not bother to implement it.
UE4 has had area lights for a while, you can make point and spot lights as a sphere or cylindrical shape since like version 4.8 or something, you can also illuminate things with emissive materials. Also, in 4.18 they added actual area lights as a part of support for the Datasmith plugin.
While the rendering method for lighting in UE4 is super outdated, at least it’s predictable and it’s been fully featured, light baking in Unity has ranged from unusable to slow.
Hi, I’m not familiar with the datasmith plugin, can you elaborate?
Area lights in UE4 are not possible at least from what i can tell given the options, Spot light area shadows are not the same as area light distribution in diffuse and reflectivity. Also I am speaking of traditional rectangular area lights. I don’t wish to illuminate things with emmissive materials this is not an intuitive lighting pipeline, I need control over traditional exposure and temperature etc…
To my knowledge so far Faking area lights with bounce cards has been the only way.
Datasmith is a plugin that will allow you to do a one-click conversion of a 3ds Max scene to UE4, it’s mainly for archviz where people have Vray scenes and want to switch to UE4, it can convert Vray materials and lights and since people have area lights they added a way to convert the area lights into UE4, but they also added the area lights into 4.19 so you can use them outside of Datasmith and it uses physical units. The point light/spot lights create area shadows if you change the radius and length values, you just couldn’t make a rectangular shape with it.
I’m just at 4.18 now, All I need is a rectangular area light with proper diffuse and shadows depending on size and light parameters :), we don’t do archviz and don’t rely on connection apps. This is partly what I meant earlier, if Area lights as in light source are not present in the light category then i’m not interested, this means they are not there, I believe it is unjustifiable to claim that it is present in some other form which is either some workaround or a custom bounce card hack, or a spot light with just area shadows but wont produce area light diffuse or some plugin i need to try out etc… So it ultimately is a full circle mess when in Unity I can just pick it and light with it just like I do in Vray.
That was my humble point earlier :).
Edit: If the light source itself is present under lights category in 4.19 then i’ll reconsider my statement (even if it waited all these versions to be available).
Datasmith is just the plugin that does the conversion of the scene in 3ds Max to UE4. But, looking at the thread in the Datasmith section this particular feature might require Datasmith to be installed, which would be dumb, it looks like the new physical lighting units are a result of adding the extra lighting support for Datasmith but it won’t include the area lights unless you have the plugin.
As someone who also doesn’t have Datasmith and just wanted area lights, here, have an hour of blueprinting work that forces the engine to have it. Just don’t try it with a dynamic light and you’ll be fine
But the thing about the unreal engine is that there are many types of games that I don’t know if they would be easy to make with the unreal engine. Let’s say for example that you wanted to create a 4x game like Civ. Is Unreal really better suited for this than something like Unity? Isn’t both Endless Space as well as Endless Legend both made using Unity?
Some of Unity’s features are incomplete sure, but have you checked UE lately that also includes areas in Lighting. Horrible ligthbaking with ancient tech and no Area lights! I have to create reflective boxes manually to simulate one myself not to mention all the artifacts that come with it. Utter pain.
