Unreal Engine and the Epic Ecosystem

hi so quick introduction my name is Joseph I'm the Technical Evangelist for Epic Games and I manage the MENA region and Turkey by the way do you prefer I do it in English or Arabic oh okay English deal so this is my email and Twitter account if you need to reach me well that's basically it a little bit about my background I used to work on a VR game at word void as a technical designer and I also teach game development at Saint Joseph's University in Beirut and I manage the community in Lebanon lab game dev I also using only for six years and I joined epoch more than a year ago so okay brief history so

back in the 80s we actually made it that's a teal which is one of the first few games so that's even before Google existed whenever you have a game and you want to put it online you would list it on a page and people usually just name their game with a so it'd be at the beginning of the list but he decided to be away at the bottom so that's why it's called Zed Zed and then T for ten and even back then to C++ because it used to be C++ and object-oriented design which just came out because we were following all the trends being on the latest technologies and if we fast word a bit later like in the 90s it's when all the tournament came out and with it came the Unreal Engine the first one it was the one of the first engines to run on a graphic card dedicated one and then after of course came Gears of War infinity played on mobile in 2010 and eventually it came fortnight so we have a long history of successful titles all of them pushing the engine and us developing our own games so right now

the company is still owned by Tim he still make all the decisions he still has the majority shares of all the company and basically what I want to do is we want to make a change we want to push the ecosystem and game development and we've done so in the past multiple times so for example when we were done with Paragon we actually released the game assets all of them for free for the community to use and there was 12 million dollar worth of assets for free we changed the percentage on the marketplace to 12% it reads to be 30% but not only that we actually reimbursed everyone the 18% difference from the beginning to now fortnight was the first game to ever have cross platform between PlayStation and Xbox and there's just a long history of that you can find so I'm gonna start with Unreal Engine Unreal Engine is 24 years old and it was released in 2014 and it's free it was made free in 2015 so far there's more than 5 million users and two of them actually came in the last year it's open

source so you can use the engine you can change it if you face a bug you can fix it yourself you can ask someone the community it's the exact same engine everyone have and it's free but there's a 5% royalty and so the impact of fortnight actually overrun read what happened was we have right now over 250 million players playing fortnight it also means we need to optimize for tonight a lot to work on every single device it needs to go around to perfection and every feature we have to do we have a real life use case to actually test it on so with the development we actually had hundred thousands of fixes and we even had some presentation you can find them at GDC or on YouTube channel basically the one we gave at GDC at only fest another presentation on how we optimized for tonight to look exactly the same on all devices and run perfectly so right now for tonight runs on Android Nintendo switch Xbox Playstation PC and iOS and

this is how the game looks like on every device and it's exactly the same project we don't have different project for each platform it's one project that's running on all platforms so so far the way we're doing it we're releasing three to four releases a year so basically it's not bug fixes of course we do have those but also we release new features and new tools for you to use in games because the technology is going really fast and we have to keep up with the market but also we have to make it easier for developers to make games for example for 23 was released around like a few weeks ago with it in 422 we actually gave the summary tracing that's when the retracing came out of experimental for people to use so you have all the features which is size of fraction have inclusion etc and we even added like a plugin for animation sharing so in fortnight for example we had millions of zombies on screen and we needed to optimize all the animation to run easily on the device and for that we added the

animation sharing plugin which recently was recent for 22 and for example we changed our a lot of stuff and how it works for compiling the code so now to recompile the entire engine and it takes a it's 350 percent faster did you compile everything if you make a code it's 30% faster and if you just change a few lines it's less than a few seconds to actually almost a few seconds to actually compile everything with life plus plus and that's because when we work on fortnight we had to iterate a lot on the game and developer just couldn't wait a lot of time for the code to compile every time so we had to optimize it a lot in 423 one of the major changes that we had other than retracing improvement was chaos which is our new physics engine and it can handle a lot of reflections and the thing is a lot of time in the industry find that existing technology become a bit outdated so we decided to make our own solution and this is why we had to do our own physics engine I will show demo in a bit but first I want to also talk

about there's also the virtual tax ring and unreal insight which I'll show video as well so this is chaos there's some audio but it's not important so it's fine basically I just want to show some destructions we call [Music] [Music] [Music] now figure out what that thing actually does you've been approved for a mandatory

overtime [Music] so for example now all the destruction you saw were made inside of Andreea like fracturing the building itself deciding which piece can actually fall and which piece will stay attached all of that used in oh really we actually showed this demo at GDC we'll keep working on the engine until we have support for everything including vehicles etc and right now it is accessible anyone with the source code can actually just download unreal and start experimenting with the engine itself also at the end when the entire building fall that's cached the simulation so not only you can actually do simulation every time but you can also cache it and now you can run it on smaller devices for example and it's hybrids so basically some of the pieces that you actually hit will just fall on the ground they simulate physics while the other just played the cached animation okay for a tracing so the first thing we're working on is the denoiser so instead of using the default the noise are working

on our own and if we do that it means we can gain some frame rates in the gameplay so now you can do more stuff with ray tracing so first time at GDC which old ray tracing we had like a device that cost around fifty thousand dollars with five GPUs from one video and you see the new demo we showed was running 4k 24 FPS on a single 20 80 or r-tx and yeah so the virtual texturing one is really interesting because now you can put giant textures inside of unreal and instead of using mid map which is it used a lower resolution texture based on the distance it will cut the texture into smaller pieces and based on your distance it won't load the entire texture it's the more of a hybrid solution so actually there's a video on try to see if it plays it's actually on the next slide so basically it those squares you're seeing right now this is how the texture so at

the end you see like lower resolution one and then right next to the camera it's high resolution and you don't have to worry about memory management so unreal insight is a way to actually know how your game is performing on multiple devices at once so you have one computer which is the server and other computers running the game and all of them are reporting how the performance on the game is running okay so this is the video now you can see exactly for each line of code running on your game on each device how much the frame rate is how much the performance consumption is everything basically you can record that session you can debug it later and now you can basically test easily your game on as many devices as you want so the foliage show that we had an unreal where you can paint grass before with it now you can also paint anything basically any actor any blueprint so even if you have a dynamic code you can an object basically you can use the tool and paint with it and the advantage of that is basically you can even move the

landscape and those actors will move with the landscape so it's very dynamic as well and it's highly performant another feature we added was exponential fog which is dual exponential for we should have one and now you can put multiple ones like you can see in the distance there's one and one before the lower areas and you can pick different colors and different densities and this is just a small list of some of the features added just in the latest release anyway so basically the epic echo system which is we succeed when you succeed and we try to reflect that with everything like for example the thing we do with the engine which is 5% it's basically it's like a partnership so if you don't succeed we don't make anything and this is why it's more we we're in it with you and you can use unreal for free if you want to learn if you want to do some demos some prototype as basically

and you anything unless you get the game to the market so to help you actually make a release that game and succeed we release the program epic mega grants which is a hundred million fund and if you're making a game in unreal there's actually multiple categories like let me show you one second yes so if you're making a game if you make movies or anything related to media entertainment architecture for example if you're working in education you want to teach people to code or anything else or if you actually doing anything open-source like a decent example would be how we sponsored the blender with it and it's basically like a grant so we just give you the money we don't want anything in return and we just want to help you to succeed and you can apply by going to our real engine slash mega grant okay so there's also the store like you know the percentage right now on the market is thirty percent which is the standard for a regular store and it used to make sense before when the store used to provide publishing services but now with

the store becoming oversaturated it doesn't work anymore and for developers that 30% can be a lot so that's why we reads the store with twelve percent and one of the main differences is that you control your page so you can control how you rate your the review section if you want to show it at the beginning or maybe you want to hide it the first few weeks because maybe you want enough people to buy the game first and have proper reviews before actually putting it publicly there is no one suggesting other game on your page so it's completely your page you can control it and it's open to all engines so if you're using unity on real game maker Koko's anything you can post the game there now it is at the beginning a bit heavily created because right now we're still growing the user base and at this point we're just selecting games to make sure we have the market share so that way everyone who's racing on the game will have users to buy their game and they can succeed as well so the long the store actually launched last year so it's only been a year and user base has been growing

exponentially ever since and eventually we plan to open it to everyone so there's for example multiple programs to actually even help you market your game like support a creator so we partnered with a lot of tubers and twitch live streamers and they basically they can do they can get a link of your game inside of the store and they get a commission for every game they tell they sell which is about 5% by default you can increase it for each streamer if you want and even epic pays the first 5% right now for the first year of anyone using that service ok so there's also the marketplace what if you're a small team or you want person you don't have time to finish an entire game and ship it but you're a very good artist or a programmer and you can work on a single feature you can actually make a living out of the marketplace you can put your asset there great so there's over 9,000 products and around 200-300 seller 2300

sellers and it's also growing rapidly all the content is being checked by people from epics so we open every answer to make sure it's high quality and 12 the norms and everything and it go back to the store and we have multiple sales around the year and also every once in a while we release free content for people to use in the game as well so as I mentioned before when reduce the percentage to 12% and yeah so the sponsored content is basically we select a few content from the marketplace and we offer the creators to actually reimburse them for everyone who downloads their game and they download their project basically and every month we pick five assets and anyone can go to the marketplace they can clean them and they will keep them forever basically and there are high quality assets so now you have more enough content to actually make any game you want and this is in addition to all the free content we release like the pangarans at infinity blade and all the demos we have and also there's a lot of content becoming

permanently free as well so yeah if you want to apply this is the link and yeah you can get started becoming a marketplace creator so we also have our own conference called on real fast and it's highly technical so basically we talk to studios in Europe and the US making bigger projects and unreal and we ask them to give a talk and share some of the challenges they're facing so last year we had 900 people it was in Prague the ticket was around 150 euros but it included also the hotel the dinners the breakfast everything so you only had to cover your flight and this is by the way those two developers are from Lebanon so I was happy to see someone from the Middle East other than me going to that conference it is really a good conference and if you have any technical questions I would highly recommend you go there because a lot of developers and people from epic will be there and as we also announced this speaker opening for 2020 so to keep

in mind we also have the meetup groups so for example whenever I'm in the region I try to go to one of the meetup group give a presentation but it's actually organized by the local community there's one enjoyed and actually on Tuesdays they're going to do a meet-up you're in at PSU tea you're more than welcome to go to find a meetup near you just go to meetup.com slash bro slash Unreal Engine there's one in Saudi Arabia there's one in Lebanon there's an basically multiple location on the Middle East we also have a game jam for films not just for games so if you're making game architecture or films anything there's a game jam for you if you're making games there's also another one we also have unreal present where we're in certain countries we when the communities are growing we start organizing our own event where we invite publishers we invite the developers and we put them in touch and we support developers at conferences we sponsor them we sponsor their boost like at GDC for example sponsored the flight the cost and the boost and just brought developers to show their game and we did

the same at multiple conferences and actually one of the games there's actually from Lebanon went to over the conference indigo actually so this is the video from that game so again if you're making gaming unreal reach out if there's an opportunity I will let you know and we also have the live streams where we have a lot of we cover all the new added features we highlight you on social media we can retweet your game if you want we organize mixers evening and we've very well connected so we know a lot of publishers a lot of people in the region if you have any questions about people you wanna work with or some advice you can always reach out to me on my email also if you're a student we have sizzle reels for every year we released a video of all the project done by student which you can basically send us a link and we'll select some of them and make a video out of them and finally unreal is actually used outside of games so in automotive industry architecture we have an entire tools and for that for virtual production I want to show us more video

oh this is for example in a concert where they used unreal for interactive graphics so as people were dancing they were changing the graphic on stage DJ was controlling all the graphics the mood the environment in real time a lot of movies also being made inside of the engine so yeah one second this video is not playing anyway and it's also a lot of our partners are helping us put the engine in that department there's an entire presentation on use of unreal and Enterprise because it's a very advanced toolset for that like the augmented reality on television how the newsperson can actually interact with the graphics who's on behind him how they use it in pre-planning and movies and some shots and certain movies also used an unreal and yeah so eventually we see the architecture industry and the movie industry and gaming to see all converging to one point where it's easily to switch between all of them so you know how to do use unreal you can work in movies or you can work on games

and yeah to get started you can go to Unreal Engine download all the games and github for the source code documentation there's also unreal Academy and our YouTube channel ok so that's everything and thank you this is my email and Twitter account if you need to reach me that's basically thank you you you