Unreal Engine 4 – Linux Demos | Hacker News Reader

Unreal Engine 4 – Linux Demos

wiki.unrealengine.com

82 pointsgalapago34 comments

Are those standalone or do I need a paid subscription to the engine?

edit: Not sure why I ended up downvoted for asking a simple question. I downloaded one of them and they are standalone binaries.

Unreal should be a nice addition to the other games on Linux. :-) I tried the Ninja demo and it seemed fluid. Then I tried the Elemental Demo (we just watch right?) and it seemed to pause periodically through the demo. It seemed laggy in this regard and reminded me of when I play Rust even though that's a Unity game. It's still encouraging to see these companies get excited about Linux though, Linux rocks, no reason great game companies can't rock with it.

Anyone able to get the console working? Should be possible top open with ~, but no go here. Might be some keyboard layout issue, but have tried switching to US layout.

Was hoping to show an FPS counter with the "Stat FPS" command.

The demos are looking great by the way, except for some stuttering in the start of Elemental.

The Console key is set to ~ in input.ini but doesn't appear to work on this build of UE4. Only option that's working for me is:

-fullscreen -resx=1920 -resy=1080

I had no idea that the Elemental demo has been made public. Are these available for Mac and Windows aswell?

Tried the cave demo: had quite some tearing for me. Is there a vsync option? I tried -vsync but it didn't change anything.

PS: I've a GeForce GTX 760 (driver version 331.79), 16GB RAM, Intel i7 quad core (8 threads) with 3.50GHz on Fedora 20 x86_64. So should there really be tearing?

Tearing doesn't necessarily mean your computer isn't keeping up with the game--you can get tearing with over 60 FPS as well. It just means the frames aren't in sync with your display.

Are you using a compositor?

I turned the compositor off and set the graphic cards profile to "performance" (was "auto") before I started the demo. For some reason I get tearing in videos (mplayer or vlc - no matter which output module) when I don't set the profile to performance as well. I don't get tearing in flash or html5 videos (chrome, no matter if compositor or not or if performance or auto)!

Is there any more room for improvement in the video game graphics? Are we going to need more John Carmacks and Sweenys?

Carmack and Sweeny are perhaps the most famous game graphics programmers, but they are far from the only knee pushing the state of the art. In fact, they've both been rather quiet lately. Carmack has been nose-down in VR lately and Sweeny has hired an excellent team that has been doing most of the talking for Epic.

Meanwhile, check out The Order:1886 and Beyond:Two Souls for examples of the most technically impressive game graphics from studios most people haven't heard of.

Game graphics have taken big leaps in the past few years. I attribute that to amazing advances in GPU tech coupled with quite a lot of open discussion and sharing of research in the game graphics community. But, we're still far from where we want to be.

To add to that, Sweeney hasn't really been a graphics programmer since the late 90's. He's always been much more focused on engine infrastructure, leaving graphics to other very competent programmers at Epic.

Is fully destructible in any way and dynamic virtual environment one of the targets?

In terms of static scenes, I'd say the industry is at the end of an S-curve right now. In terms of motion, character animation, and physical interactions between objects, there's still a long way to go. You need a AAA budget just to get a character's hand to realistically pick up an object in a scene without it jumping; I think these sorts of problems are next in line for graphics engines to solve.

There is indeed a lot more to do. While there is clearly diminishing returns, secondary rays for instance are computationally very difficult, and contribute significantly to the final perception of the scene. While we're able to take all sorts of shortcuts for special instances a general and global solution is still an unsolved problem.

Someone go find Ken Silverman!

These sorta worked for me: everything was yellow... I'm just on the latest Ubuntu, nothing fancy

Linux apps packaged as zip? #WTF

Why not? It's not something you need/want an installer for.

zip doesn't save file permissions and also .tar.xz gives smaller file sizes.

Are you sure about that? http://i.imgur.com/BpYW657.png Ok, .xz might be smaller but literally everyone can unpack .zip files.

Oh, didn't know that. Well than there's only the smaller file size. I think in the Linux world everyone can also unpack tar.xz files.

Yeah, but I guess it's because they come from Windows and don't know what the best compression algorithm supported by every Linux distribution of today is. They just know everyone can unpack zip and its good enough. Heck I would have guessed 7z is the best current compression algorithm... wait is 7z a algorithm or a container format? Wasn't the algorithm 7z uses called lzma or something like that? Who keeps track of this all?

7z and xz both use LZMA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xz

FYI these are compiled for 64bit

Almost every non-budget machine has been 64-bit capable since 2007 or so (Core 2 Duo).

That said, there are plenty of 32-bit OS installs out there.

I didn't mean my comment to be judgemental. Just a heads up that there are no 32 bit builds.

(I for one happen to run 32-bit Ubuntu on a non-budget, 64-bit capable machine, hence the comment)

Yeah but for Linux desktops? You can safely assume that a modern Linux desktop installation is 64bit these days. (Actually for years.)

I wouldn't. Ubuntu, arguably the most common desktop distribution, just started using 64-bit as a default last year with 13.10.

Seems to be a trend, even XCOM was only available for 64 bit processors.

Really slow download speeds (around 60kb/s)

Slow for me too, it looks like the downloads are linked to another site not served through CloudFront. If they were uploaded to the wiki the downloads should be faster.

I'm getting 1Mb/Sec here.

1 Mb/s now, it was really slow the past days.

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