Epic Shows Off Unreal Engine 4's Tricks in New YouTube Video

[BlameTheWizards]

Epic Shows Off Unreal Engine 4's Tricks in New YouTube Video

Epic shows off some of the tools now available to the public through Unreal Engine 4.


If you're curious about some of the tools you can use in Unreal Engine 4 <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/133059-Epic-Games-Makes-Unreal-Engine-4-Publicly-Available-for-19-Per-Month> now that its publicly available, Epic Games has just released a video showing off some of the engines features.

Zak Parrish, senior technical writer for Epic Games, goes through the basics of placing objects, setting up lights, and tweaking the properties of different textures. He even uses the engine to have his character take off in a UFO and smash the Unreal logo to pieces. Another segments, at around the 6:00 mark, shows how in-game materials, like wood, ice and metal, react differently to a player hitting them with fire and water.

Parrish ends the video by showcasing a short movie made by some of Epic's artists in the Unreal Engine. The clip shows a couple of sci-fi style soldiers in what looks like an abandoned subway tunnel duking it out, complete with intricate martial arts moves and chunks of scenery being broken off during the fight.

The whole video's worth a watch if you're interested in game design or are looking to dabble in the Unreal Engine. The subscription to use the engine is $19 a month.

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[Pilkingtube]

This thing looks like Garry's Mod v2.0!

 

[Hiramas]

Its always good if the scientists make the artists work as easy as possible.
Although someone (Jim? Yathzee?Bob?) made the argument once, that the limitations
of the past made the artists more creative in solving their problems.
So maybe this spawns a new Generation of high-quality indy games or we get 10 call of dutys a year.
We'll see.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Dang. Can't wait to see how developers will take advantage of this engine in the future.

 

[Trishbot]

I need to relearn a lot of Unreal. It's been ages since I made a level, and that was way back with Unreal 3.0...

 

[Alpha Maeko]

$19 a month is nothing if you're really interested in game creation and have a little room in your monthly budget.

Still... I have allot of learning to do before I'd tackle any projects with it.

 

[SKBPinkie]

I'm really excited to see how developers use this. It looks absolutely amazing.

Seems pretty easy to use as well. Reminds me a bit of LabVIEW, especially the bit with the nodes.

Does anyone know if UE4 is fully compatible with the current gen systems?

 

[Saulkar]

I wonder how difficult it would be to setup vehicles.


Furthermore, like the original UE3, can you use it for free if you intend to use it merely for educational or personal pursuits rather than anything commercial?

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Cancel your MMO subs, brothers. This is the real deal, provided that your PC can handle it.

 

[Li Mu]

wow...just...wow. awesome stuff.

 

[james.sponge]

Wow that was impressive. Also look at that butterfly AI, with these powerful tools infinity ward can finally improve their fish AI.

 

[Racecarlock]

And this is the final nail in the AAA industry's coffin. Now that anyone who has 20 dollars a month can make a game (I'm assuming most people), this means that indie developers will have access to all the fancy shaders and physics and elements they need to make a big budget looking game. They can market it on kickstarter as well, meaning publishers have just lost the last thing they had over new developers. The big and powerful tools.

Who is going to want to use frostbite when it's expensive and EA takes most of the money for publishing? These guys only want a 5% cut. And it has physics in there, already in place. It's convenient, easy to use. Who is going to be able to compete with that?

Will there be bad games made on it? Sure. Will there be some jerks? Aren't there always? But in the end, we are also going to see many fantastic games come out of this. All without AAA publishers sticking their noses in every aspect of development.

This is the future.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

And this is the final nail in the AAA industry's coffin. Now that anyone who has 20 dollars a month can make a game (I'm assuming most people), this means that indie developers will have access to all the fancy shaders and physics and elements they need to make a big budget looking game. They can market it on kickstarter as well, meaning publishers have just lost the last thing they had over new developers. The big and powerful tools.

Who is going to want to use frostbite when it's expensive and EA takes most of the money for publishing? These guys only want a 5% cut. And it has physics in there, already in place. It's convenient, easy to use. Who is going to be able to compete with that?

Will there be bad games made on it? Sure. Will there be some jerks? Aren't there always? But in the end, we are also going to see many fantastic games come out of this. All without AAA publishers sticking their noses in every aspect of development.

This is the future.

*sigh*

No. Until an engine is made that can cut out the work of, at the very least, a small dev team of 20 people, there will always be AAA games.

And even if there was, it still wouldn't matter actually. If one guy can do the work of 20 people with this engine, imagine what 100 people could do with it. And you can bet that the AAA industry will take advantage of that, just as they will take advantage of this engine.

 

[Racecarlock]

And this is the final nail in the AAA industry's coffin. Now that anyone who has 20 dollars a month can make a game (I'm assuming most people), this means that indie developers will have access to all the fancy shaders and physics and elements they need to make a big budget looking game. They can market it on kickstarter as well, meaning publishers have just lost the last thing they had over new developers. The big and powerful tools.

Who is going to want to use frostbite when it's expensive and EA takes most of the money for publishing? These guys only want a 5% cut. And it has physics in there, already in place. It's convenient, easy to use. Who is going to be able to compete with that?

Will there be bad games made on it? Sure. Will there be some jerks? Aren't there always? But in the end, we are also going to see many fantastic games come out of this. All without AAA publishers sticking their noses in every aspect of development.

This is the future.

*sigh*

No. Until an engine is made that can cut out the work of, at the very least, a small dev team of 20 people, there will always be AAA games.

And even if there was, it still wouldn't matter actually. If one guy can do the work of 20 people with this engine, imagine what 100 people could do with it. And you can bet that the AAA industry will take advantage of that, just as they will take advantage of this engine.

Oh for god's sake, let me have hope in something from this generation, please.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Oh for god's sake, let me have hope in something from this generation, please.

Actually I meant that in a mostly positive light. As the late and great Ken Levine once said, these amazing games you see from the AAA industry every now and then are expensive to make. The big publishers, for better and worse, are there to provide that funding. Besides, what's wrong with having both indie and AAA games?

 

[Ferisar]

Oh for god's sake, let me have hope in something from this generation, please.

Actually I meant that in a mostly positive light. As the late and great Ken Levine once said, these amazing games you see from the AAA industry every now and then are expensive to make. The big publishers, for better and worse, are there to provide that funding. Besides, what's wrong with having both indie and AAA games?

Because people who see indie games don't realize that whilst they possess plenty of depth and weight behind them, they simply don't substitute for actual blockbuster releases.
I -don't- want games to become a niche sphere for peddling shite all over steam with small indie platformer games that feature a deep and meaningful narrative. I want bombastic and epic takes. I want immersion beyond text telling me I'm immersed; I have bloody books. Until indie developers can actually afford to be CD Project, I couldn't bring myself to give a shit, to be honest. Of course they have great games. AAA has great games too, they just can't piss them out at the same rate. For some damned reason, some people think that it's the saving grace and the "definition" of greatness that suddenly spawns from a lot of dedicated small studios.

The reality is, indies now haven't done anything that we haven't seen before. It's the same games with more freedom to pursue a direction they originally wanted to take. ***** at the publishers to remove the stranglehold on big devs rather than demand the industry suffers the equivalent of black flipping plague. Of course the triple-A produces a ton of trite samey bullshit: everyone produces a ton of trite samey bullshit. Indie devs do it too. Small devs do it too. Look at steam right now and tell me how great is it to be swimming in pre-orders of early access games and stuff that money doesn't want to look at, much less be paid for.

Of course indies are fine, and people should support their developers, but stop wishing everything else away just 'cause you've decided that the best defense against poop is to submerge yourself firmly between a cheek and a half.

I'm never watching podcasts again after this, now I'm just mad and using words I never use. This is ridiculous.

Sorry for ranting, I probably don't believe half the things I said, but it felt good.

EDIT/OT:
Oh yeah, also that video was fun to watch, I saw it earlier in the week but for some reason didn't have the same gusto for posting. If I had -any- money I'd probably like to dick around on it somewhat, but it's not a priority.

 

[BarkBarker]

Now all I need is the spare cash for multiple monitors and a beast computer that can run everything at once with a decent framerate, as well as the room to.....oh.......shit, I don't have the space for such a monster set-up.

 

[Racecarlock]

Oh for god's sake, let me have hope in something from this generation, please.

Actually I meant that in a mostly positive light. As the late and great Ken Levine once said, these amazing games you see from the AAA industry every now and then are expensive to make. The big publishers, for better and worse, are there to provide that funding. Besides, what's wrong with having both indie and AAA games?

Nothing's wrong with that, technically, but look at the absolute morons in charge of the industry. The people who invented always online DRM and fitted simcity and diablo 3 with it. The ones who made a new dungeon keeper but on mobile platforms and with tons of microtransactions. The ones that whine about used games while gouging the user with DLC for things that used to come with the game, like cheats.

They LOVE jumping right in to the creative process and fuck it up with charts and demographic things and the designers have to comply or get fired. This is why dead space 3 was more action and less horror. This is why Resident Evil 6 turned out how it did. This is why so many game series are being dug up and given gritty reboots for no good reason.

Indie devs can be dicks, too, but at least they get to make the game they want to make. This is why unreal engine 4 looks exciting, because maybe some good indie devs can afford that 20 dollar subscription and we could get some fantastic games free of AAA's chart following, microtransaction filled, bland crap.

 

[Elijah Newton]

Its not that $20/month is unreasonable, but I wish they'd kept packaging this with their unreal games. Anyone here ever get terrain generation to work properly with the version that shipped with Unreal 3? I'd loved level editing with UnrealEd 1 (I think? The one which shipped with UT), but couldn't for the life of me make any terrain with that version. Bummed me out something awful as that was a big reason I'd wanted to get it.