Unreal Engine 4 Outdoor Desert Demo...

[Doublez-Down]

This video is dedicated to all those who have spent countless hours manipulating tessellated cubes and vertex editing with the floor lofter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlgvfEicdwU

[UB_]

Hell yeah mrfrank. This is fantastic.

[SteadZ]

He cheated - his blood, sweat, tears and energy were not poured into that. All he did was move a paintbrush around with his feebly mind which cannot even cope with the thought of making a l33t tesselated cube environment...

Meshes - Smeshes in my opinion

Still looked kinda cool though...

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SZ
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[Z-enzyme]

He cheated - his blood, sweat, tears and energy were not poured into that. All he did was move a paintbrush around with his feebly mind which cannot even cope with the thought of making a l33t tesselated cube environment...

Meshes - Smeshes in my opinion

Still looked kinda cool though...

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SZ
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I know what you mean there. But still that looks great. And, have you even tried making that terrain material from scratch? That's some pretty difficult thing you know.

But still, meshes smeshes.

[Doublez-Down]

I'm not sure what the huge difference is (obviously there is one though) between UE3 and UE4, but I've made some decent terrains in UT2K4, and they weren't nearly that easy. Maybe he just made it look easier than it actually is.

[Frieza]

Pretty cool to see how much leverage you can get out of 1 rocky mesh

[xRedStar]

Yeah, and you see... these great looking maps are mainly designed through 3d modelling software, the slopes and painting are through the UDK. The usage of the models take a careful eye and solid understanding of what looks natural and what doesn't. These models require lots of work, and if you were going for time. It could take a single day to produce, texture, import and get perfectly setup. The issue with new games is that in order to make a new game, it takes about 2x or more people to do a single game than what it used to be. With just myself and another on unreal engine 1, I believe it is possible to do some neat things. But it already takes plenty of time and effort, and looking at these new games... why even bother.

It definitely is very overwhelming to think you have to get help with every little step you make towards being an experienced artist or programmer. In the UDK, it's likely you cannot be both like you could be in Unreal 1... has anyone even seen the class tree in the UDK. It's aggravating, it's large enough to flood your mind with over 10,000+ questions and very little knowledge about where to begin or how each class works in the whole structure. Also, without good or adept experience with programming... without helper modules... you'll have to research variables, functions, states in a very time consuming effort to actually find what you're looking for.

There is hardly any point in buying the UDK, because it gives you no other software legally to program and make these assets that are required to design a game. The sounds, the textures, the models, the script... why even go out of your way just to learn this crap. When your chances as an inexperienced designer is belittled by a huge crowd of other talented artists\programmers which some have enough money to support whatever shitty project 90% of the time it may be contributing to.

The only people who can make a big jump to this engine correctly are those who went to college and are only interested in working in a Dev Team or those who are seriously dedicating life to produce mediocre projects by themselves. IDK about you but I think I'd rather roll a big fat joint and sit back and enjoy my day flipping burgers, because there is no stable working job in the game industry unless you're into product marketing.

[ebd]

making games is hard

Well, yes. Few things worth doing are easy or effortless.

UE4 has had a big push to make the tools easier to use. Epic wants the indie crowd. Unrealscript and Kismet are gone in favor of Blueprints, which is pretty easy to work with. Plug-ins for Visual Studio (gross, I know) are included to make browsing C++ easier. The new geometry tools are really great. More recent builds even include a toolkit for using UE4 to make 2D games. If even a simple 2D game is out of reach for an independent or even an amateur developer, then it is because they aren't trying.

Sure, making Triple-A games requires a ton of resources. Don't try for that. You will never achieve it. Honestly, it is stupid to try for even for the big studios. How many 50+ million USD failures have happened recently? Wildstar, Elder Scrolls Online, The Old Republic, MoH: Warfighter, BF4...

Yes you may need some art skills you don't have. Blender and GIMP are both GPL (free as in freedom) and have many tutorials available. Blueprints should be able to handle 99% of your coding needs, but if you want to learn C++ there is a lot of free online documentation too.