Unreal Engine Now free for non-commercial use!

[eliasfrost]

This is really great news. I read about it this morning, thought I'd share it with you guys!

http://udk.com/

[Sexbad]

I'm waiting for the Doom 3 engine to go open source. I was never a real fan of the Unreal engine, but it's still a nice thing to have.

[eliasfrost]

I could use the UE3 engine, but because of its lack of platforms support, I'm into Unity3D instead.

Why do you want the IDTech 4 engine? Why not use any other engine? Why are you not a fan of Unreal Engine, a specific reason? I mean, the technology is fenomenal and the tools are said to be top notch compared to other engines out there.

[Sexbad]

I have no major gripes with it or anything, but quite a few of the games that use it are, pretty much, shit. This produces a bias at first. The main difference I really actually care about is the graphics, because good gameplay can basically be mimicked by any engine.

Any modern engine with at least half a ball can boast all these fancy graphical techniques such as specular and realistic shadows and all that. However, with every Unreal game I've seen, these neat features are left out. This is most likely due to optimization for consoles and such, but also runs more slowly on my computer than, say, Wolfenstein, which uses specular and fancy shadows. I'll admit the depth of field sucks so I'll have to give credit to UE3 if that makes you happier (but the best DoF award goes to STALKER: Clear Sky).

I'd also like to speculate that the Doom 3 engine has received much more graphical mods, which, as far as the evidence I've seen, is not possible in the UE3. A prime example of this is shown here. http://doom3.filefront.com/file/DentonMo...lpha;94630 This is not fully optimized to work on very many video cards, but it's a mod, not a game.

I may be completely wrong and I've just never seen a graphics modding community for a UE3 game, but I need proof om nom nom.

There are areas in each engine that excel differently. Each to his own. Developing on one or the other engine would probably just boil down to which engine you're better at using.

[eliasfrost]

I have no major gripes with it or anything, but quite a few of the games that use it are, pretty much, shit. This produces a bias at first. The main difference I really actually care about is the graphics, because good gameplay can basically be mimicked by any engine.

Because the games made with the engine is bad, or shit, as you refer to it, the engine itself is not a bad one, in fact, the unreal script is pretty easy to get the hang from what I've heard from others, also from looking at some code examples, it doesn't look like much work to get a basic script working. ^^

Any modern engine with at least half a ball can boast all these fancy graphical techniques such as specular and realistic shadows and all that. However, with every Unreal game I've seen, these neat features are left out. This is most likely due to optimization for consoles and such, but also runs more slowly on my computer than, say, Wolfenstein, which uses specular and fancy shadows. I'll admit the depth of field sucks so I'll have to give credit to UE3 if that makes you happier (but the best DoF award goes to STALKER: Clear Sky).

Than again, it's not the engine itself that is bad, it's the user of the engine. If the code is badly optimized or the levels are poorly layered out with a lot of unneccesary polys, the game will simply lag and run slow. Also keep in mind that most of the other engines doesn't have those neat graphical features and render techniques, and to squeeze these in with the, actually very good performance, considering everything that needs to be rendered is a very tough job. I give the graphics coders a lot of credits for that. After seeing lots of engines with much worse performance than UE3, also with less graphical detail. I've given the UE3 coders my full respect.

I'll admit the depth of field sucks so I'll have to give credit to UE3 if that makes you happier (but the best DoF award goes to STALKER: Clear Sky).

Also, this is not about to make me happy, I asked you a simple question, if you got wind up by that, well, that's your problem.

I'd also like to speculate that the Doom 3 engine has received much more graphical mods, which, as far as the evidence I've seen, is not possible in the UE3. A prime example of this is shown here. http://doom3.filefront.com/file/DentonMo...lpha;94630 This is not fully optimized to work on very many video cards, but it's a mod, not a game.

Thay may be true, but IDTech 4 has been out longer than UE3, which I think is the reason. Plus, as far as I know, the Source for UE3 is not very easy to get.

I may be completely wrong and I've just never seen a graphics modding community for a UE3 game, but I need proof om nom nom.

That's because the engine itself doesn't have a modding community, but some of the games does, including UT3.

There are areas in each engine that excel differently. Each to his own. Developing on one or the other engine would probably just boil down to which engine you're better at using.

That's where we come back to what I said earlier. If you are good at optimizing the code for the game using the engine, it will of course run faster. You kinda contradict your previous statement here, because if the UE3 engine is optimized right, it ain't more shitty than other engine.

[Sexbad]

Stop putting words into my mouth.

I never said the UE3 was shitty.

[eliasfrost]

Oh, I thought we were talking about the engine here. When you said: "I have no major gripes with it or anything, but quite a few of the games that use it are, pretty much, shit.", I thought you meant that the engine is making the games shitty. If that was not the case, why share your thoughts about the games if it's irrelevant to the topic in question?

Take a chill pill man, I am not trying to wind you up or anything. :

[Sexbad]

I know you're a cool person.

Gears of War and Mass Effect just leave a bias on me.

[spukrian]

Mass Effect uses the Unreal engine?! You learn something new every day...

Personally, if I would make 3D games, I´d use something easy like the old Doom Engine. :