I will therefore now write down the evaluation process in some report/day like text form.
Starting from the first day (26. August 2014):
Installing was pretty easy, i have read all the requirements and limitations, created an account on unrealengine.com and activated the subscription. After downloading the engine itself ~ 50 mb, i installed it on my 3 year old alienware notebook on win 7. I started it and downloaded most of the free sample projects. The first project i had tested was the "ContentExamples" project - which i already knew about. Mostly all examples was working fine - in sens of performance, but after i opened the big example projects like "EffectCaves" or the "Realistic Rendering Demo" my System completely brokes down and i had barely 5 fps running in the editor view. It was not possible to select any actor at all - just too much for my system. But the worst was coming after i launched on of this examples in the game window outside the editor (1 fps at max) - while the editor was opened - absolutly unplayable. I knew that my system is crap, but i had not expected this to be this crap.
When i really want to do more than just a simple stuff with UE4, i need to get a real system. After i have checked out every sample project, i was just starring at the screen and watching video tutorials for hours.
On that time i was just fooling around with UE4, creating and testing stuff from tutorials - nothing special.
30. August 2014:
After a few days break, i got a much better understanding how UE4 works. So i decided to start creating a simple "learning" project - by making a simple breakout like game.
Creating visuals for a breakout game, was extremely straightforward, but converting them to static mesh's and blueprints after that was not that clear at first glance and somehow such important informationen was not teached in any tutorials at all. After a few hours i had a working prototype, but with better visuals than gameplay, but it got a moving ball, a player controlled paddle and one brick - yay.
3. September 2014:
I dont know, but using real physics in a breakout game is so much pain - i taked me so many hours to build blueprint and configure a breakout-like gameplay... But i got it, i even added a angle correction when the angle is too square. Also i improved the visuals a lot by creating own textures, bump maps, added lights etc.
10. September 2014:
I finshed the gameplay prototype with generated bricks, fixed bugs and created a video, see:
Of course its not completely finished yet, there is still much todo:
- Creating and using player stats like level, score, lives
- HUD for the player stats
- Simple game menu with (Start, Options, Exit) or an introduction screen
Yeah, I ran into performance problems with UE4 as well. I had a dual core processor which ran at about 3.5Ghz and 8gb of RAM. The performance problems arise when I start working on an object which causes a re-compilation of the shaders (usually around 400+). This causes the editor to wait for 2+ minutes for each shader to finish compiling. If you make a lot of changes to a material, you're going to be spending a lot of time waiting for shaders to compile. My system was under the specified system specs, so it's not something I can fault the UE4 team for. To solve the problem, I went to the local computer hardware store and purchased an 8 core Intel i7 processor and new mobo to go with it. After rebuilding my computer and rerunning the editor, the engine was able to put the shader compilation into a few background worker threads and I didn't have to wait anymore. SO, Lesson learned: Run UE4 on high end hardware or you'll be sorry!