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I think a large part, why smaller, "indy" engines like haxeflixel, godot, cocos-2d etc are surviving is because of the much lower entry level. I wonder if the big ones like unreal, unity and crysis are going to collapse sometime under their own weight... How are they even adding all those new features without breaking stuff all the time? This is what impresses me most.
I haven't looked at their code, but I would bet they have fantastic regression tests. Something I've added to my own engine in the past year is "pixel perfect" tests: for a given test scene employing specific effects (soft shadows, reflections, refraction, etc) the renderer should produce an image that is a pixel perfect match with a known correct image. If you begin optimizing shaders and rendering code, regressions are caught very quickly, in an automated way. Sometimes the images are close enough to be acceptable (for example, if an optimization changed floating point precision, resulting in a color that is a shade different). In that case, the test fails, and you can replace the test image with your new rendered image, after you've vetted that it "looks correct" manually.
It's not anywhere close perfect in testing all code paths, but the payoff is rather large for the effort put into creating the test.
Apart from technical answers for good engineering practice, I'd just say they do it with money (engineering time). And as long as gamers keep drooling at next-gen graphics, they'll merrily keep maintaining this beast they've assembled :)
UE vs. the indie engines you mention are very different economical animals. Where these indie engines are made by volunteers or small/medium teams, UE is built by the huge team at Epic, they've been doing it for years, it will cost you (a "5% royalty based on gross revenue" [1]).
So, not diminishing their technical prowesses at all, just reminding they pursue a juicy market which wants these weighty features so that their new AAA games stay on top of whatever new hardware and graphics advancements without having to research/implement those themselves.
I love writing everything from scratch just for the sake of learning. And yet I love engines like UE for trying new stuff and real world projects.
In large code bases, automatic testing significantly facilitates adding new features. I don't really know how they test UE, though.
It also is nice tha that Unreal Engine is open source: https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github
They have a couple people work together to make the release notes, so I'm sure that helps.
ARK (http://www.playark.com/) is a solid success, but it's a mid-tier game. Fable Legends, Gears of War 4, Street Fighter V, Lawbreakers, Tekken 7 and a handful of other games can probably be considered AAA. Given where the games business is right now I think most commercial UE4 titles will be mid-tier indie titles from ex-AAA developers, and Epic has tailored their business model and engine to reflect that reality.
Don't you love it when everyone is competing on a level ground?
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/consoles/ps4-s-outselli...
Engine vendors follow where the install base is.
What method does one use to wade through such a large list of changes? Do you look for something specific, or read the whole thing, or just assume the changes will bleed flawlessly into your project?
Very impressive update, congrats.
I'm only working on a small hobby project, but I read the bulk of the notes. I mostly look through the subsystems I use most often, and skip over others that aren't super important to me.
As always, the most important notes are at the top. Also, if you follow the live streams, you're aware of some of the bigger changes far in advance (same if you use the preview builds).
Regarding Blender, Unreal accepts FBX file format, and I've had no issues with imports from Blender.
No game engine will make your game magically look awesome if you don't have the budget for art assets and don't have an artist on your team.
That said, the tools make it very easy for artists with no programming experience to make fantastic looking games with in depth game mechanics without using programming, so thats a plus.
The marketplace has quite a few high quality art assets, but they are pretty expensive, with each bundle ranging from $20-80 basically. The marketplace is lacking content for sure though, especially compared to the Unity asset store. More content gets added each week though.
It makes certain aspects of connecting art assets with gameplay code easier, but I don't think it at all makes it "very easy". We're still talking about a non-trivial amount of programming here. If you're not a programmer already, gameplay code is still going to be a struggle.
As far as most entertaining, that'll probably depend on what you're looking for and what your platform is. I've only got a Rift DK2 so I don't know about GearVR or Cardboard or Vive, etc.
