Unreal Engine - For "Free"

[Malintent]

For those of you that have dabbled (or more) in software development for video games, I thought I would pass on to you something I recently discovered (old news, but new to me)... Epic Games owns the Unreal Engine... possibly the best known and widely used development environment.. used in cinema for AAA professional CGI, and the video game industry for AAA titles like Doom (the new one).
This tool was only available to serious game and movie producers, due to prohibitive cost and complexity.
Well, things have come a long way... Today (like right now - go get it), the Unreal Engine is entirely free for personal use*... just create an account at unrealengine.com, install their portal, and from there install the engine. This development environment is amazing. Zero code writing needed (but you totally can). It uses a visual scripting language that is basically writing C++ code in the background while you are dragging and dropping things like you are drafting a viso flow chart. You "wire" objects together to create logic, control, and flow. As for creating a level (a scene), drag and drop... so easy.

It is so worth a few minutes to search youtube for "UE4 beginner tutorial", or the like... take a look at how easy and amazing this is...

* so how do they make money now? Only when you do! They moved to a Royalty-based system. Basically, if you end up selling something you made with Unreal Engine, they get 5% of revenue. If you sell that game on Steam for $5 (lets just say), Then steam gets 7%, and Epic Games gets 5%... so you make $4.40 per sale, in that example.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Sounds like the economic model of the Unity engine also.

 

[Terrell]

Can games with the Unreal engine be modified in the same manner & degree as games on the Creation engine? If so, and it's superior to the Creation engine, it would be nice to see Bethesda use it in Elder Scrolls & Fallout games (and whatever their other 2 projects are that come before Elder Scrolls 6).

 

[Malintent]

Can games with the Unreal engine be modified in the same manner & degree as games on the Creation engine? If so, and it's superior to the Creation engine, it would be nice to see Bethesda use it in Elder Scrolls & Fallout games (and whatever their other 2 projects are that come before Elder Scrolls 6).

yes. Unreal Engine has Steam integration... for multiplayer, workshop, patches, and mods...

 

[Terrell]

Can games with the Unreal engine be modified in the same manner & degree as games on the Creation engine? If so, and it's superior to the Creation engine, it would be nice to see Bethesda use it in Elder Scrolls & Fallout games (and whatever their other 2 projects are that come before Elder Scrolls 6).

yes. Unreal Engine has Steam integration... for multiplayer, workshop, patches, and mods...

Can we use 3rd party mods as well such as Nexus, or is it just Steam?

 

[Malintent]

yes. Unreal Engine has Steam integration... for multiplayer, workshop, patches, and mods...

Can we use 3rd party mods as well such as Nexus, or is it just Steam?

Whatever you decide to support with your project... Steam integration has APIs and some real slick patch delivery and multiplayer networking tools.. I'm not familiar with Nexus (or any professional software delivery infrastructure, for that matter), but Unreal Engine is essentially C++ programming with an amazing IDE that you don't need to type a single word of code... unless you want / are able to.

I did have to edit one engine component in C... I had to comment out one line that caused my projectile class to get destroyed upon impact with a physics enabled body... but I was creating ballistic penetration rules of my own.. I wanted the "bounce" event to trigger a calculation of the material it encountered, project a path (modified by density and other physical properties), and determine an exit trajectory (or calculate the depth the projectile embedded)... all of that was through Blueprint - the visual language, except that one bit where I had to stop the engine from destroying the projectile before firing off the "bounce" event.

Youtube has a 5 part tutorial on projectile physics that I followed along with and learned a whole lot from..