I should have also considered the Unity license costs. If you bought Unity Pro, iOS Pro, and Android Pro then you'd have spent $4500. Using UE4, you'd need to make $93,000 (in one quarter, quite a bit more if spread across multiple quarters) in profit to owe Epic Games $4500. For indie developers with little budget in a market where it is difficult to make any money at all, UE is a safe bet. Sure, if you make a hit and make millions you end up paying Epic a lot, but at that point you've already succeeded.

With indie friendly licensing, UE is in a good position. Now their technology just has to be as good or better as Unity. I have not had much time to explore UE, but it looks quite solid.

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  • Pharan

    • Message #10
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    • Ce post est en anglais

    I think UE3 was an excellent engine for 3D AAA games. It powered a lot of awesome stuff last gen, had the flexibility that all sorts of developers stuck different third-party tech into it, seemed to have crazy good performance (my crappy PC ran most UE3 games really well at max settings) and seemed to provide enough ease for developers that they can freely build on it to add complex things in their games. Feels like it's pretty impossible that UE4 doesn't blow even Unity 5 out of the water.

    I think the question is not just whether UE4 is powerful enough or easy enough to use, but if it's easy enough to use for the games indies and enthusiasts want to/can afford to make. Unity's always been aggressive on that front, and I think that earned them their current gargantuan user base.

    The good thing going for UE is probably that UE4's free version is probably unhindered, while Unity Free has all sorts of weird limitations and missing features; nothing that prevents you from making and publishing complete and nice-looking games even for mobile (so the $4500 isn't really what it costs in all cases. Unity is royalty free, and you need to earn $100 000 before you're required to pony up $4500 for all those things.).

    I wonder how Unity Technologies is going to react to Epic's news. Their PR has always been on the side of "we believe Unity Pro provides real value for developers, and the subscriptions are fairly priced".
    To be fair to them, they do have some nice tools on their side for the businessy devs, like services for in-game ads, usage and performance telemetry.

    I misspoke. A lot of the limitations were removed in Unity 5 free. It's pretty cool.

    Yeah some of my ramblings were wrong, eg Unity doesn't charge below $100k and UE4's royalties are on gross revenue, not net. Ah well, I don't need to be an expect on their licensing since libgdx is Apache 2! 🙂

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    Stay proud, spiderman.

    un mois plus tard

    Any news on this? 🙂

    20 jours plus tard

    My team and I are also interested on this for UE4, we love Spine and we wanna see it running in UE! :love: :love:

    17 jours plus tard

    That should be great to have a plugin made by @EsotericSoftware that will replace Paper2D in Unreal engine by a Spine component. Seems to be a lot of work !

    And I also would'like to compile spine-c for Visual Studio 2013 to make this component available with a Lua developer interface. What do you think about that ? :bang:

    (I still have problems to compile it with visual studio 2010, because there's a lot of unsecure functions() :devil: ...so let's say that your code with LibGdx is still great in fact. :clap:

    Renaud - @Loomind

    2 mois plus tard

    I just found out about this software recently. I have been putting together a 2.5D game in Unreal for a few months now.

    You can take a look at the work here:

    https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?77201-2-5-D-Game-Art-Art-In-UE4

    I have been using Maya and Photoshop, I'm looking for a more dedicated solution for creating and animating the art. So I am also wondering what the status is for adding art to UE4 using this tool set!

    Thanks,

    NickZ. 🙂

    nickzucc a écrit

    I just found out about this software recently. I have been putting together a 2.5D game in Unreal for a few months now.

    You can take a look at the work here:

    https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?77201-2-5-D-Game-Art-Art-In-UE4

    I have been using Maya and Photoshop, I'm looking for a more dedicated solution for creating and animating the art. So I am also wondering what the status is for adding art to UE4 using this tool set!

    Thanks,

    NickZ. 🙂

    your game looks very spiney lol

    21 jours plus tard

    Hello BinaryCats, :smirk:

    It sounds like a very great idea to make a 2.5D game editor, I think that the Spine Pro will turn to Spine Ultimate version. With Nurbs Editing in 2.5D, will is it possible one day ? I hope too...

    It will help us to manage Z editing like Zbrush do with normals binding but in a Spine way animation tool, ...very difficult but 3D graphics cards can do that with : OpenGL has got Clipping planes where we can put the Spine animation with 3D object intersecting directly on it...

    At this time I'm trying to do that with JavaScript http://www.loomind.net and Spine (it's already working with SFML in C++ on my computer).

    We'll see that as soon as possible, I'll post a video on the showcase topic :nerd:

    I also would like to do an Arcade game like before :

    :heart:

    Do you remember ? It was the greatest 2.5D game flavor... I just need to optimize it with Spine 2D and 3D objects in a same scene ^^ By the way, thanks for your research....
    (we're at the good place for that !)
    😉

    un an plus tard

    Jokes aside. UE4 runtime for Spine is more than needed!

    un mois plus tard

    Nice job closing the loop

    I'd like to see people actually make good use of 2D (and Spine) in Unreal.
    I haven't seen a good example yet.

    I'd like a pony.

    Me too.

    Did you know a pony is not a baby horse?

    i want a baby horse

    I can offer this.