Unreal Engine 4

[Pampers 5,537]

Photoscanned assets from all over the world isn't something most people can do, especially small indies. So if giving away over 10k of free triple A assets isn't democratizing game development, then what is? Working with creating photoscanned assets consists of mostly boring and repetetive work, so every big studio is looking into automating these workflows anyways

[FMPONE 5,728]

9 hours ago, Pampers said:

Photoscanned assets from all over the world isn't something most people can do, especially small indies. So if giving away over 10k of free triple A assets isn't democratizing game development, then what is? Working with creating photoscanned assets consists of mostly boring and repetetive work, so every big studio is looking into automating these workflows anyways

The alternative would be paying some individual to hand author assets based on photo ref 

There’s no fighting this so I didn’t want to sound too fatalistic or anything. UE4 is incredible, Quixel seems incredible. I just think that the whole Quixel suite in particular and similar tech generally speaking seem powerful enough to sharply lower the need for env artists across the board. I think it’s only “democratizing” if your definition of democratizing arbitrarily glazed over the likely job displacement caused by new technology. But, that’s pretty much where things are headed for most industries, so not a unique story there.

Personally I can’t wait to load it up once it goes live. It’s very exciting 

[AlexM 1,080]

On 11/8/2019 at 9:20 PM, Pampers said:

you won't with an editable mesh in a traditional sense

Heh yeah, I looked at the code, when I say some day I'm leaning towards around 2027

[RaVaGe 1,831]

I'm pretty sure it's a big boost for the indie game devs, right now it's hard to compete against an AAA compagny and their huge budgets, this is probably going to change for the next few years with such an amazing library of qualitative content, and I believe the folks at Unreal understand that completely, they basically want to sell the shovels and only ask for money when the customer finds gold.

[blackdog 4,032]

6 hours ago, FMPONE said:

The alternative would be paying some individual to hand author assets based on photo ref 

There’s no fighting this so I didn’t want to sound too fatalistic or anything. UE4 is incredible, Quixel seems incredible. I just think that the whole Quixel suite in particular and similar tech generally speaking seem powerful enough to sharply lower the need for env artists across the board. I think it’s only “democratizing” if your definition of democratizing arbitrarily glazed over the likely job displacement caused by new technology. But, that’s pretty much where things are headed for most industries, so not a unique story there.

Personally I can’t wait to load it up once it goes live. It’s very exciting 

Yeah but don’t you still need people to put the scene together?
The job displacement would only be valid depending on the studio pipeline? The art direction chosen for the game?
Is not like photo-scanned material is the Graal of game art, and developers surely don’t want the games to all look the same as if they are all using the same stock material.

[Zarsky 165]

 

[FMPONE 5,728]

Already know exactly what I'm gonna make when that sweet, sweet Quixel drops. How about you all?

[Buddy 670]

I don't understand how creating market monopoly is democratizing anything (?).

Soon epic will have it all and for free, game engine, tools and assets. Good luck competing with that without also being a giant corporation yourself 
 

[Vilham 1,186]

Most successful indie games aren't being made in unreal. First party/in house tools will always dominate the games market.

So it doesn't really matter if Epic has this.:

It's not even useful stuff for people who are serious about making a game, asset flips do not sell as they do not stand out.
It also is only 1 side of the assets you need to make, so again it isn't useful as it just raises the bar too high for the rest of your assets. Making any project prohibitively expensive to make.

Essentially this just allows epic to make money off people who have the mindset of making games is easy and simple, where they buy a bunch of mismatched assets of the store and then fail to make a game / sell any copies.

Edited November 17, 2019 by Vilham

[blackdog 4,032]

Yeah what @Vilham said, unless I’m mistaken, the marketplace doesn’t allow for a “team” configuration. You want to develop a game as a team I understand you should all own a copy of the assets/plugins. That’s just money going in the copyright owners and not helping anyone.

[0kelvin 131]

10 hours ago, Vilham said:

Most successful indie games aren't being made in unreal. First party/in house tools will always dominate the games market. 

Is UE bad for small teams?

[AlexM 1,080]

13 hours ago, 0kelvin said:

Is UE bad for small teams?

I wouldn't say it's really bad. Depends on the team.

The one thing I would say about Unreal is it has a way bigger initial learning curve. So a small team that already knows unreal will probably be fine. If no one has experience they will probably have to paint themselves out of a corner a couple times as they get a feel for the engine. Arguably that's true for almost any engine but I feel with how opinionated Unreal is about development it can be more of an issue.

[blackdog 4,032]

16 hours ago, 0kelvin said:

Is UE bad for small teams?

I have the impression that Unity, having supported “mobile first” got lots more traction among indies