Category: Game Development

Epic games just made a trio of announcements today that are going to be absolute game changers for the game development industry.

Unreal Engine Free To Use Up To $1M Gross Revenue

This one is huge!  Retroactive to January 1st, 2020, Unreal Engine has been changes so developers only pay royalties after their first MILLION dollars in revenue!

Starting today, you can download and use Unreal Engine to build games for free as you always have, except now royalties are waived on your first $1 million in gross revenue. The new Unreal Engine license terms, which are retroactive to January 1, 2020, give game developers an unprecedented advantage over other engine license models. For more information, visit the FAQ.

Wow!

Unreal Engine 5 First Look

Epic also gave us a first look at Unreal Engine 5, showing off the two major new features, Nanite and Lumen.

Nanite is describe as:

Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.

While Lumen is:

Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.

Preview releases of UE 5 should arrive early 2021 with a final release later in the year.  You can see UE5 in action in this video.  Additionally UE 4.25 was just released as you can see here.

Epic Online Services Launched

First announced in GDC 2019, Epic Online Services are finally available.  This is a collection of free online tools that are battle tested using Fortnite.

Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts: we built these services for Fortnite, we launched them across seven major platforms – PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Now we’re opening up Epic Online Services to all developers FOR FREE in a simple multiplatform SDK!

Learn more about all of these announcements in the video below.

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GameDev News Engine Unreal

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Rider is a .NET IDE by JetBrains, currently heavily focused on Unity game developers.  Recently JetBrains launched a early preview of Rider For Unreal Engine.  Wait a minute you might say… isn’t Rider for C#, while CLion is their C++ IDE, and isn’t C++ the primary language for Unreal Engine developers.  Why yes, you are correct astute reader.  JetBrains however are focusing Rider toward game developers, which includes C++ and to a lesser degree Blueprint support, in addition to C#/.NET support that already exists in rider.

The top 5 reasons to choose Rider according to JetBrains:

1.

A Fast IDE with native C++ support

Rider is powered by ReSharper C++, which offers native and cutting-edge support for modern C++. Users are helped daily by its 250+ code inspections, 50+ context actions, solution-wide refactoring, and code generation abilities.

This is all combined with the IntelliJ Platform’s solid IDE features, such as super-fast navigation, integrated version control, and extensive plugin support. Rider provides this rich feature set without compromising speed or responsiveness.

2.

Knowledgeable about Blueprints

Rider for UE4 doesn’t just work with your C++ code. It also reads the Blueprints (BP) from your project and the Unreal Editor, along with plugins from both. This allows Rider to show the usages in BP files, as well as the values of the overridden properties. When navigating to BP objects, Rider opens them in the Unreal Editor.

3.

Assists with the reflection mechanism

UE4 reflection macros are more than just simple text! To speed up the process of game development, Rider provides code completion for reflection specifiers and shows the documentation in the Quick Documentation popup.

4.

Takes care of the UE4 code style

Rider accommodates UE4 naming conventions across all its actions, which helps keep your code easy to read. Inconsistent UE4 naming inspections detect names that don’t follow the rules and suggest a quick fix.

5.

Profound code analysis & RPC support

Rider ensures that your UE4 code is accurate with the help of specialized UE4 inspections for missing or incorrectly set UE4 reflection macros. Similarly, code navigation and generation actions are set up to deal with UE4 Remote Procedure Calls correctly.

If you want to check out Rider for Unreal Engine, the signup is available here.  You can learn more about Rider for Unreal Engine and see it in action in the video below.

GameDev News Tools Unreal Unity

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There is a new Humble Bundle of interest to game developers, this one is a collection of audio tracks and music loops.  Called the Big Music for Games, Film and Content Creators bundle, it is a collection of zip files containing WAV soundtracks for use in your game or film project.  As with all Humble Bundles this one is organized into tiers:

1$ Tier

• Mystical Game Music Pack
• Music Loops Mini Set
• Scary & Mystical Music Pack

15$ Tier

• Medieval & Adventure Game Music Loops
• Cosmos Music Pack
• Lyric Voices Choir Music Pack
• Heavy Riffs Full Bundle
• Big Casual & Arcade Game Music Bundle

25$ Tier

• Big Action Music Bundle 1 (Action, Rock, Energy)
• Big Action Music Bundle 2 (Powerful, Dynamic, Energetic)
• Big Orchestra Music Collection
• Universal Music Collection
• Fantasy Adventure Game Music Pack
• Epic Battle Trailers Music Pack
• Space Adventure Music Pack

The content of this bundle are under this license which seems pretty straight forward and fair.  As with all Humble Bundles, you decide how your money is allocated, including if you wish (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS if purchased using this link.  You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.

GameDev News Sale

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Unreal Engine 4.25 was just released today, with tons of improvements, new features and bug fixes.  The biggest theme of the 4.25 release was production ready with several in development systems now considered ready to use in a production environment.

Major features of the 4.25 release include:

• Niagara VFX system improved and production ready
• Unreal Audio Engine improved and production ready
• Real Time Raytracing Support production ready
• Added support for Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 development
• Hololens 2 support now production ready
• Chaos Physics Engine improved and being used in Fortnite
• New Thin Transparency shading model and a new Anisotropy material input property
• LiDAR data support
• much, much more

A summary of new features in Unreal Engine 4.25 is available here while detailed release notes are available here.  You can learn more about Unreal Engine 4.25 in the video below.

GameDev News Unreal

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