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Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free!


MajorLunaC

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

--Source: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

I'm hoping at least some of the resources are portable to UE4 from RenX's UE3, but I'm guessing compatibility and porting would be an issue, and maybe not worth it considering development up to this point. What's the verdict?

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I think this was discussed earlier on the forums. I don't know about assets,(models and such) but porting the game (if I recall correctly) would require devs to code it again since unreal 4 doesn't support the unreal 3's scripting language.

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Aye, it isn't cut and dry. I know for Super Monday Night Combat, a intern named LennardF1989 was able to port on his own the assets to make characters and a map. He showed it off in photoshop. Problems lie in post processing, some things end up looking glossy for instance, and the fact I believe he had to make the converter for the assets himself out of scripting, and the fact that it is just the assets and not the actual game such as weapons armor death conditions purchases and the such.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/smnc ... ost-998099

The language isn't the same, so it would likely need recoded. The benefit for the game itself would be marginal if existant at all, it might make it less friendly, who knows. The benefit for coding or expansions or crossovers is there though, more people can work with the UE4 code so more things can branch.

Anyway, I like to feel like I am useful, so you are welcome for porting in an example of likely the closest thing to a similar project looking at the same sort of situation. I like to think I do well in following comprehensive game development. Hopefully this was in fact useful for anyone reading, including Totem.

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  • Totem Arts Staff

You can port assets easier than code but all textures would have to be recalibrated to fit the PBR lighting model UE 4 has. That by itself is a lot of work already. Not to mention get the same game running.

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  • Totem Arts Staff

The presence of Blueprint would ease the whole scripting, but yeah, it's going to take quite a lot of time.

But if in the future one is going to port Ren-X to UE4, things that weren't possible would become possible.

Example : Day-Night cycle, Building Construction

Also, with how everything's open, you might be able to cook the game AND support custom contents

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Uncooked seems to work fine and i dont notice longer loading times. So there is no reason to care if its cooked or not. It doesent matter unless you want your game to be playable from a slow DVD/Blueray, wich seems to be the only use case where cooking could make a difference and the only thing cooking was invented for.

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  • Totem Arts Staff
Example : Building Construction

Is possible in udk, such as Dungeon Defender and some sandbox game and certain mods and stuff. Didn't really old RenX Unreal3 mod try construction and simply opt out?

Really now? I thought the game using UE3 full-license. I have no idea. But I just feel like it'll be easier in UE4

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Example : Building Construction

Is possible in udk, such as Dungeon Defender and some sandbox game and certain mods and stuff. Didn't really old RenX Unreal3 mod try construction and simply opt out?

Really now? I thought the game using UE3 full-license. I have no idea. But I just feel like it'll be easier in UE4

I could be wrong, and both those games technically do. But. Actually. No. I know for a fact some games for UDK have build lock points. Technically, they are interactable objects that can change, but it is close enough to building, and they also destroy.

Either way, I am pretty sure they intentionally opted out of it because of game design, like doing without the spawn locations there or the purchase terminals, and that messing with the gameplay.

However, the scrapped assets for C&C Renegade 2 by the official Westwood Studios team before they got cancelled so EA could funnel all playerbase into Battlefield 1942 like the asshats they are when they aren't even similar games in the sense chinese checkers isn't chess, DO include destructable buildings like a ref that falls apart on destruction. So, that is one thing that supports the destructable building idea, is that it was an official canonical idea from the actual developers to add to C&C Ren2.

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  • Totem Arts Staff

Well, I'm not big with RTS mode too.

As for spawn points, pretty sure you can dynamically spawn PlayerSpawn points dynamically. That's what's big about UE4's NavPoint presentation in the trailer, dynamic support. (haven't tried it myself, but pretty sure it's possible)

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While Renegade-X would look much better in UE4, the problem will be the performance and the compatibility of OSs since UE4 does not work on Windows XP and possibly Vista. The devs who worked so hard really do not wish to start re-doing everything again for UE4 because that required more further work.

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With UE4 out, thought, I have the feeling that support for UDK will drop even lower than it has been since last year, leaving the toolchain in a buggy mess.

The devs who worked so hard really do not wish to start re-doing everything again for UE4 because that required more further work.

I've heard of companies delegating a coder or two to work on porting the codebase to UE4, while the rest of the team works on the non-UE branch.

I work as a programmer in UE4 in my full-time job and so far the "biggest problem" that I've experienced is migrating the codebase every time a new major version of the engine comes up (while the codebase itself is still being worked on) and is something that they might experience if they start porting the code just now. In that light, the "make everything in Blueprint and then port it over to C++" workflow, which has become somewhat popular in the UE4 community, could reduce the scale of that issue.

There are options, but one thing is for sure - UE4 is quite powerful and I do hope they decide to switch. To add to the existing feature list, the backlog has loads of awesome features, which will be coming soon, if they ever decide to stop working on it - the source will be there for people to maintain and with it going free - bugfixes should increase dramatically.

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We wont switch. Deal with it. We have wasted enough of our lifes on this. Porting it over would pretty much need to be a new project by new people. With B4 we will release all the content uncooked and we allow everyone to do new projects based on it aslong as those are non profit projects aswell.

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We wont switch. Deal with it. We have wasted enough of our lifes on this. Porting it over would pretty much need to be a new project by new people. With B4 we will release all the content uncooked and we allow everyone to do new projects based on it aslong as those are non profit projects aswell.

I simply think the gain from porting it, is less than people actually think it is, as far as functionality and benefits, compared to leaving it right now, and considering it would in fact be more than a little difficult to port.

Being as difficult to port as it will be, to get the very few benefits, really is too much for such a small team to do in their free time. Remember, it took years to make it a functional unreal mod, then years to make it a standalone udk game, at this point, trust me, you don't actually want what you think you want, you don't really want them to spend 2 more years just to make the game playable again on Unreal4, compared to them focusing on the current very functional game we all enjoy playing AKA RenX via UDK.

There will be plenty to enjoy from UDK for the next 4 years as far as functionality and support. There is no way UDK will be "difficult to use, work with, or develop with" compared to UE4 over the next 4 years. People will still be making models, assets, maps, and code for UDK even over the next 4 years. It isn't like UDK will vanish overnight in a month.

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