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ceebee posted:One thing I noticed about UE4 is the fact that it requires a beast of a system. My 8GB of RAM and 560GTX get swamped with UE4, whereas Unity can run fairly quick on a low spec machine. Also, some of their example Blueprint games run like poo poo even in standalone for me, and they're fairly simple games too. Yeah the Unreal Engine is really resource intense. The twin stick shooter Waves was made in UDK and even though it's not super graphically intense that game drains my laptop battery almost immediately. I was honestly shocked.
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Mar 21, 2014 14:25
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Yodzilla posted:Yeah the Unreal Engine is really resource intense. The twin stick shooter Waves was made in UDK and even though it's not super graphically intense that game drains my laptop battery almost immediately. I was honestly shocked. I was having issues until I reinstalled Visual Studio 2013 and made sure to close the editor while playing and now I can get pretty good performance on a Macbook Pro Retina 15 (2.4 I7 + Nvidea 650m). The shooter example runs at 40-60 full screen low res (1025x768) on high detail and 60fps on low detail. It's not great but not that much worse than Bioshock Infinite. Also the mobile games (flappy bird/runner game) run great on a Moto X. Unity can really scale down (my last game demo thing runs around 400 fps) but I think UE4 can also. One of the big issues is the freaking editor continually animates and processes graphics (taking about 25% of my CPU + unknown GPU), so if you launch a standalone build without closing the editor you get like 15fps.
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Mar 21, 2014 14:52
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The other thing you can do is open it up in Visual Studio and compile with the define UNREAL_LEAN_AND_MEAN (I think that's it) and compile as release. This will strip out a lot of stuff, but if you are making a small game you probably don't need most of it.
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Mar 21, 2014 15:37
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Yodzilla posted:Yeah the Unreal Engine is really resource intense. The twin stick shooter Waves was made in UDK and even though it's not super graphically intense that game drains my laptop battery almost immediately. I was honestly shocked. (which is one of the big, huge arguments for UE4 over Unity, really - even if it's more complex to learn, Kismet + the shader system lets non-programming artists do some incredible things... I'm crossing my fingers that that's one of the areas Unity pushes for now that they have competition) EDIT: Come to think of it, that's probably a big part of why UDK games suck battery in general. The shader system encourages you to just throw a ton of data together and have it all work out, because it does - you never really think about how complex the shader you just created is, you just think "woo hoo! Now I can blend 8 different textures with a mixture of inputs! Now to make 10 more of those shaders for the other surface combos in this scene, doo dee doo doo...". Shalinor fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Mar 21, 2014 |
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Mar 21, 2014 15:43
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Shalinor posted:EDIT: Come to think of it, that's probably a big part of why UDK games suck battery in general. The shader system encourages you to just throw a ton of data together and have it all work out, because it does - you never really think about how complex the shader you just created is, you just think "woo hoo! Now I can blend 8 different textures with a mixture of inputs! Now to make 10 more of those shaders for the other surface combos in this scene, doo dee doo doo...".  The UE4 tools a pretty good. A nice evolutionary step from the UE3 tools, and with some much better worlkflow built into them.
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Mar 22, 2014 02:37
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Strumpy posted:On one of the unreal games i worked on in the past we had an array of FX artists that you had to beat over the head to get them to reduce draw, calls, overdraw, and instruction count. It was pretty crazy how much of a slowdown you could introduce just by adding a few nodes. In the end we just went and made a whole lot of 'compound' nodes that reflected what they wanted to do so we could bring performance up to required levels. Ahhh artists I guess that's one of the pros of having worked on an MMO, I'm an optimization nazi when it comes to art assets and how they affect performance now. Although I did an art test for Irrational last year and they said I didn't use enough tris  Guess I dodged a bullet there anyways 
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Mar 22, 2014 03:13
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So wait, I can pay $20 a month plus 5% of my sales to use UE4 or I can pay $75 for loving Unity? Is this even a choice? When I get into making games in a few months I'm gonna go for Unreal Engine, there's really no choice there. Unity doesn't really compare. Considering I'd be aiming for desktop systems anyway.
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Mar 22, 2014 04:18
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Dreadwroth posted:So wait, I can pay $20 a month plus 5% of my sales to use UE4 or I can pay $75 for loving Unity? Is this even a choice? When I get into making games in a few months I'm gonna go for Unreal Engine, there's really no choice there. Unity doesn't really compare. Well, from a pure money point of view: If you plan on making more than $1100 a month then Unity is the better deal and it gets sweeter the more you make. I'm sure Unity 3D will have some kind of response once they are back in the office and can digest things.
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Mar 22, 2014 04:52
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Ahhh ok I don't plan on making that much, but we will see. I'm still in the concept stage currently. On the upside I can do all the sound effects/voice stuff so that should trim my budget down pretty good. I think its gonna be some sort of horror/rpg game, hey maybe I can get Lowtax to play it and tell me how terrible I am at games. 
Dreadwroth fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 04:59
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Dreadwroth posted:So wait, I can pay $20 a month plus 5% of my sales to use UE4 or I can pay $75 for loving Unity? Is this even a choice? When I get into making games in a few months I'm gonna go for Unreal Engine, there's really no choice there. Unity doesn't really compare. You could also pay nothing for Unity while developing the game (unless you absolutely need the features in Unity Pro) and then pay $75 when you want to release the game. Or, if you don't mind the splash screen, pay nothing at all and just stick with Unity Free.
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Mar 22, 2014 05:14
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Bocom posted:You could also pay nothing for Unity while developing the game (unless you absolutely need the features in Unity Pro) and then pay $75 when you want to release the game. Or, if you don't mind the splash screen, pay nothing at all and just stick with Unity Free.
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Mar 22, 2014 07:11
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roomforthetuna posted:Yeah, I like that Unity lets you basically develop the entire game and then just go pro for the final graphical touches (assuming your game doesn't involve portals or the like where higher-end visual effects are actually part of the gameplay). I'd probably go for the flat-rate buy at that point just to thank them for that. I'd feel like kind of a dick using it for a year then paying for a one month subscription just for final touches and release. You have to pay for 12 months with Unity subscription, so it's $900 assuming you don't want to continue it.
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Mar 22, 2014 08:19
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Quick question for someone with UE4 source access: does it make use of C++11 features?
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Mar 22, 2014 11:48
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Bondematt posted:You have to pay for 12 months with Unity subscription, so it's $900 assuming you don't want to continue it. Yeah, a lot of people seem to be missing that part.
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Mar 22, 2014 15:58
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coffeetable posted:Quick question for someone with UE4 source access: does it make use of C++11 features? Very little but they do use some. Also, somewhat surprising but not really, they use pragma once guards instead of ifdefs guards. But both VS and Xcode support them so why not I guess. Also it looks cleaner anyway. I haven't dug around enough yet to see if they are using closures. Also, not surprising at all, is total lack of STL anywhere. So they have their own containers, etc. And they aren't using unique_ptr or shared_ptr, but they do have their own version of them that is used for game objects and blueprints. Apparently it's part of a custom garbage collection system and not simply a ref counted pointer. Basically if it's a C++ 11 feature that requires the STL it's probably not used. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 16:02
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More UE4 / C++ 11 stuff: Looking around some more the code base implements its own versions of - allocators - smart pointers - containers - algorithms eg. There is no stl stuff anywhere. It is also using rvalue references (move semantics), at least in the places I've looked so far (the core / utility classes). It uses final and override. It uses variadic templates. It uses closures. Some of these things are gated behind guards depending on compiler support. Also I was surprised to see unit tests. At least in some of the core stuff. This is something they didn't have in UE3. xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Mar 22, 2014 |
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Mar 22, 2014 21:25
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Man this is cool. UE4 uses a custom built UI system now, instead of scaleform. They've actually shedded a lot third party code that isnt open source. Probably so they could open the engine up to a larger audience. Anyway, the editor UI itself is written almost entirely in their custom UI system, which is called Slate and written in C++. From there they use either C# or C++ to implement whatever editing features.
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Mar 23, 2014 03:52
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I really like Scaleform, so that's somewhat disappointing. What's the new one like?
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Mar 23, 2014 04:36
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Suspicious Dish posted:I really like Scaleform, so that's somewhat disappointing. What's the new one like? To be honest I'm not a fan, from what I'm reading. It is basically an immediate mode GUI system but separates state and data model from layout, and supports skinning and animation. And you write it in what they call a subset of C++ using a declarative syntax. I need to dig around but I hope there is a WYSIWYG editor for this because the docs make it seem terrible. =(
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Mar 23, 2014 05:28
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xgalaxy posted:To be honest I'm not a fan, from what I'm reading. It is basically an immediate mode GUI system but separates state and data model from layout, and supports skinning and animation. And you write it in what they call a subset of C++ using a declarative syntax. It's got the benefit of being REALLY FAST compared to scaleform.
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Mar 23, 2014 10:04
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BabelFish posted:It's got the benefit of being REALLY FAST compared to scaleform. ^ Scaleform was cool and all but it was so loving slowwwww, because ya know ... flash. What's fun about getting the Source code by default in UE4 is that if the engine catches on with the hobby and indie crowd in the same manner as Unity you'll see tools and plugins for nearly everything start cropping up. The prospect of a huge dev community for UE4 making open source tools and plugins is suuuuper exciting to me.
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Mar 23, 2014 17:13
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BabelFish posted:It's got the benefit of being REALLY FAST compared to scaleform. ... but I'm really, really glad it's dead either way. Jon93 posted:The prospect of a huge dev community for UE4 making open source tools and plugins is suuuuper exciting to me. ("open-source" theoretically makes that all possible by default, but without an AssetStore-alike to galvanize it, it can't really become the same engine-defining force)
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Mar 23, 2014 18:15
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What what whaaaat? I just poked at Unity for the first time in a while and discovered that now they have custom script execution order. About loving time! And also super handy because the first thing I was about to do was create a manager object that would do an ordered "MyUpdate" on every script registered with it, and now I don't have to. Sweet.
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Mar 23, 2014 18:48
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Shalinor posted:
Unreal is going to have an asset store. Scratch that. They already have it. They call it the "Marketplace" and it already has things in it, though everything in there right now is officially made. From their FAQ: quote:Will I be able to build, buy and sell assets on the Marketplace? xgalaxy fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Mar 23, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 18:59
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xgalaxy posted:Unreal is going to have an asset store. Scratch that. They already have it. They call it the "Marketplace" and it already has things in it, though everything in there right now is officially made.  I'd totally missed this. THIS IS AMAZING. drat. There is definitely a UE4 game in my future now, this is too cool. When Unity people start jumping ship for funsie test projects, I'd love to hear how you think going back to C++ is affecting productivity. On the one hand, C# has a lot of nice garbage collect'y stuff that accelerates dev, but on the other, it looks like between their C++11 stuff and not-STL library, most of what makes C# faster to use, they have too.
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Mar 23, 2014 19:41
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roomforthetuna posted:What what whaaaat? I just poked at Unity for the first time in a while and discovered that now they have custom script execution order. About loving time! And also super handy because the first thing I was about to do was create a manager object that would do an ordered "MyUpdate" on every script registered with it, and now I don't have to. Sweet. You can, in fact, even write a short editor script that will put whatever scripts you want into the execution order you want, without having to go in and set it by hand every time.
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Mar 23, 2014 19:41
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Zizi posted:You can, in fact, even write a short editor script that will put whatever scripts you want into the execution order you want, without having to go in and set it by hand every time. (Just tested it with a "shared_value = 2" and "shared_value *= 2" function, and it just always debug-outputs 4 no matter which script is supposed to be first.) Edit: I wish C# had called automatically determined variable types 'auto' like C++ doing the same thing, instead of 'var' like Javascript doing something totally different. roomforthetuna fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Mar 23, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 19:58
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xgalaxy posted:Man this is cool. UE4 uses a custom built UI system now, instead of scaleform. They've actually shedded a lot third party code that isnt open source. Probably so they could open the engine up to a larger audience. Proprietary UI solutions have a ways to go before they're good enough to completely replace it, but it has to done before Flash gets evicted from the web and dies of stagnation.
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Mar 23, 2014 20:02
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 Any problems with Scaleform were problems with it, not strictly flash. Scaleform's awesome because I can write some code then hand it off to the artists to do their thing (although it never really turned out like that). You just had to be smart about with your use of vectors sine it rendered them into very fine tris.
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Mar 23, 2014 21:38
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dupersaurus posted:
By smart with vectors you mean not use them at all, at least that is what had to happened on every project I've seen.
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Mar 23, 2014 22:45
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Can someone recommend a decent book on modern game engine design that tackles things like a job system, the boundaries between game state, renderer/scene graph, AI, audio and input system, scripting language integration, etc? I'm much more interested about the proper software engineering side of things rather than super-technical code-level nitty-gritty. "Game Engine Architecture" by Gregory et al. seems highly rated on amazon but a new edition is right around the corner (coming in July). Any other suggestions?
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Mar 23, 2014 23:08
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dupersaurus posted:
about that, Flash doesn't have a bright future ahead of it and Adobe themselves are already trying to make a successor to it, and when Flash gets muscled off of the web, they're sure as hell not going to keep working on it for game UIs. Anyone planning their tech for a future 4+ years down the road has to realize that banking on Flash providing the features they need isn't sustainable and a replacement is going to have to be developed, which is basically what Epic did.This is on top of using Flash having its own limitations, like not really having a concept of UI elements that exist in 3D world (or worse, are 3D), and the code separation causes information blindness between the AS and C++ code that has lovely results like game logic in the UI, the UI being a 2D sprite drawing slave, or information stores getting out of sync (i.e. to take an obvious recent example, BF4's loadout menus showing incorrect weapon stats). OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Mar 23, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 23:38
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OneEightHundred posted:I dunno what's They are?
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Mar 23, 2014 23:50
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OneEightHundred posted:I dunno what's Flash != Scaleform Edit: those are all examples of people using the tool wrong, not the tool being inherently bad. Scaleform allows you to hand off UI development to people with more familiarity in UI concepts than your average programmer does, in a format that they're likely already familiar with. The whole AS/C++ separation isn't really an issue because if you're doing a UI right, you're separating it from the game code as much as you can already. dupersaurus fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Mar 24, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 23:59
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Suspicious Dish posted:They are? Edge is a toolchain they're building out that provides Flash-like authoring experience and produces HTML/JS/web output. It's basically looking to use modern browsers as the runtime for their authoring tools instead of the Flash VM. Some parts of the Flash shape model are still hard to represent with high fidelity on top of <canvas>, but now that WebGL is in the mix that gets better.
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Mar 24, 2014 00:00
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shodanjr_gr posted:Can someone recommend a decent book on modern game engine design that tackles things like a job system, the boundaries between game state, renderer/scene graph, AI, audio and input system, scripting language integration, etc?
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Mar 24, 2014 03:12
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Subjunctive posted:Edge is a toolchain they're building out that provides Flash-like authoring experience and produces HTML/JS/web output. It's basically looking to use modern browsers as the runtime for their authoring tools instead of the Flash VM. They're also funding Easel.js
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Mar 24, 2014 05:18
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Is there any way to add root motion to legacy animations in Unity without a Pro license (to get curves)?
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Mar 24, 2014 07:07
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dupersaurus posted:Flash != Scaleform quote:The whole AS/C++ separation isn't really an issue because if you're doing a UI right, you're separating it from the game code as much as you can already. Like as a random example that would probably produce a pathological case, Super Metroid has some beam modes that are mutually incompatible, but while that restriction is a game rule, beam selection is only possible through the UI. I guarantee that if you gave that problem to a bunch of present-day developers, a LOT of them would come back with the beam selection rules implemented entirely in ActionScript because dealing with API stuff just to get it to talk to the weapon system would just be a lot of work with no actual gameplay benefit.
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Mar 24, 2014 07:44
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OneEightHundred posted:I don't know what point you're even trying to make with this. Scaleform is only as useful as Flash is healthy. The day Adobe gives up on Flash is the day Scaleform is left holding the bag, because its "familiar tools" advantage will slowly evaporate and it'll be chained to a dead legacy product. I'm being a bit pedantic, but the point is that Scaleform works from swfs, and Flash isn't the only way you can make swfs these days. You can use Flex (open source) and you can use Haxe. Yeah, you don't have the editor, but as long as all versions of Flash suddenly disappear from their users' computers... OneEightHundred posted:Like as a random example that would probably produce a pathological case, Super Metroid has some beam modes that are mutually incompatible, but while that restriction is a game rule, beam selection is only possible through the UI. I guarantee that if you gave that problem to a bunch of present-day developers, a LOT of them would come back with the beam selection rules implemented entirely in ActionScript because dealing with API stuff just to get it to talk to the weapon system would just be a lot of work with no actual gameplay benefit. Again, you're calling bad design practices a fault with the framework. But even then you're overstating the difficulty in getting scaleform to talk with the client. In that example, whether you're using scaleform or a native solution, the UI is either 1) going to do the calculation itself (which, as you describe, doesn't seem to be all that egregious if it's single-player) or, 2) is going to need a hook into the weapon system to get to the calculation. Scaleform 3+ may have changed some things, but in 2 all you need to do is tell scaleform that there's a method it can call through an fscommand or ExternalInterface.
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Mar 24, 2014 13:44
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