TIM SWEENEY
Founder & CEO, Epic Games
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Yeah, thank you all for coming
Epic is founded on building games and sharing the results of all of our work with the whole world.
We believe that all developers have all the capabilities and advantages that we have ourselves when we build our games. The Unreal Engine the epic online services and the new epic game store are all built in the spirit.
So under Engine 4, it's available for every for free for everyone to download with full C++ source code. Skills from indie games to triple-a games from stylized games to photorealism and it enables console quality games on mobile. The Unreal Engine is funded by a 5% revenue share from games built with it in the business model where we succeed only when you succeed as a developer.
The epic online services are a new offering these provide back-end systems that you'll need for friends matchmaking cloud storage analytics and other things.
These are the services that power fortnight a huge scale and we're making them available to all developers for free supporting all platforms and all stores. This includes the epics friends system, which is the largest cross-platform social graph in gaming. This means your players will have access to all of their friends from Fortnight and as new games enable players to form new friend relationships. They'll be available in all games across all platforms and all gamers benefit and we are not building this as a walled garden. For example. We're partnering with Ubisoft as peers to enable gamers to link their Uplay and epic accounts and support friends across all. This is the first of very many partnerships that we aim to form to open up all of our systems and connect all gamers. The epic game store is a new PC storefront built on an 8812 revenues
But it gives developers a direct connection to gamers and a fair share of the fruits of their labor. Well, I have a lot of great news to share. Yep at the game store later in today's presentation
So the engine the services in the store are all here to serve the seven and a half million
Developers who have chosen epics engine and our other offerings and we're also here to help financially remember back in 2015. We knowledge to unroll dev grants with five million dollars of no strings attached funding and these funds have helped many projects at heed including games like Astra near ashen and spell break and the very last of these grants were announced this week bringing a close to the program and now thanks to fortnight's amazing financial success. We're launching the new grant program epic mega-grant. So this is a five-year program that will also provide no-strings-attached grant funding across game development enterprise firm, education and academia, and open source. and buy straight no-strings-attached. We mean we'll consider every grant proposal and great make grants based on merits and potential and there are no there's nothing to go back to epic no obligation of publishing or a store or any other commercial relationship and. This epic mega grants fund will distribute 100 million dollars.
Thank to now throughout the rest of today's event
About all of the things, we're working on starting with crystal the director of the platform for Epic Game
CHRIS DYL
Director - Platform, Epic Games
Thank you and good morning everybody with more and more games meeting online features.
We believe that developers should be free to focus on making their games fun rather than worrying about the infrastructure needed to launch operate and scale their games. So we have built our services to handle the real-world problems of Fortnight and at epic. We believe in sharing technologies we build for ourselves to help other developers succeed.
So out of Unreal Engine video game came Unreal Engine in 1998 and out of for tonight comes epic online services in 2019 these services are a new toolkit for creation to enable developers to add online features to their game. It took a lot of effort to build these services to handle the cross-platform features and sheer scale a fortnight in fact. The services have supported nearly 250 million players now at more than 10 million peak concurrent users across the seven platforms that we publish on all in one set of services that work globally without sharding of user accounts between regions the services make cross-platform gameplay easier by providing platform agnostic features that allow users to connect on across any major platform. You may publish your game on and at epic. We believe in the power of social gameplay and cross-platform features help bring together different platforms allowing players more choice in how they play with their friends and Because we want to help developers succeed We're releasing them to game developers for free to them for them to be used by any engine and any store. There is no catch here folk. Let me be clear whether you're using unity to build your game or publishing on Steam. These services are going to be completed since the December announcement many developers have been asking us. How does free work or what's the catch?
We know Depok developers need services like this to build online features for the games and we want to give back to the community. That has helped to succeed.we have achieved huge economies of scale with fortnight so we can operate these services economically and we benefit from your patronage as Tim was talking about for example if you choose to support epic identity
Your players will benefit from having new.
You're part man, established friends list from fortnight and all games will benefit from new friend relationships that were. So and as Unreal Engine has been available for more than 20 years. Epic is fully committing to providing these services to you. So imagine the game that you could trade if you had cross fat cross-platform services available to you that like fortnight enabled players to log in and connect with friends whatever platform they play on
Allowed you to manage player inventories including purchases across different platforms. Allowed you to store and retrieve arbitrary game data jar such as user-generated content and more. kept track of statistics in-game achievements and provided leaderboards to your players and
set up game matches for your players who may all be playing on different platforms and And enabled in-game communication such as voice chat between players across any platform. So some of these services are available now and others are coming through 2019 but today
Today we're making the veil of the SDK and the developer portal. You can visit the services website sign up now and access the Dell portal and download the SDK right now. So let's talk about what is developed available to you today, so Using the SDK you'll be able to access any available services in your game
We're currently supporting Windows Mac and Linux and in the coming months. We'll also be providing support for Playstation switch Xbox iOS and Android. Any platform for tonight supports the SDK is a highly portable C API. That to allow integration to any other language or engine and will provide integrations into both unreal engine and unity later this year and we'd also like to invite our community to help create any wrappers. You might want for any language or other engines you that you may deem beneficial and please let us know and we'd be very glad to help you
Second, we're launching a developer portal and the Delica portal is your destination for SDK updates and news and information and Provides tools for managing your services and accessing your data between the SDK and this developer portal. We have a framework that we can use to provide all future services to you. So let's actually talk about one of our first service offerings game analytics. You can use game analytics to collect telemetry and view basic KPIs about your game on a dashboard. The dashboard provides insights about your players including Diu Mau Retention new players game launches online users and more and with epic online services. Your player data is your own we treat it as confidential and only use it to provide the services that you request.
So let's talk about our second offering the ticketing system. So players want to be heard by developers and a ticketing system helps by providing a direct channel to your players for support. So for example, you can solve a player's problem before they choose to write a bad review. So this is just the beginning please join us on this journey and help guide the formation of epic online services be sure to sign up for our newsletter and we'll send you more updates as new services become available and over the course of 2019 will be releasing many more of the services we use for Fortnight our website contains a details on a full roadmap covering all the fortnight's services. I talked about earlier and more.
Thank you very much. Now, let me introduce. Well, welcome Kim LaBrie to talk to you about what's happening with Unreal Engine
KIM LIBRERI
CTO, Epic Games
Well, it's amazing news for developers across the planet all engines all platforms is fantastic
Hi Unreal developers. How are you doing?
So over the last few years, we've been tirelessly improving the visual capabilities of Unreal Engine
We're heading towards the time that the real and virtual worlds will be indistinguishable from each other Creating tools and rendering technology that allows this to become a reality is what drives us
Let's recap some of the cool capabilities. We've added to our rendering systems in recent years
so obviously the foundation of Yui 4 is a physically based rendering system having materials and lights, that behave like they do in the real world is what greatly improves quality and intuitiveness of creating a photorealistic scene of course PBR is great for making awesome hyper-realistic games like Ace Combat 7 it also powers the explosion of interactive visualizations that we've seen in recent years and has enabled you before to cross over into the world of cinematic content production? Speaking of cinematic production we've put a tremendous amount of effort into creating photographic effects that closely match real-world cameras and real-world lenses.
These include accurate lens distortion blooms chromatic aberration class-leading motion blur depth of field and anti-aliasing we also have industry standard post-processing through aces and OCIO color management and all of these things add up to a system that is incredibly easy to use and produces amazing industry of images that meet the highest professional standards.
We have the best graphics team in the world and every day the incredible images that you all make that. We get to see and love is really what drives us to push the envelope towards a time where we have achieved total photorealism. One company that's inspired not only us but the entire computer graphics industry is quick. So they're a combination of state-of-the-art photogrammetry super extensive assets and material library and world-class artistry really sets the standards for what video games can look going for a look like going forward
It's with great pride that we're able to premiere Qixels as Teddy over the Qixels latest work entitled rebirth. It's an amazing movie made entirely in Unreal Engine. 421
It's lit composed edited and rendered all the new before the vanilla version
Cue the video, please
PROMO:
Adaptation
The ability to learn from past experience
The use of knowledge to alter their environment
These virtues defined our creators and drove them to the brink of destruction
But we cannot exist without them we must save her
What if our creators exist within us
Humanity has always had the potential to recognize its
And choose a better way
To be saved humanity
Was bringing her here the right choice
So amazing
You believe that's made in a game engine and not with fancy ray trace and that's the existing version of Unreal Engine
Incredible you Teddy tells me the team that worked on. It was three artists just three artists. Plus they're amazing made the amazing desert library
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one of the most complex things to recreate using computer graphics is a believable human years of iteration have tuned our subsurface scattering rendering hair shaders to the point where they're looking really really really pretty closer to reality and the demanders mat demands of each digital character project from a boy in his kite all the way through last year siren has helped us improve the in rail to the point where we're very close to approaching motion picture quality for digital faces creating digital humans at this quality the level is very difficult to master we recognize this and want to bring tools and capabilities to all developers to make it easier it's important for you to focus on making a great game or great experience learning all the minutiae to make the details that you need in this Santi circus face is something that takes years and years of experience and through every demo we've worked with
VLADIMIR MASTILOVIC
Director, 3Lateral & Epic Games
it's been obvious that three lateral is the best team of the world in creating believable digital humans for video games we are thrilled this amazing team
is now part of Epic Games and we can't wait to start bringing this is expertise and this technology to you to talk more about digital humans and our plans please welcome to the stage the founder of three lateral our a great friend and now director of epic games Vladimir Mastilovitc thank you there are Kim exciting times so as many of you already know trilateral was founded with the vision to become a studio specialized in high-end digital characters vision was to have a studio a workshop a laboratory an ecosystem but before all a team that focuses on this complex and magical challenge so it is a hard task because it involves all disciplines across the spectrum characters and especially digital humans have to look correctly move correctly behave and respond in a believable manner we also need to make them in a way which is not too expensive in terms of time computational resources and yes
of course within production budgets as well so it's one of those problems where there isn't really a category which can be compromised if we want to be
in which we can immerse ourselves in so you know telling a powerful story has been important to human civilization since the dawn of our civilization and there aren't that many stories really which can be told without characters so this is where we draw our motivation from and this motivation was recognized by many major game developers over the past decade they trusted our team to innovate and deliver characters to which week they could offer their vision of interactive worlds populated by characters that will remember through our entire lives so five years ago we started working on their most with epic games and this went so well that it became a regular thing for every GDC we started with the demo boy in his kite then following it was alive captured and
rendered 1000 from hell-blade then we had met Mike a pioneering project where we could speak to Mike in VR spaced over a distance finally, there is a siren and Andy Serkis Anna's arias black demos which shifted everyone's perception of what the digital humanities could be and this year
they may be another one coming so as we were progressing each here in this collaboration both teams were realizing that the culture and the goals are very similar to an idea was born what if trilateral is the support industry not only through services but through integrating its technologies in unreal
an engine this made perfect sense to all of us we feel we have developed and proved a powerful set of technologies and our the mission now is to bring this to all Unreal Engine users through lateral is also expanding its team and in addition to the starting to contribute to developing new Unreal Engine features we will continue to provide services like this is an important part of our identity and keeps our technologies always challenging relevant we're truly excited about the future and about bringing in character powerful character tools to all Unreal Engine users thank you
Kim back:
all right so last year on this stage we introduced you to the future of real-time rendering through a collaboration with ILM xlab and end a video. we gave you a sneak peek into a real-time ray-traced future and later a SIGGRAPH we demonstrated what real-time ray-tracing can bring to the enterprise space with an awesome collaboration with the design team at Porsche Porsche and a star wars in one year it doesn't get much better than that and this month as
promised were shipping ray-tracing functionality and Unreal Engine 422 many of you already been playing with it and we're happy to see the results and also as we see little bugs and things and come up with fixing them as quickly as we can so to demonstrate this capability we really didn't want to do our download demo ourselves we wanted to team up with a partner that has extensive real-time experience, but also has worked in visual effects for television and movies.
TOBIAS DAHL
Studio Co-Manager
Goodbye Kansas Studios
FREDRIK LOVING
Studio Co-Manager
Goodbye Kansas Studios
BJÖRNE LARSON
Director, Deep Forest Films
So without further ado let me introduce you to vias doll Frederik loving from goodbye Kansas and a writer-director friend B. Larson from deep-fries films these guys are super awesome they've all come from Sweden so they're gonna have a cool accent and they're gonna show you what they were able to do with the new generation of ray tracing and the future of rendering for video games see you later good luck thank you.
so we're excited to bear today to demonstrate the power of game engines something that I and Tobias have worked with our entire careers we've always secured us on how the very best technology can help us tell stories create worlds and even build IPs exactly one year ago we sat in this an audience watching state of unreal where amazing stories came to life all in real time then and there we set the aim to be on this stage this year with a project that will push ourselves and the Unreal Engine to the next level we at go back and says join forces with director Brianna Larson and deep forest films to fusion the very best talent from both film and games so for the last couple of months our team of amazing artists that give back
answers have been working on this piece this short snippet you're about to see is showcasing real-time never-before-seen lighting fidelity amazing effects and cinematic realism .
we truly believe that the future of digital content creation will be powered by game engines and not only for games but also for movies TV and today unknown future forms of escapism x' so we're very excited and honored to show you a glimpse of what this future can look like created by Oscar-winning filmmakers pixel perfectionists and tech pioneers all rendered in real-time live here on stage in the Unreal Engine Marcus already enjoy
DEMO
thank you, everyone, 15 years ago I started a journey to bring a legendary book to life this magical fairytale has captured the imagination of millions of children's and adults and in just a few months and absolute passion for cinematic realism and pioneering tech creates unbelievable storytelling opportunities I too believe the Hollywood engine is unreal a powerful storytelling tool for all our game and filmmakers Kim you're right doodle humans are --court quite hard and our princess Bianca is actually ray traced and with that we'd like to introduce Nick Van Warden to show you a closer look of how we use ray tracing in this piece thank you thanks Marcus Thank You VR
NICK PENWARDEN
Director - Engineering
Unreal Engine, Epic Games