Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine is a game engine written in C++ from EpicGames. It is a private source engine and requires to sign up at Epic Games and to connect your Epic Games account to your Github account to see/download the source.

As of today there is no payment required to get the source and to use the engine. The game development license is revenue share based. The first million is sharefree, and after that you also have to meet specific criteria to have to pay fees. The linear content (e.g. movies) licensing will be changed in the near future to a subscription model.

All other use cases like architecture or engineering are free without any payments or revenue share (as far as I understand it).

If they change their licensing in the future it only affects the following releases of Unreal. You don't have to go with the new licensing if it sucks. So if you download the source and compile it yourself you are safe to work with it as long as it suits you.

Epic Games also provides a lot of realistic assets through their asset store. There are monthly free asset packs with varying quality.

The most interesting part is, that it's also used for robotics simulations.

The engine is widely used and there are a lot of good free and paid tutorials out there.

Sources for tutorials are:

• Epics Learning Community
• Youtube, Mathew Wadstein provides good tutorials
• Udemy and other course sites

Robotic specific tutorials are rare.