Unreal Engine now "free"

[vexed]

Can't say I saw this one coming...

https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free, and all future updates will be free!

You can download the engine and use it for everything from game development, education, architecture, and visualization to VR, film and animation. When you ship a game or application, you pay a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter. It’s a simple arrangement in which we succeed only when you succeed.

This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games. It scales from indie projects to high-end blockbusters; it supports all the major platforms; and it includes 100% of the C++ source code. Our goal is to give you absolutely everything, so that you can do anything and be in control of your schedule and your destiny. Whatever you require to build and ship your game, you can find it in UE4, source it in the Marketplace, or build it yourself – and then share it with others.

Time to port WZ over!
if only it would work on linux...

[Jorzi]

Nice level editing features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlgvfEicdwU
Note how the guy is layering in various rocks & features. I was thinking we could probably achieve something like this in warzone if only we allowed three things:
1)Intersecting features: Not sure how bad this would mess up collision/pathfinding etc, but it would be very nice.
2)Placing features at any point/depth: Afaik this is already supported by the map format so we just need to implement it in sharpFlame?
3)"Passive" features: Indestructible mesh objects that don't block units or otherwise interact with the game. These could be grass, bushes, pebbles and cliff features, for example. Being passive, this would also solve any potential issues in 1)

Considering the fact that we are moving to vertex array based rendering, having this kind of extra geometry wouldn't be too hard on the gpu either.