It's pretty much a complete package as far as I can see, what programming skills would you need, assuming your not modifying the source(still cannot believe they are licensing the full source, that's 25 years worth of research and blood and sweat there).
We are talking about shaders/effects and some gameplay scripting such as LUA, or I think it's unreal script.....?
Unreal has always had source licenses for people who could pay about 1M - 500.000 USD for it. Gameplay scripting is done through Blueprint in UE4, Unreal Script doesn't exist anymore. If you do need to add new behaviours it is C++ that you need to code that in.
Shaders will likely be in HLSL or CG.
Blueprints seems pretty powerful. I'd imagine you could get very far without any traditional programming.
Unreal has always had source licenses for people who could pay about 1M - 500.000 USD for it
Actually a couple of years ago the company I was working at got full source access to Unreal for free (I've probably still got it on a USB key somewhere). We were using a different engine (Gamebryo Lightspeed) and had been featured on the engine developers website and at GDC. A couple of days after GDC Mark Rein called us up directly and said hey guys I here you are licensing Gamebryo well stop and use Unreal and we'll let you have it for free. True Story.
It's pretty much a complete package as far as I can see, what programming skills would you need, assuming your not modifying the source(still cannot believe they are licensing the full source, that's 25 years worth of research and blood and sweat there).
We are talking about shaders/effects and some gameplay scripting such as LUA, or I think it's unreal script.....?
C++ for everything programming related and Blueprints (gameplay scripting, actor archetypes seem to be replaced with this as well.) Everything else seems to apply from UE3 to UE4, just learning how the editor works and the various tools available in it will get you far enough to make prototypes without going too deeply.
I've been toying around with it for the past couple of days, and the tools are nice for 20$. You can plop down $19 for one month and then cancel if you would like, they let you keep the source and all you lose by not continuing your subscription are updates and marketplace access (which isn't even available as of yet). Some of my friends have decided to go with 19$ every six months, since that was about how long it took to get UDK updates anyway.
Actually, if you feel like, you can also do the gameplay part in c++ (like I am), however, blueprint is VERY powerful, and is very extendable by c++ (adding new nodes, events etc). It isn't really hard. I actually had a little c++ knowledge, and I'm finding my way through (although I have big uscript experience, wchich actually helps if you have it). Shaders are done by the material editor (easy to use), with a lot of functionality.
Shaders will likely be in HLSL or CG.
The shaders seem to be written in HLSL using the internal Material Editor. The HLSL is compressed so you cannot access it from the file system (you must use the Show HLSL option in the Material Editor). The HLSL is converted to GLSL when packaging for the OpenGL rendering target (or when running on OS X). This is the same way it was done in UE3/UDK.
