Monthly digest for August 2024
The agenda for Unreal Fest Seattle is now available. Plus: Epic Games Store on mobile, new Steam store page requirements, and more.
Nick Pfisterer •
Greetings, everyone. Welcome to the monthly digest for August 2024. It was a very quiet month on the news front, but with Unreal Fest Seattle fast approaching, that is likely to change soon. Only time will tell, but I hope we get a beta launch for FAB and some meaningful updates on the future direction of Epic Games. Perhaps the fabled launcher update will finally see the light of day. A man can dream...
Full agenda published for Unreal Fest Seattle
Well, it's just an unordered list at the moment. You can view details for every planned session and filter by category, but there is no information on days or time slots. Apparently that information will come later.
For now, you can at least get a sense of the topics that will be covered, and by whom. At a glance, there are several sessions that cover Unreal Engine 5.5 in some fashion. Expect to hear about the roadmap for 5.5 and beyond, along with the latest features for dynamic gameplay cinematics, animation, mobile development, and build iteration. We will cover all the news coming out of Unreal Fest Seattle right here on Unreal Source, so stay tuned for that.
The best talks from Unreal Fest Prague
While Unreal Fest Prague took place June 18-20, Epic continues to release session recordings from the event. With a sprawling playlist of 50 recordings and counting, there are a few sessions that I think are worth highlighting.
The Unfeatured Features of Unreal Engine in 2024 - This session with senior technical artist Chris Murphy covers a wide spectrum of lesser-known features that don't make the headlines, but nevertheless are very useful to have in your repertoire.
Perforce & Unreal: Best Practices & Pitfalls - Ryan Maffesoli, a senior solutions engineer at Perforce, takes a detailed look at modern workflows with Perforce and Unreal. He covers everything from setup to scaling, with tips and pitfalls based lessons learned from the recent Project Titan game jam where over 4,000 people used Perforce to collaborate on a single Unreal Engine project.
Royalties and Reality: Making Cents of Unreal - Unreal Engine evangelist Ari Arnbjörnsson explains how Unreal Engine's royalties and licensing work, including a breakdown of the latest pricing changes for non-game projects recently introduced alongside Unreal Engine 5.4.
How Scene Graph Can Improve Your Life - This updated version of a similar presentation from GDC 2024 is worth watching, even if you saw it the first time around, as it features more demos and up to date information. Scene Graph is a new framework for composing game objects that is built on top of the Verse programming language. You can try it out now in UEFN, but it will eventually come to Unreal Engine, and seems poised to replace the current actor-based framework we all know so well.
Quick links
- Unreal Engine 5.4.4 hotfix has been released. Link
- Jonathan Winbush teamed up with Epic to release a free, introductory course for Unreal's motion designer mode. Link
- Four new documentation pages are available for developers who are migrating from Unity to Unreal. Link
- Submit your discounts for Epic Games Store sales in Q4. Link
What's on our radar
- The Epic Games Store is now on mobile. It's available on iOS in the European Union and on Android devices worldwide. The launch lineup includes a limited selection of first-party titles including Fortnite, Rocket League Sideswipe, and Fall Guys. Epic said it plans to allow other developers' to publish their apps on the platform at a later date.
- Steam announced new rules for store page descriptions. Starting this month, several written description sections on a game's store page can no longer contain links to other websites, embedded imagery that mimics Steam UI, or anything that links to other games on Steam. If you have any of these on your store page, they will disappear when the update goes live. However, after receiving feedback from developers, Steam will also introduce the ability to add a widget that features other games you make, as well as new ways to highlight DLC. Additionally, Steam is now supporting larger sizes for many graphical assets.
In other news
- Black Myth: Wukong (Unreal Engine 5) surpasses 3 million concurrent players and 10 million sales in first 3 days. Link
- After 8 years of development and just 2 weeks on the market, Concord (Unreal Engine 5) is going offline September 6. Refunds will be issued to everyone who purchased the game across PS5 and PC. Link
- Surreal Engine is an open-source reimplementation of Unreal Engine 1 that runs Unreal Tournament '99. Link
- Read seven stories from developers who switched to Unreal Engine and saw success. Link
- U.S. AI Safety Institute signs first-of-their-kind agreements with Anthropic and OpenAI. Link