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Comment by erdevs | Hacker News Reader

Is this only a fork rather than being accepted into mainline because of Epic's thoughts regarding UWP?

http://www.pcgamer.com/tim-sweeney-thinks-microsoft-will-mak...

the bottomline is that epic wants to make money out of the engine so unless they are willing to lose marketshare to other engines (e.g. Unity) they will eventually have to accept that their engine will be used for UWP apps.

I'm still waiting on seeing some real UWP apps that aren't first-party Microsoft efforts or shovelware. The platform is not exactly new, and I'm just not seeing anybody bothering to adopt it.

Netflix is on board, as is Hulu. But the platform makes more sense than average for them, since they want to be on Xbox.

http://www.windowscentral.com/netflix-looks-be-readying-its-...

I really liked the idea MS had with phones that could scale up to full screen devices if you docked them, but I'm more skeptical of this. Aside from media providers, who else is going to put in the effort to make their UI controller-friendly?

Game engines are just about the only other example I can think of.

I think the goal of scale-up would be to make it so easy people just put it in. Swiping up and down on the phone could be pushing up and down on the joystick on the Xbox, or using the scroll wheel on the PC.

In theory. Obviously if not adjusted some, user experience suffers. But the idea is to make it so easy to adapt to different form factors, it just seems normal to. (People expect these days that their Android phone or iPhone app will work well on an Android tablet or iPad, for instance.)

First UWP needs to have market share.

Why would a multi-platform game engine mainline changes that are only applicable to Windows 10 devices?

Why not? Since it's a multiplatform engine already, any platform specific code would have already been modularized from the very beginning.

It's also code that modifies the engine in a way that Epic's founder disagrees with.

Well there's also special code that caters for Android and Apple store development, so why not also Windows store. As long as there is choice, there's no problem. If the MS fork were to disallow any other target platform, that would be a problem. Otherwise I expect it to make it to the main branch soon.

I think you could make the case that people should not be locked in to UWP if they wish to develop an UWP app with Unreal Engine, so giving them an easy way to deploy on UWP, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS is beneficial to the engine ecosystem as a whole, even if you think that UWP is not something you should develop for.

the beauty of open source though will let people develop UWP games using epic's engine against its founder's wish.

Unreal Engine is still propertiary software. If Epic wishes so, they may enforce their wish on any of its users on grounds of EULA.

Exactly. Do not mistake source available as open source.

EULAs are meaningless in many countries despite what US companies wish for.

Unreal Engine 4 is not open source.

The Unreal engine already has lots of platform-specific code for each of the platforms it supports. Eg DirectX is supported...

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