Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament [UT4]

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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by UT99.org »

billybill wrote:Hmm my computer crashed and had some trouble while I was editing my last post. There's a whole bunch of replies. So I'll put what I was going to finish with first

Postal 2 is not published by Epic, maybe our govts knew that down under, and knew the publisher wouldn't be able to challenge them, thus the penalty for mere possession of the game is like possessing heroin. Unlike UT which is fine here, but banned in places like Germany. But seems like possession and hosting of playable servers is not going to get you in trouble for "possession of the game". if the case arouse where the new UT got censored in Germany or elsewhere I would hope Epic does take some action that doesn't censor the game. Especially not do what south park did where other regions got effected (unlikely though since not console regions). I wish they'd be more outspoken on the subject, maybe even mount a legal challenge. (Moderators: Is this borderline "politics" and not allowed? Could it be broken into another thread about censorship of UEngine games?)

OK, regarding my quote. Or mis-quote. . Personally, I'd fully support this site becoming the HUB for UEngine1 games and a full make-over to support that :P There is already lack of support for other UEngine games, maybe ut99.org becomes UEngine1.org hehe
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by papercoffee »

Feralidragon wrote:@Paper: It's not a win-win situation. The fact that Epic has to manage a forum and the community, manage the marketplace, give their input, do plenty of things also themselves, it's not something I would consider "win-win" at all, they are literally spending part of their working time for this, time that has to be paid as well somehow.
It's going from C person doing just X and Y to also do Z on top of it, time they could use for anything else more profitable if you think about it.
That's what actually impresses me the most, they are trying to do something new never tried before at this scale, and it is actually a risk for them.
Ok ...I see what you try to explain ... lets say, the timing is odd.
-No hint, no announcement in any kind about the future of the UT franchise since the publication of UE4.
-All questions about it from the community are ignored by Epic ...instead is GoW advertised and Fortnight.
-The GoW franchise is finally sold to Microsoft... but still nothing about UT.
-GameSpy is closing the Masterserver ...The community is afraid and puzzled ...countless questions hail down on Epic.
-(this is a guess) Epic realizes that the Community of the UT franchise is still THAT big.
-They finally announce a new UT.

Epic is not taking that much risk ...they take the opportunity and let the Fans make the game.
On top of that, if you check the history of modding, you will see that most people do not finish what they started, either due a sudden lack of time or lack of motivation or interest, or even other reasons,

:sad2: ...I know.
so the risk is even bigger than this since the moment they have someone in the community working in any key part of UT, they get dependent on this person and his/her whim, making it the kind of risk you never have in an enclosed studio working with professionals instead.
The more time they take in releasing a first version of the game, the more money they will have to invest in the process until the marketplace opens.
The Engine is already there... They making money in selling the engine to other game producers?
What will Epic contribute to the new UT than just the Name-Rights and the Marketplace?
(Ok this part bothers me because I missed the stream and nowhere in the net did I find info about this)
Furthermore, you only pay to get access to the *full*, I repeat, !!*FULL*!! Unreal Engine 4 editor and source code *to do whatever you want*, I repeat: to do whatever you want. Up until UE4, developers could only dream of having any of the engine versions in their hands since it cost so much and the policy around it was so tight.
The fact that you can help develop UT with it is just a bonus, not the real intrinsic cost of it.
uhu... so you will be able to mod for the new UT without having the full Unreal Engine 4 editor??
So honestly, I don't know what people have to complain about it
People? ...Right now it's just me here? :noidea
Edit ---------------
And Cronoloop...

Ok ...I say "Mal schauen was uns die Zukunft bringt" = "Let's see what the future holds ready for us"
I'm not that much hyped ...but that's ok.
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Cronoloop »

uhu... so you will be able to mod for the new UT without having the full Unreal Engine 4 editor??
No.

If things stay like now, this game is going to fail so hard you can't imagine
What made UT99 a good game was the customization and the HUGE amount of maps, skins, mutators, etc. made FOR FREE by people who LOVED the game.
Now you'll have to pay (and I'm fine with this) monthly (not fine with this) to get the FULL EDITOR/ENGINE (why a mapper need this? a mapper just wants to get the UED and start to map) and then RELEASE IT (and guess what? it won't be free, because you paid, and if some poor guy will make it free there will be someone else who'll make something cooler and you'll have to pay).

"No why? You'll get the full engine u can docrazy stuff with it you can make apps for phones too" lol no one cares about that shit in all honest.

These kind of things will literally destroy the game and the community, and the only good thing this new UT will do is bring back us to the REAL UT.

Facing reality though, the Unreal Engine will get cracked (I Think it already is) and serious people will start to spread mods/maps for free, so Epic will have either to change something or I don't know really.
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Wises »

hmm well .. I think that this Engine maybe near final in terms of engines.

as updates will be included in the monthly fee.. so the engine itself will be maintained / upgraded as time goes by

and depending on the number of serious developers in the community will dictate the direction / costs of this imo.

Unfortunately in terms of Development the limiting factor will be;

What are Unreal Engine 4's system requirements?

You will need a powerful setup to get started developing with UE4 right now.

Here's what we recommend:

Desktop PC or Mac
Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later
Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD series card or higher
8 GB RAM
https://www.unrealengine.com/faq

there goes 2/3'rds of the community from even starting any kind of Development for UnrealTournament 2k14
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Tobibrocki »

As far as I understand it, you don't have to pay monthly actually, I heard from a lot of people that you can buy the Editor and then do your thing for as long as you want with it, paying every month is only to get you Engine Updates and access to the Marketplace (Github?) to get and upload assets. So, in other words, for developing the game you would potentially have to pay every month (or at least every once in a while) so you can get the latest Engine/Editor version and have access to Assets the community creates for it (beta maps, etc.), but you could in theory build a map without spending money every month.
I know where you are coming from though, this whole deal with paying money to get the editor and having to pay again and again to get your stuff up in the repository or get it into the game at all sadly prevents me as a total beginner to even build a simple cube map just for fun once the game has progressed a little to that stage where its playable.
I do really hope that once the game is progressed to a certain point where most of it is complete and it's not necessary anymore to pay for it via the Editor costs, that they consider creating a free version of said editor, maybe with occasional updates for it as well, it could be stripped down in a few areas and just allow model making and mapping, but a free version should definitely be considered by Epic if they want this to game to truly shine long after its initial creation.
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Carbon »

You pay for a subscription - $19.99 - then cancel it. You still get the engine and all of the tools, just no updates or templates. Develop your stuff. If you see a significant update or something, renew your subscription, get the update, then cancel again and continue your work. This is coming from Flak on the Epic forums.

I suspect that the only people who will need a constant renewal are those who engage in huge projects. Those who want to map or work on smaller-scale mods won't need a constant subscription to develop or publish work.

To talk of cracking the engine when you can essentially buy it for $20 is pretty lame. Such versions would not only not receive updates, etc, but I would hope that there would be something in the final builds or at the point of release that would be a roadblock to making public content developed with illegitimate versions.

Sure having to pay something for the Engine and tools will motivate some to charge for their work, but $20 is not a lot of money. Sure, something on the Red Orchestra scale might be costly to develop in the end (though probably not), but I bet that most content will emerge free of charge. Paying to get your work into the official repository is likely optional: you can probably publish your map anywhere, but it won't perhaps get the coverage it would in the official location.

I am not sure what exactly your $19.99 buys, but Epic probably realize that a recurring monthly payment will turn many people off and thus have likely put together a good, workable package for the one-time subscription.

Anyhow, all of this speculation is fine, but ultimately meaningless. Either get involved somehow or wait; those are the real choices. Epic are taking the forum talk seriously; if you go over there and register, your ideas, thoughts and concerns will get heard. My big concern is that I will have to pay to play in the end. If I want to play online but all of the servers are running paid-for mods and maps, then I will likely be unable to play there until I pay as well. This might be problematic, but then again, there might be 'pure' servers are well; ones without any custom content.
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Wises »

All in all... we've been asking for something like this... for the last 1 1/2 decades.. so its now come to pass.
Allowig a collaboration of new and old veterans and gamers and modders and mappers &... to get involved.
If like Carbon says is true then $20.00 for everything needed to get the jobs done .. then Awesome.

The Blueprints system that they have employed is the future of scripting and would be alot easier for non-coders to enter the modding arena.. with its WYSIWYG styled approach practically anyone can build something creative and say at least . I MADE THAT!

[youtube]IKAcrNHENC8[/youtube] [youtube]6-ZwY4RDaPQ[/youtube]
[youtube]pvTHfIBMEEs[/youtube]



*In regards to someone's statement re:mobile device , application/game making being or no use. Think like this instead..

If you have a simple gane concept and were able to build it easily and sell it for a $buck on google/apple store.. then you can potentialy make a shitload of coin from less then a months work which costed you $20.00

For example... doing a simple catchy game ie;flappy bird , or AgroDuck!

Putting it playstore for $1.00

After 20 downloads.. its paid for the IDE... now... in 2-3months time.. your bank balance may have over $10K...
Or 10,299 downloads.

- Epics %5 = a good damn profit and money for 1 months work..

And if your game had over $1M in downloads.. then hello... Retirement plan sussed at 18years of age.. (or 40 ;)

So.. imo it's worth the investment..

Now lets see if they allow for the ground to be exploded.. or do we need to make some blocks of reinforced concrete with other blocks of dirt then clay followed by .... then bedrock.. and fire off several landmines and see if the physics doe's it's job!

I'm looking at RedFaction styled destruction here ... only more.
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Feralidragon »

@Paper: They are still taking a good risk in this. No one can actually assume that only because they get profit from selling it to other publishers (and getting 5% of the income) that they can simply inject some of that money into this, enterprises do not work that way (nor the small nor the big ones), the usage of that money has to be *always* justified internally (and sometimes externally if there's a partnership going).

Furthermore, about the "just the marketplace", I want to clarify that even if that was the only thing they would have to support in all this (which is not), that's not a job to be taken lightly, at all. A marketplace is one of the most complex things to handle nowadays, specially when it comes to money and partnerships which they will certainly make eventually, and it takes a lot of people and effort to get one going and going well (I know this from own experience btw, years of it).


@Cronoloop: I disagree completely. History once again proves otherwise: Google Play is the biggest Android marketplace of all time, you need a small fee to enter it and to ensure a certain degree of quality (screenshots, high-res icon, etc). Yet, half of the apps (specially games) are free. Instead most of those have ads and/or in-app billing, that's how they get revenue.
You cannot possibly compare the work needed from a map made in UE1 to a map in UE4, they are in totally different realms of difficulty and effort, so obviously most will seek some sort of revenue from it, and they deserve such, but the pay-for-it model is actually dying in that regard, and instead there's more focus in other kinds of revenue which are starting to get more profitable in fact.
Although it's true that many do it out of "love", you cannot spend just a day or a week in developing a map or a proper mod, you will have to take more time than that, and no matter how much you love a game, there's a breaking point where the effort needed outweighs that love, and as such you will seek some form of revenue in one way or another.
ASLY

Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by ASLY »

Dr.Flay wrote:Can't wait for the arguments to start.
"No! UT should be more like this"
"No not like that, like this!"
"hell-no! way too much of that, there needs to be more of these"
"Uggg it's to fast"
"No it's too slow"
"To many vehicles!"
"Not enough vehicles"
It's started! https://forums.unrealengine.com/forumdi ... Tournament
To much topic, to much replies, to much discussion,the disturbance will be too big, that's crap I think.
I don't care, I stay in the good old UT99! Image :mrgreen:
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Cronoloop »

@Cronoloop: I disagree completely. History once again proves otherwise: Google Play is the biggest Android marketplace of all time, you need a small fee to enter it and to ensure a certain degree of quality (screenshots, high-res icon, etc). Yet, half of the apps (specially games) are free. Instead most of those have ads and/or in-app billing, that's how they get revenue.
You cannot possibly compare the work needed from a map made in UE1 to a map in UE4, they are in totally different realms of difficulty and effort, so obviously most will seek some sort of revenue from it, and they deserve such, but the pay-for-it model is actually dying in that regard, and instead there's more focus in other kinds of revenue which are starting to get more profitable in fact.
Although it's true that many do it out of "love", you cannot spend just a day or a week in developing a map or a proper mod, you will have to take more time than that, and no matter how much you love a game, there's a breaking point where the effort needed outweighs that love, and as such you will seek some form of revenue in one way or another.
I really do hope that only the biggest mods like total conversions and similar things will be a pay thing.
You know the game is going nowhere if you have to pay even for a map, right? The worst thing is: you discourage people from modding and mapping. How many people started opening that UED you found in the folder and then learnt how to use it? All the noobs and the casual people will be discouraged from doing so, since now they have to pay (leaving out people who'll download it illegally).

What we'll get? A bunch of elitist mappers who put maps on 1€ on the "Marketplace" because they think they did something good. No one will pay, people will understand and start to mod for free if they want to get some props.

Be honest: this thing CAN work, but it won't be the NEW UNREAL TOURNAMENT everybody was excepting. If UT99 mods were to be payed for, I think fan forums like this wouldn't even exist
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Hellkeeper »

Wait, the real news here is... UE1 code possibly made public?
That would make all these years of struggling with an obsolete engine, all these sacrifices made in the name of performance, all thee people who suffered and fought against the technical limitation of the engine FINALLY WORTH IT!

If this happens, I'll drink myself to heaven and personally move to the US to give physical gratifications to several Epic members (and also to CliffyB).
You must construct additional pylons.
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Feralidragon »

@Cronoloop:
I think you are misunderstanding something: UE4 is *not* for the casual developer, the kind that writes a couple of lines of code or does a 100Kb cubic map. For someone to use it, they will have to want to use it in the first place, and have already an idea on the expected minimum quality.
Let's assume that the tools are given for free, now please do a nice map with it.... you will quickly realize that you can't do much at a quick pace anyway, you will have to build things, or otherwise reuse stuff just like it happened in most UT2k4 maps, making all maps look and feel the same, or worse, having a billion different versions of CTF-Face or DM-Deck because someone "casually" modified it to just have some different stuff...
To build stuff from it, you need to use external tools anyway, either a free one like Blender, or a paid one like Maya or 3DStudio.

Once you get even to UE3, you're not "playing" around anymore, subtracting brushes here, adding stuff there, etc, you're using a fully professional oriented game/map editor meant to be used with external tools you're supposed to learn or know to use already, while in UE1 and even UE2, the editor was still a lot more community/casual friendly, hence you will have to literally become something close to an "artist", even if a small one, to be able to do anything at all there.

Furthermore, I think it's quite disrespectful towards any developer at all to imply that whoever does go with this current is "elitist minded" or that will sell the maps and mods at all, and even if they do, that the maps and mods won't be worth paying? Are you implying that someone's skill and work is not worth any income at all, specially when it takes tons of their (many times short) free time? Are you implying that you can output the same quality as them *effortlessly* to justify such claims? I assume you (like anyone else) pay more for useless things that took way waaay less effort to do by their manufacturers, than maps and mods in a modern engine.

Considering the amount of effort needed to build each map, if they are sold at 1$, that's actually very very cheap. Considering that other games sell mappacks at about 15$ and you only get about 4 or 5 of them, and players do buy them, I wonder what's wrong with this approach anyway.

I think that UT1 and UT2k4 communities have been spoiled over the years in getting content for free for the game, and now totally disregard the effort needed to do something modern and feel entitled to still get stuff for free anyway, as if it only took a mapper a day to do a map in this beast of an engine, it's a completely spoiled consumer mindset that doesn't take into consideration the amount of sweat needed until the point of releasing something nowadays.

Also, many of those mappers will certainly release maps for free as well anyway. If anything, some will do so simply over the fact that it's actually good for the paid ones: by giving a nice free map, people will know the expected minimum quality of the paid ones by a certain author. Others will release them for free because they want to, paying to develop it doesn't change that. Developers can even come as far as doing the exact same thing most UT admins do: setup a donation system to support the cost, and it's actually something seen a lot in open source.

Once again, and I can't stress this enough, history has proven and is continually proving that this kind of approach actually works (I just named one: Google Play, although it's a one time fee [25$], you still need a fee to use it nonetheless as well, and there's a very strict policy in what, when and how release stuff that steal more time from the developer to prepare releases, yet there are tons of free apps).
Yeah, it will certainly make some developers to stand aside from it at the start due to the initial cost, but that's only in the beginning while things are not mainstreamed, and that's actually not a bad thing all things considered specially security wise (for instance, Google Play uses the fee to actually control the amount of new developers, to discourage someone to create multiple accounts in an attempt to distribute malware, and it works to a good extent). Once stuff starts to get released, and people start to play with them, developers will want to dig into UE4, even if just once to try it out for about 20$.

On top of all that, anyone with a machine good enough to develop properly with UE4 will certainly have the funds to have no problems in paying for it, even if 1 single time.

Regardless of all this however, even if what I just said is proven to be wrong in the future (which is also possible of course), that will reflect in Epic directly, and they will certainly take another course of action and maybe create new types of subscriptions, free and paid ones with limited access, à la UDK. But just like in any business model, you never start giving things away, you start by restricting them first, so you can then gradually give some of them away if that proves to be a better course of action business-wise.
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by Cronoloop »

I think you are misunderstanding something: UE4 is *not* for the casual developer, the kind that writes a couple of lines of code or does a 100Kb cubic map. For someone to use it, they will have to want to use it in the first place, and have already an idea on the expected minimum quality.
And this is the point
Where's the tool for casual developers?
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by papercoffee »

Cronoloop wrote:
I think you are misunderstanding something: UE4 is *not* for the casual developer, the kind that writes a couple of lines of code or does a 100Kb cubic map. For someone to use it, they will have to want to use it in the first place, and have already an idea on the expected minimum quality.
And this is the point
Where's the tool for casual developers?
^This

The Pay-For-Content model is working very well in TF2 from Valve ...but Valve build at least the game beforehand.
Additional content comes now from two sources, the community and Valve itself.
New models of weapons, player and accessories are on sale ...Big map-packs also. But also can you download free content.
The player buys the stuff, Valve gets the fee and the creator gets money too.
But the creator doesn't have to pay up front for the tools he have to use to create the stuff.

That's all what 's bothers me.
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Re: Epic: Future of Unreal Tournament

Post by UT99.org »

billybill wrote:I'm not 100% against this model of the user-made mods/profit, I was hoping the client would be a lot like Starcaft2, with the custom mod area. (& the match-making/ladders). Maybe I need to get out more and try other games so I can compare it in an over-all sense.

I want to know though, are people going to start trying to hide their code so that their mods are not stolen and combined into something bigger which is sold to profit. Or does this not matter since the modding can be in c++ which is extremely hard to get the source-code, you can only see what objects in the computer are being messed with. And pardon my poor knowledge of the master language
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