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Unreal Engine 4 Thread

U

User 73706

Banned
I figured I might as well post here since things have been picking up lately. I've been working on an FPS in UE4 primarily through Blueprint and things are going pretty well so far - I finally figured out a weapon system (that is, having multiple weapon types, etc.) so here are some bullshots of the super pre-pre-alpha build courtesy of UE4's HighResShot command:

7MN7DN.png

oYTnrk.png

TqxNrO.png

MtPzkp.png

iSBAJC.png
Click to expand...

Most of my progress has been documented on either my Youtube or Twitter accounts.

Bonus gif of the bokeh ADS variant:

YYpV7A.gif
 
T

Theanine3D

Member
Anyone happen to know where UE4 Linux games store their save files and user configuration?

I know in Windows it's in [user]\AppData\Local\[game name]

I'm trying to enable cloud saves for my game and already have it working on Windows. But I can't find any documentation on where the directory is on Linux.

EDIT: I figured it out. It's in ~/.config/Epic/[game name]/Saved/SaveGames/
 
S

Sesha

Member
A lot of UE4 projects (demos and static levels especially) have this polished, shiny look to them. Why is that? Is it an issue with how the engine handles rendering or lighting?

Take this for example.
 
H

Harlequin

Member
Since yesterday, whenever I try to access the official UE4 forums, both Firefox and Edge (which I don't normally use but I wanted to check if it was a Firefox-only issue) keep giving me a warning along the lines of "this connection is untrusted". I can still access the homepage/answerhub/etc. just fine, though. Now, I'm assuming that this is to do with them getting hacked recently but well, is there any merit to the warning and should I really not be accessing the forums right now or can I just ignore it?
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
Sesha said:
A lot of UE4 projects (demos and static levels especially) have this polished, shiny look to them. Why is that? Is it an issue with how the engine handles rendering or lighting?

Take this for example.
Click to expand...
It should just be a material/texture/PBR thing. Shiny materials look flashy for demos.
 
M

_machine

Member
Blizzard said:
It should just be a material/texture/PBR thing. Shiny materials look flashy for demos.
Click to expand...
Yup, something in how the artist prepared the scene probably isn't exactly per PBR standards. That's not to say it isn't intended, just that the scene/material composition isn't based on real-life values, which is still pretty common since not a lot of artists are used to finding and working with those values.
 
J

Jay Shadow

Member
Harlequin said:
Since yesterday, whenever I try to access the official UE4 forums, both Firefox and Edge (which I don't normally use but I wanted to check if it was a Firefox-only issue) keep giving me a warning along the lines of "this connection is untrusted". I can still access the homepage/answerhub/etc. just fine, though. Now, I'm assuming that this is to do with them getting hacked recently but well, is there any merit to the warning and should I really not be accessing the forums right now or can I just ignore it?
Click to expand...
Forums were put into maintenance mode a few days ago to investigate the breach. They haven't given an ETA yet on when they'll be back to normal.
 
S

Sesha

Member
Blizzard said:
It should just be a material/texture/PBR thing. Shiny materials look flashy for demos.
Click to expand...

_machine said:
Yup, something in how the artist prepared the scene probably isn't exactly per PBR standards. That's not to say it isn't intended, just that the scene/material composition isn't based on real-life values, which is still pretty common since not a lot of artists are used to finding and working with those values.
Click to expand...

I think I get it. I feel the plasticine or shiny look of the materials makes a scene lose its impact. The recent Bloodborne Hunter's Dream demo by that DICE Simon guy, for example. Not saying it's bad or that I could make it look better or anything. And of course, Bloodborne employs specific lighting and fog effects, in addition to giving materials a specific look as well.

Speaking as someone with little knowledge about this, is adhering to real life values harder than the shiny demo look?
 
V

VisceralBowl

Member
_machine said:
Yup, something in how the artist prepared the scene probably isn't exactly per PBR standards. That's not to say it isn't intended, just that the scene/material composition isn't based on real-life values, which is still pretty common since not a lot of artists are used to finding and working with those values.
Click to expand...
Care to elaborate on how one might do this better? I've had a hard time with PBR mostly because I have no idea how to find these values. I've seen reference charts with ideas for the ranges for various materials but they always seem off.
Sesha said:
A lot of UE4 projects (demos and static levels especially) have this polished, shiny look to them. Why is that? Is it an issue with how the engine handles rendering or lighting?

Take this for example.
Click to expand...
Looks like a material thing.
 
P

Prophet Steve

Member
Sesha said:
I think I get it. I feel the plasticine or shiny look of the materials makes a scene lose its impact. The recent Bloodborne Hunter's Dream demo by that DICE Simon guy, for example. Not saying it's bad or that I could make it look better or anything. And of course, Bloodborne employs specific lighting and fog effects, in addition to giving materials a specific look as well.

Speaking as someone with little knowledge about this, is adhering to real life values harder than the shiny demo look?
Click to expand...

I think when you work on an asset it is easy with PBR to go for something that "pops", so something that is supposed to have a bit of shininess gets very shiny. It just takes some restraint and a better look at how something fits in an overall scene. There are also reference images out there for what PBR parameters to use for certain materials. I don't think adhering to more real life values is very hard.

Also PBR is relatively new so people may not be as used to it yet.
 
T

Theanine3D

Member
Sesha said:
A lot of UE4 projects (demos and static levels especially) have this polished, shiny look to them. Why is that? Is it an issue with how the engine handles rendering or lighting?

Take this for example.
Click to expand...

It's a sign that the person or people who made the project didn't bother to tweak the materials on their models. Changing a single value (roughness) makes it go away. The default value in a new material is 0.5, not zero.or 1.



Some people just want to make something quick and dirty and so they just slap a texture onto a new default UE4 material's diffuse slot without changing or adding anything else. I've seen this a lot. Materials and shaders are an art of their own, they're not something that should just be skipped over, at least not if your project is meant to be a professional one. But it happens.
 
V

VisceralBowl

Member
Has anybody figured out how to edit CircleDOF's quality? I remember they added it a while back but idk where it is.

Also does anybody know what "Depth Blur km for 50%" is? The description has been "todo" for as long as it's existed.
 
M

mnannola

Member
Raticus79 said:
The VR template sounds like a handy starting point.
Click to expand...

Just tried it out and it's great! Teleport works well, and allows you to change player rotation by moving over the trackpad while it's held down. Also the grabby hands are pretty cool because the hand changes when it's over something it can grab which is a nice touch.

Going to try and whip up a bowling demo with the template. Anyone know of any free bowling ball or pin models?
 
P

pottuvoi

Banned
Blizzard said:
That dynamic shadow map caching feature is brilliant. Have other engines tried that?
Click to expand...
Pretty much every one with many 'static' shadowing lights on buildings etc.
Shadow generation is one of the big limitations in lighting of current polygonal engines, so it makes sense to cache it.
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
pottuvoi said:
Pretty much every one with many 'static' shadowing lights on buildings etc.
Shadow generation is one of the big limitations in lighting of current polygonal engines, so it makes sense to cache it.
Click to expand...
Ah, I didn't realize it was common for non-Unreal engines to cache the shadows for dynamic lights too though, only static lights.
 
P

pottuvoi

Banned
Blizzard said:
Ah, I didn't realize it was common for non-Unreal engines to cache the shadows for dynamic lights too though, only static lights.
Click to expand...
If there is no light baking involved for lights, there shouldn't be much difference.
When light doesn't move and there is no changes in shadow frustum, keep using same shadow.
 
F

fengshuifever

Member
Don't know if I've posted here before but hi!

Jumped into Unreal seriously now and I love this thing so much.

I've been looking at a lot of terrain videos cause its a skill im sorely lacking in.
 
K

kittenhitman

Neo Member
M

Minamu

Member
Anyone in here done title update work in Unreal 4? I've heard that the system is a bit weird. For example, if you want to add a variable to a blueprint for some reason, you gotta send the whole blueprint file along with the update/patch. Same thing with maps or props if you change something tiny like adding a variable. Seems a bit wonky if true, file sizes for patches might grow really quickly for no real good reason? I've heard of software that checks the title update code for dependancies regarding file size etc but in a larger production, this could take hours to scan properly, not to mention to time it takes to re-evaluate your update design. Is this true, and the only way to do it currently?
 
A

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
Minamu said:
Anyone in here done title update work in Unreal 4? I've heard that the system is a bit weird. For example, if you want to add a variable to a blueprint for some reason, you gotta send the whole blueprint file along with the update/patch. Same thing with maps or props if you change something tiny like adding a variable. Seems a bit wonky if true, file sizes for patches might grow really quickly for no real good reason? I've heard of software that checks the title update code for dependancies regarding file size etc but in a larger production, this could take hours to scan properly, not to mention to time it takes to re-evaluate your update design. Is this true, and the only way to do it currently?
Click to expand...

As i understand it, in packaged builds, especially if you nativize blueprints, the entire codebase is very tiny.
Sending the entire compiled codebase should be a 20mb patch or whereabouts.

Are you using UE4's patch generation tool? sizes seem normal to me.
 
M

Minamu

Member
Aureon said:
As i understand it, in packaged builds, especially if you nativize blueprints, the entire codebase is very tiny.
Sending the entire compiled codebase should be a 20mb patch or whereabouts.

Are you using UE4's patch generation tool? sizes seem normal to me.
Click to expand...
I have no idea, I heard it from someone in AAA production. I assume the company knows what it's doing, but apparently it can take up to a day to just check for dependencies, which seems excessive and a major time waster.
 
A

AzaK

Member
I've tried using it several times on not too shabby iMac and 2015 MacBook pro. The thing has such a low framerate even with the simple demo project of a few platforms and that supplied character animation. I just ended up giving up as it's basically unusable.
 
R

Raticus79

Seek victory, not fairness
There we go - the UE4 VRWorks branch has the new Pascal stuff now.
https://developer.nvidia.com/vrwork...i-lens-matched-shading-and-single-pass-stereo

NVIDIA has released a new VRWorks-enabled branch of Unreal Engine, adding support for new Pascal VRWorks. With this branch, Unreal developers can now easily take advantage of features including Lens Matched Shading, Single Pass Stereo, VR SLI and Multi-res Shading.

Lens Matched Shading uses NVIDIA Pascal hardware features to improve upon Multi-Res Shading, ensuring frame buffer and display pixel rates are matched for optimum performance.

Single Pass Stereo, another Pascal exclusive, reduces geometry bandwidth by 50% resulting in useful performance improvements on CPU and GPU.

VR SLI lets developers take advantage of multi-GPU systems for peak performance.
Click to expand...

Edit: if you were running into linker errors with this, a commit was just added that fixed it. Re-download and say N when prompted to overwrite nvapi libs during setup.bat.
 
M

Mik2121

Member
Here's something I did last Saturday night in about 6 hours on an empty UE4 project, plus another hour later to add network compatibility:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqJWSoe4U34&feature=youtu.be

It's based on the area surrounding my work office (Umeda Sky Building, Osaka). I did all the models (easy stuff so not really time consuming), cars and blueprints from scratch, except for the main character which is the default UE4 character. Also currently the roads look too wide but that's because they're also missing the sidewalks, which I'll make unique for each block of buildings.

Yesterday I went and made it online compatible (with some help from a coworker to find some of the more obscure nodes needed to do all the server-side stuff), so now I can ride around this area with other people, haha.

I made this pretty much because I was bored last Saturday night and after watching some Watch Dogs 2 vids I thought it'd be cool to run around the city where I live.

I love how easy it is to make prototypes from scratch in UE4 in just a few hours...
 
IbizaPocholo

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
Mik2121 said:
Here's something I did last Saturday night in about 6 hours on an empty UE4 project, plus another hour later to add network compatibility:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqJWSoe4U34&feature=youtu.be

It's based on the area surrounding my work office (Umeda Sky Building, Osaka). I did all the models (easy stuff so not really time consuming), cars and blueprints from scratch, except for the main character which is the default UE4 character. Also currently the roads look too wide but that's because they're also missing the sidewalks, which I'll make unique for each block of buildings.

Yesterday I went and made it online compatible (with some help from a coworker to find some of the more obscure nodes needed to do all the server-side stuff), so now I can ride around this area with other people, haha.

I made this pretty much because I was bored last Saturday night and after watching some Watch Dogs 2 vids I thought it'd be cool to run around the city where I live.

I love how easy it is to make prototypes from scratch in UE4 in just a few hours...
Click to expand...
Pretty awesome for the time you spent.
 
D

Durante

Member
Just went through the notes.

Forward rendering with MSAA is obviously huge / massive for VR, but there are also lots of other really useful things in there. The forward renderer is actually a bit more limited than I expected, with no support for shadows from moving light sources. I'm also surprised at no alpha-to-coverage support, it's cheap and looks pretty good with 8xMSAA.

Anyway, the directional contact shadows are really neat and actually rather simple for a very good result in specific use cases.

But really, what surprised me and is incredibly useful is the built-in automatic LOD generation. I was actually wondering why no engine had that. It's not that hard to do a decent job at automatic LoD generation (I wrote my own once), and it's much better for the average indie to have something decent and workable built into the engine than e.g. doing without LoDs.

I also appreciate the new noise stuff since procedural generation ahs always fascinated me.

Finally, continuous collision detection on kinematic objects!!!! I actually stopped working on my table tennis VR demo thing since it needs that feature and I wasn't willing to dig deep enough to implement it :p
 
C

CalamityPixel

Member
Durante said:
Just went through the notes.

Forward rendering with MSAA is obviously huge / massive for VR, but there are also lots of other really useful things in there. The forward renderer is actually a bit more limited than I expected, with no support for shadows from moving light sources. I'm also surprised at no alpha-to-coverage support, it's cheap and looks pretty good with 8xMSAA.

Anyway, the directional contact shadows are really neat and actually rather simple for a very good result in specific use cases.

But really, what surprised me and is incredibly useful is the built-in automatic LOD generation. I was actually wondering why no engine had that. It's not that hard to do a decent job at automatic LoD generation (I wrote my own once), and it's much better for the average indie to have something decent and workable built into the engine than e.g. doing without LoDs.

I also appreciate the new noise stuff since procedural generation ahs always fascinated me.

Finally, continuous collision detection on kinematic objects!!!! I actually stopped working on my table tennis VR demo thing since it needs that feature and I wasn't willing to dig deep enough to implement it :p
Click to expand...

Oh shit I didn't know about the continuous collision detection on kinetic objects, this is something I'm gonna play around with :)
 
T

Tain

Member
SSR is one of the effects not supported by the forward renderer, and while I totally understand that it shouldn't be high priority for VR, I'd like to see it eventually. Planar reflections are too expensive to be the only option for realtime reflections.
 
R

Raticus79

Seek victory, not fairness
These new features are great. One step closer to someone making a solid Black & White VR spiritual successor.

Continuous collision detection is going to be really fun too.
image_39.gif


Durante said:
Finally, continuous collision detection on kinematic objects!!!! I actually stopped working on my table tennis VR demo thing since it needs that feature and I wasn't willing to dig deep enough to implement it :p
Click to expand...

Ha, they even used a ping pong example there.
 
C

Cow Mengde

Banned
I know my CPU is good enough, but can a GTX 960m be good enough of a GPU? I want to play around and see if I can create some simple 3D models.

Edited for typo.
 
R

Raticus79

Seek victory, not fairness
Cow Mengde said:
Excellent! Thanks for the info.

Now I just need to find some simple tutorials to get started. I want to see if I can build some simple dinosaur models.
Click to expand...

Oh, for that part you'd start in another tool like Blender.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/AssetCreation/

I'm just getting started on both. I picked up Ben Tristem's courses on Blender and UE4 for cheap from Udemy a while ago and have been slowly working through them.

Edit: they have a black friday sale on now, actually. 90% off.
https://www.udemy.com/blendertutorial
https://www.udemy.com/unrealcourse
 
H

HTupolev

Member
Tain said:
SSR is one of the effects not supported by the forward renderer, and while I totally understand that it shouldn't be high priority for VR, I'd like to see it eventually. Planar reflections are too expensive to be the only option for realtime reflections.
Click to expand...
Might be impractical. SSR implementations generally rely on the G-buffer that's produced in the deferred rendering process; sometimes forward renderers also produce a G-buffer of sorts to accelerate things like decals (see: Halo 3, The Order 1886), but these tend to be very simplified.

An SSR implementation in a forward renderer would probably require an expensive extra geometry pass (to get the properties of the surface that the reflection is currently being generated for), and because you don't have detailed material data for the rest of the scene, quality options would be limited (i.e. you couldn't make proper use of secondary rays).
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
I figured I would ask in this thread since there weren't many responses in the indie game thread:
Blizzard said:
If I ever manage to carve out some time, I want to dive seriously into UE4 and try to make something.

I've used UDK off and on over the years, and messed briefly with UE4. Are there any references, guides, intros, summaries, tutorials, etc. that are highly recommended? Or should I just dive in and look up stuff when I need it like usual?
Click to expand...
 
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