Unreal Engine Marketplace now open | Hacker News Reader

Unreal Engine Marketplace now open

unrealengine.com

102 pointsnailer38 comments

This is great!

However their launcher program eats 100% of one of my CPU cores all the time while its running. Seems like their Slate UI works the same way as the game actors do: update everything every frame.

This makes it hard to have background downloads while you're doing something else.

Hey jeremiep - check your specs against the recommended ones here. If it's seemingly an issue, hit us up at answers.unrealengine.com - https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/GettingStarted/Reco...

Unreal Engine is already at version 4.4? So we can expect 5.0 in a couple of years? Or will they just call it "Unreal Engine" and be done with versions, like CryTek did for CryEngine.

Neat. I'm happy to make unique assets for my game but I really, really don't want to spend time modelling the same toilet that thousands of others have made.

Is there some standard for modelling assets so that assets from different artists can be mixed together?

Not really. But you can scale / color / modify stuff assuming you're given enough data for the assets.

Of course, then you can often remix and Resell so usually you don't get that level of detail.

This. I was more interested in the problem of scale where maybe a cow from one artist has to be scaled to fit with a car from another artist. I heard there could be problems with that.

That's not really a big deal with 3D models. Except for the texture, it's all vector data that can be trivially scaled. But UE4 does define its own standard for convenience where 1 unit = 1 centimeter.

Wavefront .obj is probably the closest thing to a de facto universal 3D file format standard, but it doesn't support animation and has limited support for normals (which is a problem if you're using normal mapping).

There have been various attempts at standardizing 3D formats that include animation and modern features, perhaps most notably collada, but like most formats striving for standard status as a goal it ended up being a bit of an over-architected mess.

Having something like the Unreal Marketplace sidesteps this situation a bit in that any content available there will be in Unreal Engine/Editor friendly formats, so it should be relatively easy to mix and match it with other things from the marketplace.

Most modern 3d modelling tools support either Collada or FBX which act as interchange formats. Some game engines also support these formats so content can be imported without explicitly needing to write an exporter for each tool you are using.

FBX is the closest thing to a standard right now. It's getting increasingly usable, particularly since Autodesk (the people who control FBX) more or less owns the pro 3D market.

There's also Collada (which I have very rarely pursuaded to work) and Alembic (which works very well, and is used in high-end 3D houses, but only stores vertex data - no bones).

And then there are older formats. Probably the closest equivalent to a universal 3D standard is .obj, but again, it doesn't store skeletal data at all, just vertexes, normals, and materials.

The "unity feel" is a well-known phenomenon (relying on pre-made components and assets too much, so that you can guess which engine was used without researching). I guess soon we will have dozens of "unreal feel" games. I hope at least the latter will be a good thing...

I've actually picked up on 'unity feel' from shaders and shadows, since those are limited to the paid version.

When you play enough games, most widely-used commercial engines tend to have a 'feel'. For example, I am fairly confident I could pick engines out of a line-up consisting of Unity, Unreal, Source, CryEngine and RAGE (Rockstar's engine).

> For example, I am fairly confident I could pick engines out of a line-up consisting of Unity, Unreal, Source, CryEngine and RAGE (Rockstar's engine).

For some, but not for all. There are lots of games that you cannot feel the engine in. Most people would not be able to tell that Titanfall is Source for instance.

I agree. Its interesting though: Most engines do have small 'tells' that a seasoned gamer can identify, usually related to subtle movement physics differences when it comes to jumping and strafing, and also FOV settings could sometimes be a give away.

Back in the Unreal Tournament 2k3-2k4 days, I could always pick out any game made with the Unreal engine, same with GoldSource and Source... kinda scuked. I do hope that doesn't start happening here.

I used to be a game reviewer, for about 80% of the games on the market you're right. However, some just make it all their own and it can be on a per game basis. Diakatana was obviously a Quake II engine game, Anachranox was not. The engine was so heavily modified and doing things no one thought an FPS engine could do, everyone I talked to was surprised when they found out it was Quake II.

I don't mind having a "feel" where UI, HUD, crosshairs etc are similar across games. It's the common in-world assets that I don't like.

This is awesome!

However, I'm worried about the performance issues others have stated, particularly when making downloads on older computers out of my house. Time will tell.

hey jonifico - check our system requirements here and see :) we are actively working on tons of performance enhancements as well - https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/GettingStarted/Reco...

Unity's one edge was the marketplace. Now that is going to disappear, UE4 is a superior engine.

What are your thoughts on Unity's per-seat pricing model vs. UE4's 5% top of line?

I doubt anyone would find the Unity licensing model interesting. Epic is known to be a good partner and if you are in the league where it hurts you, you will be able to negotiate with them.

Given that most indies fail before they make any profit, the Epic model is definitely superior.

Unity has a free verson, UE does not IIRC.

With UE4 you can pay for a single month and retain full access to the tools you've paid for, you just don't get updates. What you could decide on doing is paying every few months when an update comes along that offers something you need / want.

UE has UDK, which allows you to use their scripting interface and access some engine classes, to but no access to most of the source code. It doesn't unlock as much a proportion of power as Unity Free out of Unity Pro, but lets you get a taste for the asset pipeline, workflow, level editor, etc to decide if you want to go for UE.

Unity's paid version doesn't even have access to source code -- which would actually be very helpful for many devs because Unity's buggy as heck and have very long bugfix turnaround times, that we'd be happy to dive in and try to fix for ourselves if we could.

Not to mention more flexibility/modification for the dev's uses of course.

This is not true. There is no such thing as UDK any more. You need to pay $19/month for full source code access to the engine. You could however pay for just one month, cancel your subscription and continue using whatever you have downloaded.

I'd rather program in C# in Unity than C++ for UE4.

I would subscribe to that, IF Unity guys bothered to settle with Xamarin and offered a modern C# compiler.

As things are, C++11 looks more appealing.

They have plans to upgrade C# and .NET, once they complete IL2CPP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bfa9ILwlsFw&list=PLX2vGYjWbI...

Straight C++ or C# put through IL2CPP to get C++, put through Emscripten to get JavaScript... What a wealth of choice between well grounded software engineering foundations, I feel bad for anyone stuck with something like Lua!

Yeah, and most probably way more expensive ($ dev hour * time) than just settle their argument with Xamarin.

I am aware of it, and it feels so wrong.

Unity started as a Mac engine and only got big when they integrated C# into their tooling. Now that they are everywhere in the indie scene, why bother paying the guys that helped them get famous?

"Thank you Xamarin and bye"

EDIT: Provide some more context.

Has any of this supposed feud been documented publicly by either side? I'd imagine doing so could complicate things quite a bit.

Actually I would also like to know.

It keeps being repeated in online forums and given the current state and new direction with IL2CPP, I can only assume it is actually true.

We've been using Unity and C# for the past year. I would switch to UE4 and C++/Blueprint in a heartbeat.

This would allow artists to do their own integration using Blueprint and programmers to focus on game mechanics in C++. I can't imagine having such productivity with Unity.

C++ does scare me but I'd learn it because I really like UE4.

I also really like Cryengine, pondered about getting it on Steam but then gave up after seeing lack of updated documentation and examples.

UE4 have nailed it also in terms of educational content.

LUA and Javascript bindings are in the works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com