The world has gone crazy! Quote from announce post of Unreal Engine 4:
For $19/month you can have access to everything, including the Unreal Editor in ready-to-run form, and the engine’s complete C++ source code hosted on GitHub for collaborative development.
CRYENGINE (itself theoretically in its fourth iteration) is also available with a subscription and a free plan.
It seems to be the access method of the future, and it's an interesting one. I'm not a fan of having to subscribe to a tool, but versus the $3600 for Maya (which is like $200 a month) it's cool to see how the large game engines seem to have an okay idea for licensing.
I kindof like the idea of subscriptions for software like a Unreal Engine that is always being actively developed/maintained. I believe it avoids the "do some development, move things around, add some bloat, then increment the version number and sell it again" method that some of the more horrible companies do. I would assume that it would provide a steadier cash flow to the company.
However, having looked at UE4 as a mostly-non-coder I might prefer it, especially since it has that visual block-based functionality that I understand to be similar to MIT Scratch.
EDIT: Found this in the EULA
Yes, the EULA is very liberal in this regard. It doesn’t contain a Non-Disclosure Agreement. You’re free to use, learn from, and freely discuss the Unreal Engine even if you’re developing a competing product or technology.
While obviously they'd probably still sue you for copyright infringement if you lifted stuff and any patents they hold would still be valid, UE4 could be an interesting study.
SquireNed wrote:However, having looked at UE4 as a mostly-non-coder I might prefer it, especially since it has that visual block-based functionality that I understand to be similar to MIT Scratch.
EDIT: Found this in the EULA
Yes, the EULA is very liberal in this regard. It doesn’t contain a Non-Disclosure Agreement. You’re free to use, learn from, and freely discuss the Unreal Engine even if you’re developing a competing product or technology.
While obviously they'd probably still sue you for copyright infringement if you lifted stuff and any patents they hold would still be valid, UE4 could be an interesting study.
Wouldn't surprise me if some of the open source projects out there (hopefully a certain one this very project uses?) will be taking notes...
The UE4 announcement reminded me (somehow) of someone's ill-fated attempt to recreate Balmora in the UDK. I think it only ever amounted to some screenshots, alas.
I wouldn't hold your breath there; until UE4 announced native Linux support (probably part of the WebGL move away from DirectX), Epic was really disappointing me for a while. I'm not a Linux user, but I massively prefer OpenGL to DirectX, because I don't want another operating system "upgrade" to play new games.
As someone who loved Unreal and the original Unreal Tournament, I've disliked Epic since the UT3 on Linux fiasco and Epic working with MIcrosoft (Gears of War). I'm cautiously optimistic about the latest happenings. I'll wait and see what happens.
Quote from announce post of Unreal Engine 4:
