Are there any good resources in regards to making specific types of games in UE4? I've found lots of "Make a tower defense game in Unity!"-style tutorials and I tend to learn best from dev'ing live examples, so I'd love to find something similar.
ain't got one
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Unreal itself has several prototypes like that just built in, plus example projects downloadable from the launcher. The templates in the game are first person, third person, third person over the shoulder, 2D and uhh, top down? And some vehicle stuff I think.
I don't remember all the examples in the community projects marketplace, but I know there is a top down tower defense, an RTS example, a first person shooter example, a racing example, a paper 2D platformer example, a styalized (WoW style) rendering example, and a ton of others.
The fact that a bunch of core Unity classes/components are closed source hurts it in ways that are annoying. I've been totally comfortable with advocating Unity (for all its shortcomings) since it's free to start using and its component system is relatively easy to come to terms with, and it builds for seemingly everything (especially both mobile platforms and PC!). But personally I'm jumping ship to Unreal now that it's free, even though my day job is Unity development.
Still need Unity Pro for a custom splashscreen. For some reason, that really annoys me and is enough reason for me to switch to UE4. (Plus, I'm not very good with Unity so I haven't lost much anyways).
Probably just irrational, but I hate the default Unity splash screen.
Not that it would really change your opinion but I guess they've changed the default Unity splash to some sort of animation that supposedly looks better. I haven't been able to find a video/gif of it though so I have no idea what it looks like.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Frankly, I give it a release before Unity does something source code related. Access to the full Unreal source is such a powerful offering, I can't imagine they won't respond at some point.
Another point in UE4's favor is that they're not tied to monodevelop if you want to step through code. Monodevelop, which in case you've forgotten, has a bug that renders it unable to inspect generic collections.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited March 2015
The version of MonoDevelop that Unity forces has that bug. In fact, that bug has long been fixed. The version they force you to use also resets your projects to .NET 3.5 constantly, even though Unity supports .NET 4.
e: Caveat this was all six months ago when I still used Unity, and before Microsoft released VSUnity for free.
Going through the basic Unreal tutorials and there appears to be some instability on my Macbook Pro. So far 4 crashes just following the tutorial instructions moving assets around and changing properties.
What swings UE4 for me is full source code access. Its great being able to do whatever the hell you want and fix issues within the engine without waiting for an official patch.
There have been many times I've fixed something in UE3 or CryEngine3 and have the exact same fix come down from the vendor weeks or months later.
Going through the basic Unreal tutorials and there appears to be some instability on my Macbook Pro. So far 4 crashes just following the tutorial instructions moving assets around and changing properties.
The Mac version is super new. Report the bugs on the UnrealEngine site, because they will fix them. (Or just be Mr. Crazy Dude and fix them yourself and do a pull request on GitHub )
Going through the basic Unreal tutorials and there appears to be some instability on my Macbook Pro. So far 4 crashes just following the tutorial instructions moving assets around and changing properties.
The Mac version is super new. Report the bugs on the UnrealEngine site, because they will fix them. (Or just be Mr. Crazy Dude and fix them yourself and do a pull request on GitHub )
As much as I would like to get into "the scene" I can barely motivate myself to work on something fun like a game much less a game engine. I'm hitting the "report this crash" bug every time but I can't reliably reproduce any of them.
Just going through the steps and suddenly the cursor turns into the mac "wait" wheel thingy then I get a crash report.
Been meaning to give voice to the subliminal thought that's been going through my head that Unreal going free was probably something that Unity forced them to do. Yes, you could get Unreal for "just" $20, if you were willing to forgo any new features that came out after your 30-day subscription expired. But if you wanted updates, it got more expensive, and there's this special little place in our psychology that makes us seriously overvalue "free" things in disregard for the total cost of ownership. That is/was the glue that held people to Unity (I basically only decided to drop the money on Unreal the instant before they made it free), and I suspect it was the way Unity had that "but seriously, I'm one guy in his own room, why pay for middleware if a free version exists?" set on lockdown that made Epic consider going free with Unreal. So now Unreal seriously competes in Unity's niche, and that's going to force a strong response out of Unity, as everyone's been saying.
Good times ahead, methinks.
My favorite musical instrument is the air-raid siren.
I think I like UE4, but I just cannot fucking wait until these initial stumbling blocks are out of the way. It doesn't import .blend files, and all the tutorials I've seen assume you have maya. But blender comes with an FBX importer. But the default scale and orientation are different in blender. And materials don't import in any way resembling how they look in blender.
And this weekend I saw a blueprint or something in here that connected a player state machine to animations, but now I can't find it.
@Delzhand I'll check my settings when I get home, but put your units to Metric in your project, scale up by 100 on export, FBX 6.4 binary or whatever it is, and I believe it's -Z forward. Those settings should get you to proper "Unreal" settings.
Also, now that this is free and the barrier to entry is super low for everyone - Anyone here interested on working on a slightly longer, low stress game project? I love game jams, but I want to do something longer term, where people can reliably commit ~10 hours a week to. I've had a few ideas kicking around for a while, but would also be very open to working on something else if it's fleshed out. Shoot me a PM if interested.
Been meaning to give voice to the subliminal thought that's been going through my head that Unreal going free was probably something that Unity forced them to do. Yes, you could get Unreal for "just" $20, if you were willing to forgo any new features that came out after your 30-day subscription expired. But if you wanted updates, it got more expensive, and there's this special little place in our psychology that makes us seriously overvalue "free" things in disregard for the total cost of ownership. That is/was the glue that held people to Unity (I basically only decided to drop the money on Unreal the instant before they made it free), and I suspect it was the way Unity had that "but seriously, I'm one guy in his own room, why pay for middleware if a free version exists?" set on lockdown that made Epic consider going free with Unreal. So now Unreal seriously competes in Unity's niche, and that's going to force a strong response out of Unity, as everyone's been saying.
Good times ahead, methinks.
I think it's the other way around, and it's the sense I get from talking to a lot of other bedroom devs. Unreal being at $20/month actually forced Unity to look in the mirror, and Unreal going free basically forced Unity's hand this morning. Remember that Unity has been in this space for nearly a decade, Unreal jumped in last year. In that year, they've been completely disruptive (in a good way) and forced Unity to make a ton of changes to their software and licensing. I really don't think Unity was driving Unreal to do much of anything, as Unreal is still making plenty of money at the high end. Unreal entering this space did, on the other hand, force Unity to do quite a bit.
I think I like UE4, but I just cannot fucking wait until these initial stumbling blocks are out of the way. It doesn't import .blend files, and all the tutorials I've seen assume you have maya. But blender comes with an FBX importer. But the default scale and orientation are different in blender. And materials don't import in any way resembling how they look in blender.
And this weekend I saw a blueprint or something in here that connected a player state machine to animations, but now I can't find it.
@Delzhand I'll check my settings when I get home, but put your units to Metric in your project, scale up by 100 on export, FBX 6.4 binary or whatever it is, and I believe it's -Z forward. Those settings should get you to proper "Unreal" settings.
This will get you to proper default UE settings, aka 1cm = 1uu. If you want 1dm = 1uu or 1m = 1uu, you'll have to divide that 100 by 10 as you step up. So I know you and I have talked about 1dm = 1uu being ideal, and that would be a scale factor of 10 coming out of Blender.
The biggest thing I'm struggling with now is that I look at what CAN be done in UE4 and just...freeze up. I'm by no means a 3D artist, so the thought of attempting such a task seems pretty herculean to me.
Maybe I'll just make pong to start with.
ain't got one
+1
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
The biggest thing I'm struggling with now is that I look at what CAN be done in UE4 and just...freeze up. I'm by no means a 3D artist, so the thought of attempting such a task seems pretty herculean to me.
Maybe I'll just make pong to start with.
There are tons, and tons, and tons of really high quality resources available for free and at reasonable prices in the marketplace. You should be able to make just about any game concept you care to try using just the free art and assets available in the various example projects.
So far the process to upgrade our project from Unity 4.6 to 5 has been no hassle for our scripts. There is an API updater that did everything it needed to do (mostly just getting rid of the getters for builtin components). However some of our custom shaders are broken and I don't know enough about shaders to figure out why (not originally written by me).
Yeah, I went through and grabbed everything free. I'm excited, as I'm a bit of a learning nut so anything new is fun at this point, but still daunting. I do think I'm going to get started with a Pong clone, since I figure it should be a good learning exercise with pretty minimal time buy-in.
The biggest thing I'm struggling with now is that I look at what CAN be done in UE4 and just...freeze up. I'm by no means a 3D artist, so the thought of attempting such a task seems pretty herculean to me.
Maybe I'll just make pong to start with.
Really, don't let Unreals power cripple you. You can spend days making amazing top quality models and import them and stick amazing PBR textures on them. Or you can spend an hour, give it a flat shader and actually get to work on making gameplay mechanics. I would heavily recommend the latter. Prototype the gameplay, then worry about making it pretty.
It's worth mentioning that you can make a version of Pong that looks INCREDIBLY COOL just because of Unreal's lighting system. Like, if all you have in the world is a matte white box in which two matte white blocks bop a matte white sphere around and there's a few lights in the larger box, it still looks crazy good. Great assets look awful under terrible lighting, while even the simplest of assets can look awesome with merely decent lighting.
It's worth mentioning that you can make a version of Pong that looks INCREDIBLY COOL just because of Unreal's lighting system. Like, if all you have in the world is a matte white box in which two matte white blocks bop a matte white sphere around and there's a few lights in the larger box, it still looks crazy good. Great assets look awful under terrible lighting, while even the simplest of assets can look awesome with merely decent lighting.
Case in point:
There is basically nothing amazing going on there texture wise. All the pretty comes from a few volumetric lights, and a few particle effects. Which brings up the next point - abuse the fuck out of particle emitters. Not so much in terms of sheer volume, but what you can craft with them for an incredibly low resource hit is pretty astounding.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited March 2015
Probably not, unless the editing tools have gotten insanely better since the last time I looked at source. Unreal and Unity are as popular as they are not because they are great engines, but because they are great engines with great tooling.
e: Direct quote from that presser, from the VP of Valve's engine group "We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform." (emphasis mine)
Probably not, unless the editing tools have gotten insanely better since the last time I looked at source. Unreal and Unity are as popular as they are not because they are great engines, but because they are great engines with great tooling.
e: Direct quote from that presser, from the VP of Valve's engine group "We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform."
So yeah, they noticed.
Yep, full quote makes it even more apparent that they're more focused on tools this time around.
Valve announced the Source 2 engine, the successor to the Source engine used in Valve's games since the launch of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2. "The value of a platform like the PC is how much it increases the productivity of those who use the platform. With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity. Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games," said Valve's Jay Stelly. "We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform."
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
They still seem to be going after the after market content creator more than the game creator with their free offering. Which is fine, especially since so much of their business model is around selling user generated content for their games. I just wonder how useful that's going to make Source 2 as an actual engine product, when stacked up against Unreal and Unity, which are squarely targeted at people making their own complete games.
Oh, god damnit. Now I gotta find screens or video of this engine.
As far as I know, there hasn't really been any released yet. The Dota 2 Workshop Tools Alpha is widely accepted to be on Source 2, but it doesn't look any different from normal Dota 2.
The version of MonoDevelop that Unity forces has that bug. In fact, that bug has long been fixed. The version they force you to use also resets your projects to .NET 3.5 constantly, even though Unity supports .NET 4.
e: Caveat this was all six months ago when I still used Unity, and before Microsoft released VSUnity for free.
Yeah, Visual Studio Tools for Unity is really solid -- and so is VS Community Edition, so get the fuck out of here, MonoDevelop.
Does anyone know what version of Mono 4.6 and/or 5 are even using, though?
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited March 2015
Thinking about dropping my 30 unreal bucks on the SpaceBox Variable space box package, and then dropping another 5 for the star rendering VFX pack. Anyone used either, and have any good/bad experiences with them?
Still need Unity Pro for a custom splashscreen. For some reason, that really annoys me and is enough reason for me to switch to UE4. (Plus, I'm not very good with Unity so I haven't lost much anyways).
Probably just irrational, but I hate the default Unity splash screen.
Not that it would really change your opinion but I guess they've changed the default Unity splash to some sort of animation that supposedly looks better. I haven't been able to find a video/gif of it though so I have no idea what it looks like.
According to a post on reddit, this is the new splash screen. It's better but not like whoa better. I actually didn't find that link until after watching this video, because I was really hoping the Unity logo at the beginning of that was the new splash screen. I was slightly disappointed that it apparently isn't. But still, an improvement is an improvement.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
And really, if I were using their engine at that free tier, I wouldn't be ashamed one bit showing that logo at the start of my game. I made this awesome thing, and I used this awesome tech for free to do it.
kaceypwe stayed bright as lightningwe sang loud as thunderRegistered Userregular
Yeah, I have no problem at all with the splash screen. I get why some people do, but for me, that's exactly it. If I used this engine to make a game, I feel like displaying their logo for a couple seconds is the least I could do. If anything I'd actually just like to be able to make an even cooler looking Unity splash, but I could even see why it might be an issue to let devs do that.
I upgraded to Unity 5 today and am pretty happy, just wish they would open the partile collider api a bit more.
No matter what though, it's a great time to be an indie game dev. About a month and I can start looking at getting my game out maybe for some people to play.
Posts
I don't remember all the examples in the community projects marketplace, but I know there is a top down tower defense, an RTS example, a first person shooter example, a racing example, a paper 2D platformer example, a styalized (WoW style) rendering example, and a ton of others.
e: Caveat this was all six months ago when I still used Unity, and before Microsoft released VSUnity for free.
This. I've already made a few minor tweaks to UE4
The Mac version is super new. Report the bugs on the UnrealEngine site, because they will fix them. (Or just be Mr. Crazy Dude and fix them yourself and do a pull request on GitHub
Just going through the steps and suddenly the cursor turns into the mac "wait" wheel thingy then I get a crash report.
Good times ahead, methinks.
@Delzhand I'll check my settings when I get home, but put your units to Metric in your project, scale up by 100 on export, FBX 6.4 binary or whatever it is, and I believe it's -Z forward. Those settings should get you to proper "Unreal" settings.
I think it's the other way around, and it's the sense I get from talking to a lot of other bedroom devs. Unreal being at $20/month actually forced Unity to look in the mirror, and Unreal going free basically forced Unity's hand this morning. Remember that Unity has been in this space for nearly a decade, Unreal jumped in last year. In that year, they've been completely disruptive (in a good way) and forced Unity to make a ton of changes to their software and licensing. I really don't think Unity was driving Unreal to do much of anything, as Unreal is still making plenty of money at the high end. Unreal entering this space did, on the other hand, force Unity to do quite a bit.
This will get you to proper default UE settings, aka 1cm = 1uu. If you want 1dm = 1uu or 1m = 1uu, you'll have to divide that 100 by 10 as you step up. So I know you and I have talked about 1dm = 1uu being ideal, and that would be a scale factor of 10 coming out of Blender.
Maybe I'll just make pong to start with.
There are tons, and tons, and tons of really high quality resources available for free and at reasonable prices in the marketplace. You should be able to make just about any game concept you care to try using just the free art and assets available in the various example projects.
Really, don't let Unreals power cripple you. You can spend days making amazing top quality models and import them and stick amazing PBR textures on them. Or you can spend an hour, give it a flat shader and actually get to work on making gameplay mechanics. I would heavily recommend the latter. Prototype the gameplay, then worry about making it pretty.
Case in point:
There is basically nothing amazing going on there texture wise. All the pretty comes from a few volumetric lights, and a few particle effects. Which brings up the next point - abuse the fuck out of particle emitters. Not so much in terms of sheer volume, but what you can craft with them for an incredibly low resource hit is pretty astounding.
Oh, god damnit. Now I gotta find screens or video of this engine.
e: Direct quote from that presser, from the VP of Valve's engine group "We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform." (emphasis mine)
So yeah, they noticed.
Expect some later this week. Thursday is going to be my guess.
You can find some images from a slideshow presentation that's a few years old, but that's all we've got right now.
http://www.destructoid.com/leaked-presentation-shows-left-4-dead-2-in-source-2-269580.phtml
Yep, full quote makes it even more apparent that they're more focused on tools this time around.
As far as I know, there hasn't really been any released yet. The Dota 2 Workshop Tools Alpha is widely accepted to be on Source 2, but it doesn't look any different from normal Dota 2.
Yeah, Visual Studio Tools for Unity is really solid -- and so is VS Community Edition, so get the fuck out of here, MonoDevelop.
Does anyone know what version of Mono 4.6 and/or 5 are even using, though?
I need them for...reasons...
According to a post on reddit, this is the new splash screen. It's better but not like whoa better. I actually didn't find that link until after watching this video, because I was really hoping the Unity logo at the beginning of that was the new splash screen. I was slightly disappointed that it apparently isn't. But still, an improvement is an improvement.
I literally have no excuses now, considering that's my main area of interest.
3ds friend code: 2981-6032-4118
No matter what though, it's a great time to be an indie game dev. About a month and I can start looking at getting my game out maybe for some people to play.
GameMaker 2.0 doesn't come out until the end of 2015, and we still have not seen a single bit of news on it.