Unreal Engine 4

Lore & Background

Development of Unreal Engine 4 began in 2003. In August 2005, Mark Rein revealed it had been in development for two years. By early 2008, Tim Sweeney was basically the only person working on the engine, though the R&D department was set to expand later that year. In 2011 Sweeney said he spent 60% of his day on UE4 research. The engine was unveiled at GDC 2012 and a public video was released on June 7, 2012. A planned feature called Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination (SVOGI) was replaced with a less computationally expensive algorithm due to performance concerns. UE4 was released via a new licensing model on March 19, 2014, with a monthly subscription and 5% royalty on gross revenues. The first game released using UE4 was Daylight on April 29, 2014. Epic made modifications to UE4 for Fortnite's battle royale mode in September 2017. UE4 officially supported platforms as of version 4.27 (August 2021) include Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia, Magic Leap, HTC Vive, Oculus, PlayStation VR, OSVR, Samsung Gear VR, and HoloLens 2; it formerly supported Google Daydream and HTML5.

In Their Own Story

The loading screen flickers to black. A single heartbeat—Pain's—rumbles through the bass channel. Then the world snaps into focus: a cathedral of rusted iron and black glass, its vaulted ceiling cracked open to a sky the color of a bruise. UE4's global illumination paints every rivet in cold, directional light while the ambient hellfire beyond the shattered windows throws long, licking shadows across the floor. A horde stirs in the distance, chitinous and many-limbed, and the sound design swells into a wall of shrieking. Pain's jaw sets. The shotgun's pump catches the light one more time. The engine holds at sixty. The fight begins.

Reader's Guide

Unreal Engine 4 features physically based materials based on a model from Disney's Brent Burley, with parameters BaseColor, Metallic, Roughness, and Cavity. It includes a simplified UI toolkit and a visual scripting system called Blueprints. Real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing was first unveiled at GDC in March 2018, with beta support added in UE4.22 in April 2019, leveraging DirectX 12 and DirectX Raytracing. Licensing: free for schools and universities from September 4, 2014; an Unreal Engine Marketplace was opened; a $5 million Unreal Dev Grants fund launched on February 19, 2015; from March 2015, UE4 was free for all users with a 5% royalty on revenue over $3,000 per quarter. Oculus VR announced in October 2016 it would pay royalty fees for Unreal-powered Oculus Rift titles up to $5 million per game. Epic Games Store games using UE4 are exempt from the 5% royalty. Effective May 13, 2020, the royalty exemption amount increased to $1,000,000 in lifetime gross revenue per title.

Did You Know?

• UE4 began development in 2003, two years before Mark Rein revealed it in 2005.
• The first game released using Unreal Engine 4 was Daylight on April 29, 2014.
• UE4 introduced a visual scripting system called Blueprints, a successor to UE3's Kismet.
• Real-time ray tracing support was added in beta form in UE4.22 in April 2019.