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Unreal Engine 4 Thread

P

pottuvoi

Banned
Messing around with editor trying to create a simple house layout.
Tried to add windows with basic Glass material, but apparently the SSR doesn't work automatically and thus reflections look all kinds of strange.

How can I turn translucent SSR on? From blueprints?
 
M

Mechanical Snowman

Member
pottuvoi said:
Messing around with editor trying to create a simple house layout.
Tried to add windows with basic Glass material, but apparently the SSR doesn't work automatically and thus reflections look all kinds of strange.

How can I turn translucent SSR on? From blueprints?
Click to expand...

In the Translucency tab of the shader, tick Screen Space Reflections.
 
A

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
Krejlooc said:
Part of the rules for this competition I'm doing requires us to work entirely in blueprint mode. Which isn't too bad, I figure I can adapt.

I'm simulating a crowd. So I spawn a bunch of actors in the level blueprint, then spawn a bunch of target points in the level blueprint and randomize the locations of all the actors and target points, and set each actor to run to a random target point. This creates an illusion of entropy. What needs to happen is that, when they reach their target point, they will turn around and run to another random target point.

So, in c++, this would be simple as shit, and I could do this in a variety of ways. But I can't figure out how to do it in blueprint. My level blueprint has an array that holds all the actors and target points. From within the actor blueprints, I can't access the target point array to discern their location because they are out of scope. In C++, I could just pass a reference of these objects to each spawned object, but that doesn't seem possible here.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Have the level blueprint (or any other global) hold the data, and give the 'walkers' one point, then request another point onreach?
 
P

PdotMichael

Banned
Just downloaded the engine and tools to play around and to relearn some of my lost coding skills. Though I wish there is a way to write in C.
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
PdotMichael said:
Just downloaded the engine and tools to play around and to relearn some of my lost coding skills. Though I wish there is a way to write in C.
Click to expand...
Do you mean you wish the engine source was in C rather than C++?

If you mean C/C++, you can certainly write your own C++ code for a custom game if you wish.
 
R

Raticus79

Seek victory, not fairness
All right, I'm diving in. I was wondering if UE4 would make sense for a low-poly stylized look - guess it's ok since this person's recommending it as a good activity for beginners.

http://nerd-time.com/learning-lowpoly-blender-ue4/
http://nerd-time.com/nighttime-settings-ue4/

I'm thinking of this kind of thing, except not quite so flat on the lighting. http://ashleywilkie.co.uk/blog/?p=601

The reason for low-poly was to be able to get lots of units on screen. I thought it would be fun to have an overhead perspective on some Shogun-scale battles in a Dwarf Fortress 3D kind of game in VR. I'll see if I can get some stick figures running around by the time DirectX 12 support is in, heh.
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
Raticus79 said:
All right, I'm diving in. I was wondering if UE4 would make sense for a low-poly stylized look - guess it's ok since this person's recommending it as a good activity for beginners.

http://nerd-time.com/learning-lowpoly-blender-ue4/
http://nerd-time.com/nighttime-settings-ue4/

I'm thinking of this kind of thing, except not quite so flat on the lighting. http://ashleywilkie.co.uk/blog/?p=601

The reason for low-poly was to be able to get lots of units on screen. I thought it would be fun to have an overhead perspective on some Shogun-scale battles in a Dwarf Fortress 3D kind of game in VR. I'll see if I can get some stick figures running around by the time DirectX 12 support is in, heh.
Click to expand...
Those two posts look awesome, thanks for linking them! I've wanted to learn how to do low-poly flat shading like that.
 
Jessie.Bristol

Jessie.Bristol

Member
Raticus79 said:
All right, I'm diving in. I was wondering if UE4 would make sense for a low-poly stylized look - guess it's ok since this person's recommending it as a good activity for beginners.

http://nerd-time.com/learning-lowpoly-blender-ue4/
http://nerd-time.com/nighttime-settings-ue4/

I'm thinking of this kind of thing, except not quite so flat on the lighting. http://ashleywilkie.co.uk/blog/?p=601

The reason for low-poly was to be able to get lots of units on screen. I thought it would be fun to have an overhead perspective on some Shogun-scale battles in a Dwarf Fortress 3D kind of game in VR. I'll see if I can get some stick figures running around by the time DirectX 12 support is in, heh.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the links... SAVED!
 
G

Granadier

Is currently on Stage 1: Denial regarding the service game future
I started playing around with UE4 again since we got some beefy rigs at work. It blows me away compared to Unity. I'm in love.
 
P

PBalfredo

Member
Any good references or tutorials for Blueprint, namely what's new and different from Kismet for someone who is familiar with UDK? It's high time I learned UE4 properly and now that the Infinity Blade assets are out, I want to try using those to assemble a level and rig things up with Blueprint to actually play like a game.
 
G

Granadier

Is currently on Stage 1: Denial regarding the service game future
PBalfredo said:
Any good references or tutorials for Blueprint, namely what's new and different from Kismet for someone who is familiar with UDK? It's high time I learned UE4 properly and now that the Infinity Blade assets are out, I want to try using those to assemble a level and rig things up with Blueprint to actually play like a game.
Click to expand...

This series helped me out a ton.

Blueprint jump start
 
M

MikeHaggar

Member
how viable is it for me to use ue4 if i have no modeling and animation abilities? are there tools in the sdk that will help me build and texture areas? do they have built-in animations that can be applied to character models? i'd love to get into it, but i don't have any artistic abilities and i don't know any artists. i am a developer and have done game development before, so i'm comfortable on that front...
 
A

astonish

Member
MikeHaggar said:
how viable is it for me to use ue4 if i have no modeling and animation abilities? are there tools in the sdk that will help me build and texture areas? do they have built-in animations that can be applied to character models? i'd love to get into it, but i don't have any artistic abilities and i don't know any artists. i am a developer and have done game development before, so i'm comfortable on that front...
Click to expand...

There are lots of starter content and there is the asset store.

You can certainly play around with gameplay and system concepts there.

If you want to make things look nice tho, you're probably going need get some basic 3D under you belt. Most levels are just tons of static meshes placed around the level.
 
H

Harlequin

Member
If you're looking for animations and don't want to spend any money on stuff from the asset store (though I'd say a lot of it is worth spending money on if you're looking for high quality assets that are easy to use in UE4) you should also have a look at Mixamo. All their animations are currently free (for a limited time but I don't think they've actually said until when this free period lasts). You'll have to use their rig, though (either by using one of their characters or by rigging a character you got from somewhere else through their online rig tool), or retarget the animations for use with the UE4 default skeleton. (I tried doing the latter but couldn't get it to work quite right for some reason - not sure if I'm just too dumb or if Mixamo's animations simply don't work all that well on the UE4 default skeleton. It worked fine on some animations but whenever there was jumping/landing/kneeling involved shit just started to "fall apart" with feet moving up and down instead of being on the ground, etc.) But yeah, for 70-100$ you can also get pretty great motion-captured animations for basic movement on the asset store (if you're using a humanoid character, that is).
 
Jessie.Bristol

Jessie.Bristol

Member
desu said:
And 4.10 is out: https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-4-10-released
Click to expand...

Yep, got the e-mail. Looking through the Release Notes and this highlight stood out to me:

XBOX ONE
New: Distance field ambient occlusion and shadowing are now enabled on Xbox One.
New: The default Xbox One XDK has been updated to August 2015.
New: Various rendering optimizations have been made in preparation for a future switch to the fast semantics driver.
Dynamic vertex and index buffers are now handled manually, saving time spent in the driver and avoiding syncing with the GPU.
Swapchain handling updated to latest APIs.
Removed some old verification code that won't work with fast semantics.
Shader compilation options tweaked for slightly better GPU performance.
Memory corruption is prevented in the case that an invalid controller ID is passed into the force feedback channel functions.
Click to expand...

What is the Xbox One's new "fast semantics driver?" Is it fully replacing it's current driver?
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
zeox said:
that's awesome. prototyping a map in UE4 with bsps is a god damn nightmare T_T
Click to expand...
UE4 has so many features now, user-provided and otherwise, that I'm kind of surprised there's not a good way to do it. Is there some other way Epic recommends blocking out maps now?
 
Z

zeox

Member
Blizzard said:
UE4 has so many features now, user-provided and otherwise, that I'm kind of surprised there's not a good way to do it. Is there some other way Epic recommends blocking out maps now?
Click to expand...

last I saw they still recommend doing it with bsp primitives. I'm positive I remember improving bps stuff was on the official trello board, but I can't seem to find it any more. shame really
 
T

Tain

Member
ashecitism said:
Saw this in a twitter discussion, GAF's very own Turfster is making a Source .VMF to UE4 plugin called hammUEr. Coming out later this month, here's a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzguNJsivM&feature=youtu.be

twitter account: https://twitter.com/hammUEr
Click to expand...

This is really interesting. I haven't used UE4 BSP tools much at all, I'm surprised they're that bad. UE's subtractive brushes were always way more appealing than Hammer's carving tools to me.
 
A

astonish

Member
Tain said:
This is really interesting. I haven't used UE4 BSP tools much at all, I'm surprised they're that bad. UE's subtractive brushes were always way more appealing than Hammer's carving tools to me.
Click to expand...

People use BSP at all? I thought everything other than terrain is a static mesh these days.
 
H

Harlequin

Member
astonish said:
People use BSP at all? I thought everything other than terrain is a static mesh these days.
Click to expand...

I think it usually is but when you're in the prototyping phase it's usually a good idea to first block out the level using primitives before you commit to a final level design and start modelling the environment.
 
V

Vincent Alexander

Member
My co-worker and I came to the realization the other night that we love video games, used to make tons of stuff in RPG Maker, and that we need to do what we love. So after reading about all the different kinds of game engines out there we have decided to give Unreal Engine 4 a go. We're going to try to learn together so we can keep each other motivated. I wish this thread was more active, but hopefully we can get some help along the way from people here! We refuse to let ourselves be intimidated by the fact we don't know programming.

Does anyone have any recommendations for beginner videos? There are sooo many on youtube that we don't know where to dive in at. Any recommended series or anything?

Unreal has their own videos on their YouTube channel, but they're version 4.7. The very first video has me doing things that are already not working because of version changes. Grrr....this is such a pain to find good tutorials that are up-to-date.
 
B

Bollocks

Member
I'm sorry to hear cause their YouTube videos are pretty good actually, what exactly isn't working?
Still, I would watch them as they give you a pretty good overview of how things works.
Minor differences aside, the blueprint ones are a good starting point.
 
I

icecold1983

Member
Has there been anything impressive on this engine other than the inhouse epic projects? Every non epic game ive seen on it looks and/or runs abysmally. Just like ue3 realtime shadows seem to be nonexistent
 
Z

z3phon

Member
Vincent Alexander said:
My co-worker and I came to the realization the other night that we love video games, used to make tons of stuff in RPG Maker, and that we need to do what we love. So after reading about all the different kinds of game engines out there we have decided to give Unreal Engine 4 a go. We're going to try to learn together so we can keep each other motivated. I wish this thread was more active, but hopefully we can get some help along the way from people here! We refuse to let ourselves be intimidated by the fact we don't know programming.

Does anyone have any recommendations for beginner videos? There are sooo many on youtube that we don't know where to dive in at. Any recommended series or anything?

Unreal has their own videos on their YouTube channel, but they're version 4.7. The very first video has me doing things that are already not working because of version changes. Grrr....this is such a pain to find good tutorials that are up-to-date.
Click to expand...
Started learning UE4 recently but mostly to just do environment art. Some of the digital tutors videos I watched were pretty helpful and as Bollocks mentioned the youtube videos are actually really nice. The documentation on their website is really helpful also.
 
B

Blizzard

Banned
crazyconka said:
I had been wanting to dive into programming strictly in C++ with UE4 for a while (mainly to avoid the performance overhead of a scripting language), so I tried converting the BP_SkySphere into a C++ Actor a few weeks ago. I was able to reproduce it after a few hours, but it really made me feel bad for developers who actually have to use this engine. Documentation is either poor or missing entirely, compiler messages are vague at best (stack traces even more so), seemingly harmless bits of code can cause the entire engine to crash forcing you to delete several folders and assemblies before restarting, and user created C++ classes can't even be moved, renamed, or deleted without deleting some other folders and rebuilding the entire project.
Click to expand...
I can understand being frustrated by compiler messages, but those are up to Visual C++ (an incredibly popular and widely used compiler), not UE4. And if anything, stack traces should be very precise, pinpointing every function called, aside from outside libraries...and even those should have entry points. What was vague about the stack traces?
 
V

Vincent Alexander

Member
Bollocks said:
I'm sorry to hear cause their YouTube videos are pretty good actually, what exactly isn't working?
Still, I would watch them as they give you a pretty good overview of how things works.
Minor differences aside, the blueprint ones are a good starting point.
Click to expand...
We're working through the "Introduction to UE4 Level Creation (v4.7)" on the Unreal Engine YouTube channel. We're on 4.10.2 now, so there were just some very minor differences we worked through after playing around. For instance, first step they want is to make your character's hands/gun invisible to the eye for immersion's sake. I turned off the hands, but the gun was still there. I guess in 4.7 the gun/hands were one piece? Since I'm a noob, it took me a while to realize I just need to pull up the gun itself and change the owner view on it as well. As of now, we're really liking this little series. But there aren't many of them.

z3phon said:
Started learning UE4 recently but mostly to just do environment art. Some of the digital tutors videos I watched were pretty helpful and as Bollocks mentioned the youtube videos are actually really nice. The documentation on their website is really helpful also.
Click to expand...
Do you have any particular video or video series you would recommend? And out of curiosity, how is your learning going?


My friend and I spent about 2 hours last night playing around. We're treating this like any other skill and trying to make sure we spend at minimum an hour each night practicing and learning. Our concern at the moment is simply that we'll run out of videos to watch---not that there aren't a lot out there. Just not knowing which ones to watch. I imagine we'll just have to use our best judgement if something is far beyond our level.
 
V

Vincent Alexander

Member
No one else playing around with this right now? Or is there some other game creating dedicated thread I can't find? I'd love to talk with others about all of this fun stuff.
 
A

ashecitism

Member
There will be VR related news in tomorrow's UE4 stream: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?99449-Incoming-VR-News!-Feb-4-2016-2PM-ET

Tim Sweeney will be present.

https://twitter.com/UnrealEngine/status/694959493055135746

CaT9y3BWwAABXf6.jpg:large
Click to expand...
 
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