Its free for low volume only. Its actually hideously expensive beyond something around 50000 units on paid for titles. Into more figures than you can ever expect on your yearly salary in your lifespan.
"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." The way I interpret that, you can develop games on there, and as long as you don't release anything, there is no cost. They could play around with it for as long as they like internally, and as long as they don't ship the game using unreal engine, they would never have to pay. All I see for expenses is the 5% royalty on gross revenue. Unless epic is being shady, and hiding expenses and there are a lot of strings attached, then that seems very fair to me. Of course, I don't know how that would work, as there are already ~210k copies sold on steam alone, and if epic would want compensation for those copies already sold.
i dont trust epic games. a 5 point royalty is not that bad for a cutting edge platform. again, i cant see them changing engines without another few million sales. they will need to hire much more muscle and @gabester will have a lot of long nights.
It would be so much easier for map makers to make interactive environments in UE4 because of its blueprint system. Even non coders can easily use it. To do that in torque 3d, you have to learn torque script, which due to the poor documentation will be hard to learn correctly. The blueprint system in UE4 is so awesome, it is so easy to make something like a working garage door or maybe a working car crusher!!! Or maybe even something ridiculous like a car catapult! That would be so much fun! I think being able to do this would make BeamNG the most awesome game ever made for modders!
I don't think you need to learn TorqueScript to make maps, it can all be done it the editor. And the devices you mentioned are already possible, just as vehicles instead of static objects. Nevertheless, UE4 would probably be easier to build in.
OK, now you got it done. We really, really considered it. Yes, we thought about it for days, tested things out and considered again. Then we slept over it, considered it again, had team meetings. Waited some days, considered again. And finally came to the conclusion that we will not risk it to rewrite it in Unreal 4 at this point in time. It is so horrible complex from all different angles that i am really super tired to try to break this down to the basic bits here over and over again. I simply kindly ask you to trust in our decision in this. I think most of you forget that we actually employ people from the money we earn, they get salaries, which they use to pay their rent, buy food, etc. Every action that we take must be taken with the Early access model in mind and the promised features we have. Can we complete feature X in the time (and time equals money) that we have or should we risk it because we will redo years of work just to add some additional "global illumination" on top? :| That being said, the thread is finally locked - I do not see any reason of leaving it open for discussion. So, in case you tl;dr: PORT TO UE4: NOT GOING TO HAPPEN