as planned, I cancelled my subscription, because I want my game project to continue in 3DGS, but I will keep discovering it. UE4 has a long learning curve if you are new in it, but has definitely professional and complex features. its Blueprint visual programming system is great for experienced 3d artists and casual game developers to make little simple games easily, which is a very strong point to switch to it. using example projects as references, and starting a new project based on templates is also a big help (they have both Blueprint and C++ versions, but later the project can be a combined one).

yesterday they released 4.1 which supports beside PC, Mac, Android, iOs, HTML5, (but as a preview solution only) Linux, SteamOS, XBox One, Playstation4 (consoles require additional registration at MS and Sony). but for example SpeedTree integration is still missing. they seems to know that templates are a strong feature, so new ones are also available... this is how they can attract more potential Unity5 users.

What's even better: You now can earn 3000$ per product per quarter you have to pay no royalties on making UE4 even more indie friendly. That translates into up to 12,000$ annual income you don't have to pay royalties on which is quite something and makes the entry into game development even more accessible when comparing to paying the 20$/month fee versus e.g. around 3000$ for one Unity Pro license with mobile publishing...

It'll be interesting to see how Unity reacts as their 75$/month model (you afaik only can cancel every 6 months) they introduced looks horrible now and that might even be 150$/month if you also need the mobile publishing add-ons (I at least think they again did split PC/Mac and mobile publishing)...

I have not noticed that license change, but cool, easier to manage releasing very cheap little casual games.
the source code access of UE4 is also fun, user feedback based bug-fixing and feature development became a proven way last month. for an ordinary user it is not really needed, but can attract many indie developers and larger studios.
game engines targeting rather beginners, students, and hobbyists seem not to react on these changes (or just waiting), and probably they are right as they are a bit different market segment, focusing on easy start and basic usage. I wonder how 3dgs price policy goes in future, maybe stays as is, but it could easily be a more potent engine than currently (okay, the pc only publishing is a bit odd today).

I think there's still a lot of shock and awe left. UE4 pretty much changed the industry just as Unity did when releasing their free version of the engine which made most other engines release something similar too...

Considering 3DGS - well I don't want to sound too harsh but apart from people who did use it for years and know the engine very well there's no reason to prefer it over virtually any serious engine out there. Development of the engine seems to have stopped and even if something is going on no one can tell if development won't be halted for yet another Zorro kind of project. Apart from that the development in general is too slow - I mean look at what pretty much one guy did on the Neoaxis engine and what happened here in the last few months. 3DGS hasn't really evolved for years and is in no way worth its price - especially not when considerung a 20$/month UE4 engine. I also don't really see any serious advantages 3DGS has. The engine itself and the tools/editors are badly outdated. Lite-C once might have been a good thing (although I always was rather sceptical about it) but nowadays you simply can go for Lua / Javascript for easy scripting. If you want a bit more which is just what Lite-C is about you should go straight for C#. It pretty much fills Lite-C's role without being a proprietary solution you only can use for 3DGS...

When now talking about the other engines I think they simply will be forced to do something. They probably can stick to what e.g. Unity does with their pricing but they will need to adapt to what UE4 did i.e. also offer a very low monthly fee together with some royalties. Changes might not be evident in the near future but I guess in the next 2-3 years it will be obvious that the UE4 licensing model is extremely attractive and will catch lots of users. That's why I think that e.g. Unity will adapt in the near future. It also was told that internal discussions about changes already are going on but they don't want to knee-jerk their counterreaction which is why it'll still take quite a while...

, its very cheap (com. version is only 150 euro ).

, I personally don't know much of the spec differences, but in this thread http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/187356-...d88c1738cdf3056 , a poster called DaviHimura seems to have some decent arguments.

Neoaxis or Shiva don't cost me a thing in order to use the full engine with more features (not mentioning the "hidden" restrictions like Com may have weighted bones but in Com it's just one vertex per bone although that might have changed in the meantime), more modern tools, a multitude of shaders that work out of the box on anything and especially when considering using Unity's free version you also have access to an asset store with lots of assets. Especially Unity's asset store is fantastic with entire game kits, pathfinding algorithms, editor extensions, particle effects or even visual scripting solutions...

From my point of view especially the tool situation and the shader aspect are a huge downside for 3DGS. The tools didn't really evolve and still are stuck in the Half-Life 1 era. We have been promised an overhaul which also is on the forecast page but who knows how it'll turn out in the end - I actually expect nothing close to what Unity or Shiva (2.0) offers. Shaders also always were terrible in 3DGS as things that simply worked out of the box never really existed and in order to really make good use of them you have to have an in-depth understanding and should be able to write them for yourself. I also don't know if shaders on the BSP level geometry ever started working the way you'd wish them to do...

In my opinion 3DGS simply started to miss the "Zeitgeist". Look at MED - that's a mid 90s mindset. Nobody needs such a modelling tool anymore and it still got quite some love when free solutions like Blender or Wings3D existed and were good at what they do. You nowadays should be able to import from whatever tool you chose for your work. I can't even say if it now does import models with bone animations or if you still have to animate in MED...


For the most part I fail to see real arguments here. Mentioning the lightmapping on terrains especially feels wrong as the 3DGS lightmapper always created rather unsatisfying results and I still remember people constantly asking to "outsource" the lightmap information so they could use a software like Gile[s] instead to bake their own actually decent looking lightmaps...

Talking about multiplayer capabilities also is a rather bad idea as the users in this forum did show that the 3DGS multiplayer system is in many parts a catastrophe that might in theory be able to handle some nice number of players etc. but fails badly on rather simple tasks when actually using it. What I especially remember is that you could compile whatever program of yours and make it try to connect to a 3DGS multiplayer server of someone else which results in a server crash. So in the end just as for the lightmap example the multiplayer component is there on the paper but is lacking in its execution. You still should be able to find topics about it and I think someone at a certain point started integrating RakNet into their project as the 3DGS internal system simply was unable to deliver good results...

Yeah, until you get a conflict because some (lots of) Asset Store Developers are too dumb to use namespaces. Actually I don´t know how good the features are implemented in UE4, but when it comes to Unity you can find a big bunch of half-baked features. You need some awkward workarounds if you want to realize a mid-sized project.

Example? What about this: You can´t load scenes additively with baked Occlusion Culling. And you have to dig in their forums to get this information...

Yeah - all that glitters is not gold and as such asset store solutions might not always work as flawless as intended. When talking about Unity there is some truth to a discussion that came up in their forums after the UE4 announcements. UE4 sort of has become a service while Unity is a product you buy. In order to make a new version attractive there have to be new features. This of course sometimes leads to some half-baked stuff. That's a rather general problem though while the service idea behind the UE4 subscription creates a stronger focus on aspects like bugfixing and refining the features that are already there...

UE4's new licensing model in my opinion is the next big thing after Unity with its free version which had quite an impact on the entire industry back then. We'll probably see other engines offering similar subscription offers...

Already happenend - both Unity and CryEngine now run on a per-month payment, with Unity actually offering the least attractive option.

cryengine only announced it, without source access, but 9.9 per mo is neat (and I think they will limit the available platforms). ue4's cancelling option is also neat. I wonder how crytek improved the workflow to be more user friendly (and easy). the photoshop and Max/Maya dependency of cryengine3 was a significant gate imo. a few days ago a 3rd party importer tool appeared for it, probably a similar one can be expected for cry4.
due to my little testing experiences, ue4 is much more easier than UDK was (making a new project is not a pain any more, fine asset packs, example projects, templates), with good docs and videos, but still more heavy than Unity (I used only Unity3, which was really easy), whose javascript is as easy as lite-c. but 75/mo is now simply too much.