If You Love Something, Set It Free

Epic:

Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free, and all future updates will be free!

You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It’s a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed.

[Pandamobile]

Woo! $30 marketplace credit for people that subscribed in the past.

[SuperBlur]

i fear to know what is on that marketplace.

Today's special deal , 50% off on the ability to finally complete your game

[Godmars290]

I didn't know EA had anything to do with UE4.

[DanteVFenris666]

@superBlur. I havent worked on unreal but if its anything like unity. The store will have assets that others created. Those user receive a porportion of the profits. For example their was an asset someone made that made the unity engine "tiled based", which can be very usful and worth it if you are making a 2d game. At least that was my experience with unity. Unreal could be completley different

[Dee_91]

Ha! I literally just downloaded unity like a week ago.

[pixelsword]

does anyone know if you can use blender with UE?

[freddukes]

Unreal imports anything from an FBX. If you can export from Blender as an FBX format, then it will work with Unreal. I just did a quick search for "FBX Export blender" and found a script which will do it. If you use that script it should work; no guarantees though.

[pixelsword]

Thank you.

[DevilOgreFish]

holy sht, getting it now! it's worth it.

[TheRedButterfly]

As soon as I get home, I am so uninstalling UDK3 and making the switch. I don't even care. I'll gladly relearn the lighting perimeters!

[ABizzel1]

Huge news

[Spenok]

Yeah this is pretty crazy. I can only see the possibilites with this. I hope developers go nuts with this.

[LonDonE]

Agreed this is big news!
"If u love something, set it free"
Translation = If something u sell doesnt sell, MAKE IT FREE!!! lmao

I think didnt expect so many devs to use thier own engines or free/cheaper alternatives.
last gen so many games used unreal, this gen so far not so much.
Even ea are using thier own frostbite, where as say bioware always unreal.

I think this a good thing, unreal is a good engine and i am eager to see the first AAA game pushing current gen muscle via the new unreal engine.

Problem is last gen 99% of the time i could easily spot unreal engine games, hopefully this gen it wont happen.

Either way free means allot more smaller devs will get access to it.
But i love the spin, free means the licenses were obviously were not selling, hence the change.

[christocolus]

Nice.

[Koopdogg]

Roll on some sweet indie games to follow :)

"YES"

[quenomamen]

Wish I knew how to code,

[Dee_91]

I don't know how to code either, but I'm learning in my free time.Just try it out. If you're really interested, it would be fun just to learn it. They have lots of tutorials online.

[nowitzki2004]

I tried a few times, its a bi*ch but anyone can learn it with the right guides/tutorials. I amazed myself a bunch of times. Its just not for me, I am a gamer and coding is a whole other world.

[Pandamobile]

You don't even need to program with Unreal 4. The Blueprint system is very robust and is able to handle pretty much every engine-related function with a visual scripting language.

[SephirothX21]

Blueprints are not fast enough to make a proper game. They are useful for animation state machines, game objectives and high-level AI decisions but they depend on the underlining c++ functions that they call. In general, something done with Blueprints is more than four times slower at runtime when compared to c++. As a programmer, my advice to any aspiring game programmer is to start small. Firstly, master c++! Then learn how to program a small game just using c++ and D3D or OpenGL. Start by learning what the different stages of the graphics pipeline do. Then start looking at vertices and indices and how to draw a simple triangle on screen. Write a simple vertex and pixel shader to draw a basic 3D object on screen. Its amazing how many fun little programs you can write by just moving and drawing a few cubes. There are many great tutorials online and many great books. Even if you learn c++ and become very knowledgeable of the UE4 engine API, there will always be a need to edit the code in the renderer to add some new effect or to even add or improve support for a new graphics API (D3D12). Therefore knowing the basics about 3D graphics can be a huge help. However when programming with UE4, a deep understanding and knowledge of c++ is of most importance. It is very easy to write bad c++ code and this can lead to big problems such as memory leaks, high memory usage, poor thread safety (multi-threading) and runtime exceptions (crashes) to name a few. When it comes to memory-management, Epic have thankfully created a library containing their own very efficient smart-pointers.

[imXify]

No coding required, use Blueprint.
Only 3D knowledge is required and that's not sonething everyone has.

[iNcRiMiNaTi]

What's blueprint? Is it similar to the kismet system they had on UDK? I thought kismet made things so simple when I messed around with the UDK

[imXify]

Yes. Blueprint is the new Kismet, but alot simpler!

[Timesplitter14]

Nice, though it was already ALMOST free

[Gore-Content]

Ah, I remember the tech demo they've showed. I remember the water that looked like something from 2002. We have a great future ahead of us as gamers.

[Muzikguy]

This is awesome! This may sound crazy, but I'd love to see some games get rebuilt with this now (like Blacklight Retribution). I'm also thinking of buying this for Squeenix with a note saying "here's your engine, now where's my game"?! :)

[RSKnight]

Downloading it right now. Maybe I'll learn to use it some day... or not, anyway free is free.

[kingmushroom]

this is huge

[victorMaje]

Is anyone getting this message when accessing the site?
'Thank you for visiting our site. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide the requested service at this time, due to the IP from which this request was originated.'

[Muzikguy]

Think you may be being watched! O_o

[CuddlyREDRUM]

Bravo, Epic.

[MilkMan]

More like good business sense. Put it for free, and folks will use it. Better than becoming obsolete. Pretty clever.

[FreakyFox]

Normally they would showcase the engine by selling us a game (Unreal Tournament), but instead this time they had a years worth of subscriptions and then make it free and continue to make money from store assets.

Im glad its free again to use.

Talking about Unreal Tournament, you guys should check the progression of the new totally free Unreal Tournament built with Unreal Engine 4, totally driven by devs and the community, assets and weapons made buy the community are making it into the game, its looking really good.

http://www.unrealtournament...

[lemoncake]

The success of unity has changed so much in the world of game engines, good to see unreal 4 going this route.