Unreal Engine 4 Message Board

Windows Phone and Windows RT, the Microsoft operating systems for the company's smartphones and tablets respectively, could be getting a little more ... epic in the future. Epic Games co-founder and CEO Tim Sweeney told forum-goers that the company is working on implementing its Unreal Engine 4 on mobile Microsoft platforms.

"We have been doing some work in this direction (implementing various levels of WinRT API support) and we want to have Windows Phone support eventually, but we're a very long way from having a ship-quality implementation," Sweeney wrote on the Epic forums. "Right now our mobile efforts are really focused on iOS and Android based on their huge market sizes. We have a lot of work to do on these platforms before expanding to other mobile platforms such as WP."

In other words, while we might see Unreal Engine 4 support on Windows Phone and Windows RT in the future, for now it's still more likely to hear or read "coming soon to iOS and Android" than it is "coming soon to Windows Phone." [Image: Epic Games]

Our last look at sci-fi survival horror epic Caffeine was rendered in the third incarnation of the Unreal Engine, but now developer Dylan Browne has kicked off an Indiegogo fundraising effort for the game and unveiled a new Unreal Engine 4 trailer to whet players' appetites. [Image: Dylan Browne]

Who’d have thought game engines could be so competitive? We need Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura commenting on all this news from GDC. Following on from yesterday’s announcement that Epic will be releasing Unreal 4 on subscription for $19 per month plus a 5% share of the gross profits, Crytek has responded by announcing that their CryEngine will also be available on subscription, for the cryminally low price of $9.90 per month and no cuts from the profits. Is this the engine equivalent of Hulking up?

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Epic has announced today that Unreal Engine 4 is to dramatically change its licensing model. From now on anyone can subscribe to Unreal Engine 4 for $19 a month, and then release those games commercially for a 5% gross revenue share with the developer. This means that indies no longer need to stick with the Unreal Development Kit, but get the entire engine at what appears an affordable price. And on top of that, they’re releasing the source code to Github. All from 9.30 PT today.

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And to think, before Unity caught on, the words "browser game" used to be cause for laughter.Read more...

Mozilla offered up a new trailer this week that shows Unreal Engine 4 tech demos running in Firefox. The games shown are seemingly running without the use of plugins in the popular browser. The software company added Unreal Engine 3 support to the browser last June.

Nvidia and Epic Games have been friends for a while, so it's only natural the latest mobile processor from Nvidia, the Tegra K1, officially supports Epic Games' latest engine, the Unreal Engine 4. We saw our first hint at this union last summer, when Nvidia unveiled Project Logan - a mobile GPU built on the same Kepler technology powering Nvidia's latest PC graphics cards.

"We can take absolutely anything that runs on PC or on a console and run it on Tegra," says Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, in the Nvidia announcement post. "The differences between the platforms is really blurred." Nvidia says Tegra K1 is the first mobile processor capable of pumping out graphics on par with Xbox One and PS4, and even offers "faster performance" than the Xbox 360 and PS3.

In the sizzle reel above, Sweeney says all of Epic's tech demos - "Samaritan," "Infiltrator" and "Elemental" - came through collaboration with Nvidia. "I didn't think we'd be at this level on mobile for another three or four years," Sweeney said.

The Tegra K1 is Nvidia's newest super chip. The mobiel processor packs a whopping 192 CUDA cores—a Nvidia first. Here you can see it in action with Epic's Unreal Engine 4.Read more...

Flix Interactive recently launched its Kickstarter project for an Unreal Engine 4-powered, first-person adventure game called Eden Star. The developer is seeking £620,000 ($1,003,284) by November 29 to fund the project.

Billed as a "sandbox survival-creation game," Eden Star has players gather resources from the hostile world of Pharus 7 to bring back to a desolate Earth, guarding their "Eden Kit" power source from imposing alien forces. In the project description, Flix Interactive put an emphasis on the game's physics-driven combat and "free-running movement system." The developer also opened a Steam Greenlight page to get the PC game on Valve's distribution service.

Our previous look at the Unreal Engine 4 in action was the hyper-dramatic Infiltrator demo. It was sci-fi, it was 50 bajillion shades of grey, it was quite a spectacular piece of machinima that I totally want to play. This time around, there’s almost no action or budget: just a couple of members of the development team talking about the engine’s material layering capabilities. Where before the soundtrack was dramatic and swelling, here it’s a dude saying things like: “I can see that adds a lot of flexibility to the art pipeline.” Games!(more…)

Here's the Unreal Engine 4 "Infiltrator" video, which was shown off as a demo this week at GDC, displaying the power of Epic's latest tech. The company jumped through different filters to show the demo was being rendered in real-time. Yes, it will run so many major titles for next-gen systems. Now, enjoy.

#daylight This is the first footage from Zombie Studios' latest, a survival horrory-looking game called Daylight. There's not yet much to know about it, besides that it's powered by Unreal Engine 4 and its world is entirely randomly generated. More »

We don't know if you guys are aware of this or not, but the human body is a disgusting thing. Even the really top notch, showroom-quality human bodies are essentially sacks of greasy tubes and cartilage. Here to remind us of that fact in stunning detail is Project Awakened's Unreal Engine 4 tech demo, which shows just how elaborate the game's character creation system could be.

Now, we doubt Project Awakened will allow players to select from a multitude of different organs or anything, but the super powers shown off are quite impressive looking, if a bit disturbing at times -- we're looking at you, weird split-open-hand-bone-thing.

Of course, Phosphor Games will only be able to turn this flashy demo into something tangible if its ongoing Kickstarter proves successful, but with only four days left on the clock, and around $300,000 in funding still needing to be raised, that looks increasingly unlikely.

[Thanks, Ryan!]

#projectawakened Project Awakened is supposed to be a big open-world action game that lets you play as any super-hero you could dream up. More »

Epic's Unreal Engine 4 was shown off during Sony's PlayStation 2013 event today, where the PlayStation 4 was formally announced. Above you can see demo footage of the "Elemental" demo, while below you can comb through a gallery of some still.

Epic's Seattle arm has been toiling away on Unreal Engine 4 since the studio's formation late last year. In October, Square Enix confirmed it was the first company to publicly license Unreal Engine 4.

#sony At the PS4 event in New York, Sony showed off the Unreal Engine 4 running on the PS4, as well as the new Havok physics engine. Real time, millions of particles, and state of the art hardware. Have a look. More »

#wiiu The Wii U is significantly more powerful than the Wii or the GameCube before it, but Nintendo's next console doesn't appear to radically surpass the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, according to conversations we've had with people familiar with the Wii U and the forthcoming consoles from Sony and Microsoft. More »

Having announcing Fortnite as Epic Games' first Unreal Engine 4 game, "exclusively for the PC," Epic Games design director Cliff Bleszinski took to Twitter this afternoon to make some breathing room. "We wouldn't rule out the possibility of other platforms later," he wrote. That is, while Fortnite will be "primary and first" on PC, it may not be exclusive to the platform forever.

Given that Fortnite is built using UE4, it stands to reason that those "other platforms" won't be of the current generation (none of Microsoft's, Sony's, or Nintendo's current hardware can run UE4-based games). What might they be, then? We'll have to wait until the next console generation to find out, it sounds like.

Fortnite is Epic's first Unreal Engine 4 game and it'll ship "exclusively for the PC," Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinksi said today during a San Diego Comic-Con 2012 panel. "We're here and we're announcing that this is a PC-designed game, it's shipping exclusively for the PC," he told a crowd of attendees.

"Next-gen's here. It's been here. It's a high-end PC," Bleszinski said. He added that Fortnite didn't "make sense" for Unreal Engine 3, and cheered PCs as in Epic's "heritage."

Fortnite was suspected of being a PC exclusive earlier this year when it popped up on a LinkedIn listing for PC - suspiciously, the listing was quickly changed after we brought it to the attention of Epic Games. We'll have more from Epic's SDCC panel as soon as we can (it's still going on!).

#fortnite Epic Games' Fortnite will be the first game from the Gears of War studio made on the company's Unreal Engine 4. So said Epic people at the Fortnite panel at San Diego Comic-Con. More »

If you were curious why a zillion games run on Unreal these days, this might help fill you in.

How many times do you think we'll see that swirly particle effect in the next five years?

#videogamegraphics Did you see today's hot new Unreal Engine 4 graphics demo? And read about how it will change the games we play on the next Xbox and PlayStation, perhaps? More »

#epic Epic tonight gave the world its first look at Unreal Engine 4, the skeleton that - if this generation of hardware is anything to go by - a lot of your next-gen games are going to be built around. More »

#videogamegraphics A couple of months ago a game developer who works on a very well-known video game walked out of a secret demonstration of Epic Games' new Unreal Engine 4 and told me it was the most impressive thing he'd ever seen in his gaming career. More »

#unrealengine4 You gotta stop and smell the roses. In video games, that means taking a break and noticing walls, dirt, doors, and vegetation—you know, the inconsequential things. It's in these things that you can see how realistic a game's graphics are. More »

Epic's Unreal Engine 4 strides into public view with a spectacular real-time demo, dubbed "Elemental" (seen above). The short film depicts an ancient knight creaking to supernatural life while a decrepit castle comes apart around him, letting in floods of light and gusts of snow. It's a concise showcase of the underlying technology, which features sophisticated dynamic illumination, light-reactive materials, rich particle effects, per-pixel lens flares, and other visual processes that don't sound quite as sexy as they appear.

According to Epic, games running on Unreal Engine 4 won't ship until sometime in 2013 at earliest. With partners already lining up to use it, and the engine running in 1080p on a PC built from off-the-shelf parts (the demonstration I saw was running on a variant of the Falcon Northwest Fragbox, augmented with Nvidia's Geforce GTX 680), Epic can focus on highlighting the usability of the editor that accompanies UE4.

If you peer past the break you'll see a dry, detailed deconstruction of all the effects that comprise "Elemental," and a twist of sorts: the demo runs in real-time right from the editor itself. We'll leave it to Epic to explain how the engine allows for quick iteration on effects, materials and other visual properties, and how it can help manage the blueprints of a game, right down to the behaviour of the smallest particle.

We've also embedded several videos of some simple games created with the aid of Unreal Kismet, an integrated visual scripting system. if you have a cursory interest in the nuts and bolts of game creation, you may appreciate this informative glimpse at our impeccably lit future.

You know what to expect, I should imagine: a camera pans across a world of raw graphics. Look, there they are, all over the place. It’s the showcase that Wired got a demo of the other week, with a big old demon being all fiery and stuff. And now you get to see it, too.(more…)

#deathmatch These aren't just future graphics. These are future graphics going head-to-head, mano-a-mano. This is next gen graphics death match. More »

See the Unreal Engine 4 in action in this beautifully compiled trailer featuring full in-engine cinematic glory!