Apparently, on Monday, Epic decided to spontaneously drop all subscription fees for everyone, making Unreal Engine 4 free for download and use for anybody.
The only fees still in place are those related to income (After a certain amount of income, you pay Epic 5% of the game's revenue).Here's the official blog:https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-freeI'm gonna get to downloading this when I get home.EDIT:In other news, Khronos has just officially announced the successor to OpenGL, to be called Vulkan
Damn, you beat me to it.
I've already downloaded it and given it a look. The apparently revised interface looks…a lot like Unity. Other than that, it'll be nice having another powerful tool at my fingertips. It truly is a great time to be in game development.I was looking at the feature list for version 4.7, and it looks like UE4 has better 2D support than Unity, at any rate. Will be interesting to play around with it, and the fact that the underlying source code is C++ is a great thing for me.
We could always consider a UE4 competition, with entries being open source, as a sort of way for people to learn how to use it.
Hmmm I was always curious about this platform. It seemed like it could make some pretty cool stuff relatively quickly, but it always seemed a little more proprietary for me at face value for some reason…
and yes the fee is very fair.I once almost tried UE4, but then I looked at the C++ API… my reaction was that it's easier to build an own 3D engine in C++ than use that one. But maybe I'll give it another try later…
Unity 5 is also free, though still has silly limitations such as not getting the dark skin. > : (
http://unity3d.com/unity/personal-editionOther Pro features are free now, though, so I guess that'll have to do. Still, $75/mo or $1,500 for the dark skin…Have they removed the mandatory splash screen? It bugs me for some reason.
UE4 has one major advantage for me: C++. Give me a choice between C++ and any other language, and C++ will always win.Splash screen is still there, unfortunately.
I actually see UE4's C++ as a downside, but that's because I'm more comfortable with C# than it. I was looking at the Unity comparison in the UE4 docs and it just seemed like you had to go through more hoops to do the same things in UE4 than you did with Unity and C#.One little advantage I'm interested in: built in tilemap and 2D mapping support in UE. Unity's 2D is still kinda poor (Though I might re-evaluate that after trying Unity 5).