Greetings, everyone! Time for another Marketplace content release, including our first Code Plugin! But first, I have a Marketplace announcement: We're going to discontinue the use of the Marketplace Trello on June 25th, and starting today, we will no longer add new items to the public voting. This will dramatically speed up the time from submission to publishing by removing 2 to 4 weeks of time for each approved submission, which is a direct response to your community requests to be able to get more content, better, and faster! Read on to learn why.
I'd like to explain our reasons for this. When the Marketplace originally launched, we opened the public Trello boards as a way to understand what type of content the community is looking for, and to give them a view into what's in the Marketplace submissions queue. As the Marketplace has grown and matured, we've seen activity migrate toward the forums and quickly outpace the public Trello boards. Content creators have been interacting directly with the community, listening to their requests, developing content based on community input, and setting up their own ongoing support threads for content they've published. This became especially pronounced after we announced that Unreal Engine 4 is going free at the 2015 Game Developer's Conference, as demand and interest in developing UE4 projects with Marketplace content skyrocketed. The message we've gotten from the community has been "publish content faster and let us vote with our wallets!"
Well, you asked, and we're listening. :) After June 25th, we'll close the public Trello boards. All submissions currently in the queue will skip Trello and be scheduled for publishing sooner. In the near future we'll launch a "Coming Soon" section of the Marketplace so you can view upcoming content and discuss it on the forums, where the Marketplace content creators are active, listening, and engaging with the community. We have ongoing threads where you can post your content requests for creators, support threads for creators to answer questions and receive feedback, as well as giving feedback and suggestions on the Marketplace itself. It's a thriving, vibrant community that's constantly surprising us with its creativity and ingenuity, and you can interact directly with the people making the magic. I highly recommend having a look around and participating! Even if you're not actively developing a project, it's a great place to go get your daily inspiration.
This is one of the many Marketplace improvements we have in the pipeline to make everything easier for content creators and game developers. More on these developments soon! For now, let's see this week's releases.
Code Plugins
Substance Plugin by Allegorithmic
Surprise! With the release of 4.8, we now support Code Plugins on the Marketplace, starting with Allegorithmic's Substance Plugin. This plugin enables the use of substance files directly in UE4. This allows games and applications creators to use all the power of Substance to deliver a unique experience to the final user. The runtime component of the plugin works for Windows and Mac builds, and will be available for consoles and mobile later. When it comes to offline editing, this works for any platform. Check out the video tutorial series!
Environments
Minimalist Apartment by UE4Arch
Minimalist Apartment is the beginning of what will be quite a bit of architectural visualization content on the Marketplace. This is a minimalist apartment with photorealistic furniture and lighting, as well as a very nice day and night city view. Check out the video!
Weapons and Props
Looking for content for your next survival or zombie game? Have a look at Survival Gear, a set of high quality current-gen PBR assets with 4096x4096 textures designed for first or third person games. This contains a survival knife, folding shovel, compass, canteen, emergency radio, map, lighter, flashlight, sleeping bag, and first aid kit.
Boxes and Cases by Alexander Ponor
If you're looking to populate your game with weapon cases and ammo boxes, begin filling your armory here! This is a set of 5 different boxes with fully customizable colors. Each box is organized in Blueprints and has a custom parameter for an openable cover. You can choose the base color, secondary color, and colors for decals. All models delivered with LODs and collision meshes. . Check out the video!
Better Rocks and Cliffs by Quantum Theory
Quantum Theory is back with more excellent content. This time it's beautifully rendered rocks and cliff sides, high-resolution but low-poly components that can be rotated, scaled, and pushed together to create crisp, high quality environments. Each rock’s side purposefully has a unique surface property, so you can rotate them and scale them to get a lot of variety in a single scene. Some parts are hard-edged and flat, a result of setting smoothing groups by UV shells. Nice work as always!
2D Assets
Mobile Aqua GUI by Jiří Bury - UETools
I've been looking forward to publishing this one! If you need a menu system\GUI for your game, Mobile Aqua GUI is a unique set of 200+ high quality GUI elements designed for use with UMG and Canvas rendering. It contains textures, atlasses, materials, fonts, sounds, documented custom widget Blueprints, UMG menu screens, and a demo scene. Some elements are dynamic, allowing you to mix any color combination, including shadows and highlights. 100% vector PSD source is included and you can create your own reskin in less than three hours. It's optimized for both Desktop and Mobile.
Blueprints
Auto Landscape MatAlpine by MaxStudiosDe
Here's a faster, easier way to generate landscape materials! All you have to do is edit your landscape in the editor and the Automatic Landscape Material will do all the work of making everything you just edited look properly textured, because the texture is driven by hte real landscapes' structure and features. This includes the master material and set of instances for different uses and times of year, 66 height maps at 4k resolution, seven at 8k resolution, and all bitmaps are 2k resolution. Everything is fully adjustable, including coloring, shading, and distribution of the landscape on a material instance level. The final material looks detailed from a first-person perspective, and even works when looking at it from a satellite image view. Check out the video to see it in action!
Blueprint Dialogue System by Alain Bellemare
See what pepole are talking about with the Blueprint Dialogue System! Built using Blueprint/UMG and actor components, this enables developers to quickly create dialogue content, empowered by a data-driven design with a myriad of inline text formatting tools and configurable interface options. Branching and non-branching styles of dialogue are supported; which to use is determined at run-time, according to the response options provided by the developer. The system can be used for basic text-only dialogue or for more complex conversations with text formatting; inline images; variable text; and custom interface layouts. Check out the video!
The Perfect Tile System by Michael Fahel
This is a very technically impressive submission. The Perfect Tile System is a material built to handle tile variation at a very large scale by allowing artists to design different types of tiling surfaces including solid tiles, glass tiles, frosted glass tiles, metallic tiles, bricks, wooden paneling, and much more. This is fully scalable down to extremely cheap rendering options and up to supporting complex surfaces with parallax occlusion, DirectX 11 tessellation, subsurface scattering, clearcoat rendering, and more. The basic set includes the material, fully annotated, 52 material instances showcased in an example map, a PDF user guide, a few material functions, and a collection of art assets and tile maps for tiles of different shapes and sizes. Textures, normal maps, and masks are included for bricks, stone, and wooden surfaces. Check out the video, it's impressive!
Audio
Military UI by Craft Media Group
This is a set of 20 short, appropriate-sounding military themed user interface menu sound effects including clicks, accept, back, error, switches, and other various effects for UI actions. Click here for audio samples!
Calm Music Pack by Art Activated
Calm Music Pack is a collection of 9 unique tracks inspired by JRPG \ adventure games. Click here for audio samples!
Horror Audio Bundle by Evil Mind
This is a great concept and well-executed. If your game is a frightening adventure with quests and puzzles, a terrifying story full of "nearly die!" moments, or an overwhelming horror experience, this bundle will boost the immersion of the project with a very dark creative touch. It contains 185 unique high quality files including music, instrumental environment and ambience loops & most needed SFX files, in .wav format, ready to use. Click here for audio samples!
That's all for this week, folks. Have a look around our forums and let us know what you'd like to see on the Marketplace!