Archive notice: This article was originally published on March 9, 2015. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
In return, Epic Games is compensated with licence fees when a game is commercially released: 5 percent of the gross revenue of each product after the first 3,000 US dollars earned. Under this agreement, this means that Epic benefits from the commercial success of a developer who has worked with the free Unreal Engine 4.
There are no limits to the use of the engine: Unreal Engine 4 can be used for game development, education, architecture and visualisations. Epic Games uses the same engine technology for both indie games and high-end blockbusters. The downloadable Unreal supports all major platforms and contains 100 percent of the C++ source code.
Ecosystem
Furthermore, a complete ecosystem is available for Unreal Engine, such as a chat forum and collaborative development projects via GitHub. Content can also be sold or purchased in an associated marketplace.
The download also includes a large number of tutorials and documentation intended to help users get started with Unreal Engine 4.
Unreal Engine 4 is available here after signing in.
Unreal 4.7
The current release of the engine is version 4.7. Among other things, this version adds a new foliage shading model, component editing, automatic asset importing within the world and a Leap Motion plug-in in beta. Here is an overview of all the features.
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