Unreal Engine 4.12 released | Hacker News Reader

Unreal Engine 4.12 released

unrealengine.com

102 pointswaivek21 comments

Completely tangential, but why is

> NEW: TV SAFE ZONE DEBUGGING

still a thing that needs to be added to a brand new engine targeting the latest console generation. It's 2016. Why do TVs still do overscan? And why the hell are there still TVs being produced where overscan can't be turned off?

This will never change if we accept the status quo and actually add features to help with this mess.

What should happen is that devices and software should assume overscan to be off and then maybe allow for manual correction.

> What should happen is that devices and software should assume overscan to be off and then maybe allow for manual correction.

And then people think your device or your software is broken. Most people, if trying to debug something, are going to assume that the TV is not the part that's messed up.

I couldn't agree more with the sentiment. It seems absolutely insane to sell a TV with a certain resolution and then make it very hard to actually use all the pixels.

Unfortunately on many devices it can be very difficult if not impossible to activate a pixel perfect display mode. Developers can't expect people to buy a new TV or track down obscure and poorly named settings on their TV so we are stuck with overscan.

They have added a sequencer which works much more like a traditional non linear editor, only you can compose the shots in real time. Even though modern display technology is somewhat better, safe zones are still a useful tool for composing shots and many people in the film industry are used to this visualization even beyond it's original use.

> And why the hell are there still TVs being produced where overscan can't be turned off?

Because you wanted the price of a new HDTV to be $200. Consumer electronics are focused mostly on price, rarely on quality. The menus for most of these devices are incomprehensible and the new fad is IoT and Smart TVs, not usability. HDMI has a flag you can set to say "please don't overscan", but I know of absolutely 0 TVs that respect it.

Also, because standards and legacy content means that content is produced for older standards. Backwards compatibility in broadcast TV has always been important. With a simple converter box, you can view signals from the 1950s on a modern TV. So we can't just turn overscan off globally for everyone.

> Because you wanted the price of a new HDTV to be $200.

actually, performing overscan requires more functionality on the TV. That's what I think is so crazy. You have a digital signal producer (the console), a digital link (the HDMI cable) and a digital signal consumer (the TV).

And then you add additional code to the TV to cut off some pixels from the digitally fed signal and then scale the resulting image.

As this is significant additional functionality compared to just showing the image you're being fed, I don't buy the pricing argument at all. If you wanted it to be cheap, just don't overscan.

The cost of doing overscan at all must be much higher than the cost for a toggle to turn if off.

Presumably you already have some scaling mechanism for non-native resolution inputs already.

It adds a fair bit of lag, too, which is already pretty bad on most HDTVs.

This is how a new release should be communicated to the community. Awesome post and update with both overall feature walkthrough and a more thorough and detailed spec about what has actually changed down to the nitty-gritty parts of the release. Good job!

The new Sequencer tool that replaces Matinee is the big new exciting thing in this release. If it goes as planned we'll see a lot of animators using Unreal without ever needing or caring about the gaming side of things.

I'm still learning Unreal for game dev, but finding the Blueprint system quite difficult to get to grips with. Coming from javascript, I thought it would be easy, but I never seem to know what node to connect to what module for the outcome intended. I guess I will stick with it. I felt the same when I first started with Jquery, I hated it for months then began to enjoy it.

I dabbled with Blueprints a while back, and I got a strong impression that experience with C++ is still valuable background because it gives you a better grip on the types and the general structuring of how the parts communicate. To a pretty large degree you're composing C++ bits and pieces visually, but it makes a lot more sense if you can intuit why something is structured the way it is. And that all ties back to the underlying engine.

Yes I think in my case I need to push through that language learning stage where you have the documentation open constantly looking up methods, selectors... forums posts from other users on tricks and shortcuts. I was hoping blueprints were more intuitive, but it still has a complex syntax of its own nature -nice challenge.

Marketplace is also interesting.. very good, but sometimes the things sold could be assembled easily by just having the required blueprints. So I wonder if this creates a sort of restrained help community on the sharing and caring front of blueprints and solutions to common need such as "Info bubbles on any object! just $19.99 now from the market" and it's just a handful of blueprints essentially - at least for the non-asset offers on the market. Javascript has always been generous and happy to share code snippets and plugins and so on, but in Unreal there's this economy around that, which is cool if a bit cunning.

Blueprint is just a visual wrapper for the C++ API - a large amount of the functions exposed to you are 1:1 representations of functions from the API. Once you spend some time reading over the API documentation it becomes easier.

Yes true, I will stick with it. For basic things all is well, but naturally we always want to do complex things too early.. I need to be patient.

Looking at other people's layouts did a ton for me. Epic has some killer example projects you should check out.

Wow that VR editor is unreal! (hurr)

Being able to build the 'world' and unleash artists into it with that would be fantastic

Unity has something similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzjxRi5J4XI

Man, just 7 years ago this level of world building was science fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzFpg271sm8

Thank you for linking me to that short film - it's wonderful.

I continue to be blown away that such a powerful and flexible piece of technology is completely open source. Bravo Epic!

Those are some seriously impressive features. I kept scrolling down and every single addition seemed useful.

Really hope I get to work with this engine some time.

It's free to use, snag a copy and play around :)

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