Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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Our World - Built by the Rerolled community
- Thread starter Utnayan
- Start date
Yeah, Unreal 4 is free now and superior to Unity in pretty much every way. I guess that includes price now ...
Convo
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Bruman
Golden Squire
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Unreal is only free until you make $3,000, then it's 5% of your revenue. Unity prices are a little harder to understand, but you can use it free too, until you make like $100k or something. Again - could have Unity3D wrong, I spent all of 2 minutes trying to read all the rules. I know I've installed it and messed around with it for a few weekends for free though. I think they make most of their money off of subs to bigger companies and their cut on the asset store.
Vitality
ＨＵＳＴＬＥ
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Sounds like it's free until you have to report it as taxable earnings. Unreal that is.
Unreal has just been pretty terrible at marketing itself to indies. It's basically been free-ish for a while. Unreal 4 has been $19/mo (which you can cancel immediately and retain access) for months, and prior to that, you could use UDK for no up-front charge in return for a 25% royalty on earnings >$50k (which equals free for almost all indie teams).
tad10
Elisha Dushku
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Utnayan
I Love Utnayan he’s awesome
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HAHA^^
So since we aren't selling anything here, it sounds like we can use it for free.
ismaris
Silver Knight of the Realm
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Hachima
Molten Core Raider
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- 638
Using Dropbox as some type of source control is a bad idea... You should really use something like git. Then you can actually deal with merging code, better control over who can contribute, better history for changes made to track down when issues were introduced and where etc...
Fight
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Bruman
Golden Squire
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Well, you have to have a developer before you worry about source control. That said, yeah, Dropbox for source, trololololol. Github (if you're keeping it OS) and Bitbucket (if you're keeping it closed) are much better free solutions.
Dropbox could work okay for non-code releated assets (art, models, etc), but the problem there is that Dropbox is for people's personal accounts, and Dropbox has one the stingiest free packages, and most people probably have a lot of their meager space used. Plus art assets are huge. Drive or OneDrive would be better solutions.
$3,000 per product, per quarter. So that means $12k a year for free if you never break the quarterly max. With Unity (until they change there model, which I suspect will be soon) you have to pay $1500 per seat for Unity Pro, and then $1500 per seat for each iOS and Android support. Without the Pro version you miss out on a lot of features such as shadows that come out of the box with Unreal.
Unreal also has the added benefit of giving full source access, something you have to pay a lot of money for (undisclosed unless you are a serious buyer) in Unity. The "downside" for people who aren't software developers by trade is you need to know C++ to work directly with the source, or to extend it. I personally see this flexibility as a huge boon, and was gladly shelling out the $20 a month for access to Unreal 4 instead of Unity. Being able to code low level framework and general entities in C++ and extend them with the Blueprint system creates a really cool workflow.
As a disclaimer I don't do any heavy game dev, it is more of just a hobby. I have a "real" software engineering job in a less fun industry as my day job.
I'll go back to lurking now.
Bruman
Golden Squire
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Ditto - boring internal business apps here. From my POV, I like that Unity3D lets me do C# (which is what I've done the past 10 years). Sounds like Unity3D costs more upfront, but if your game got mega-successful, Unreal4 would cost more long-term. I wonder what the Source2 cost will end up looking like.
Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
- 279
- 39
One of the reasons why so many MMOs companies write their own engine or heavily modify the source code of the existing ones is that engines are never written with the specific goal of displaying a lot of characters on screen at the same time (think raid or large scale PvP). Now you are starting to understand how SWTOR did cost shy of $200m or so.
Not just the rendering of players but just the transferring of information over the network as well. I know that Unity's built in network layer is trash if you are ever trying to scale it up, and you really need to code your own server. At one point before Unreal became free I was dabbling with integrating RakNet into Unity using the SWIG wrapper (pretty painful to set up actually). It worked well after I got it built and I had it easily talking to a C++ backend server, but it still felt messy.
Unreal isn't really that much better though. I really can't see how their network entity 'replication' model would scale well at all. I think by default they suggest either a 32 or 64 player max with the out-of-the-box networking capability. A lot of your development time for an MMO is going to be spent writing custom network client libraries and backend servers I would assume, and that takes network coders with a lot of experience to do well.
Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
- 279
- 39
This is why I'm going to be interested in seeing how Pantheon will fare once they scale up their testing.
I do know that Epic has been trying to hire senior engineers with MMO experience; I'd assume it's to help address some of their networking issues when it comes to larger player counts.