Unreal Engine free for schools

[BJG]

I was having a look at Unreal Engine over the weekend. This has probably been posted before, but budding game devs might be interested that it's free for schools, in case you were't aware.

 

https://www.unrealengine.com/education

 

Together with Autodesk's offering of free Max & Maya, and Microsoft's free Visual Studio via DreamSpark, that's a heck of an FPS toolset.

Edited December 15, 2014 by BJG

[Arthur]

Unreal Engine 4 is now free for everyone.

 

www.unrealengine.com/blog/ue4-is-free

 

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.

 

This is the complete technology we use at Epic when building our own games. It scales from indie projects to high-end blockbusters; it supports all the major platforms; and it includes 100% of the C++ source code. Our goal is to give you absolutely everything, so that you can do anything and be in control of your schedule and your destiny. Whatever you require to build and ship your game, you can find it in UE4, source it in the Marketplace, or build it yourself – and then share it with others.

 

[daflibble]

Have you deployed EpicGames Unreal Engine to student class/lab PC's?

If so how have you dealt with the issues of deploying the software?

 

It's not provided as an MSI or EXE installer just a web launcher.

The suggestions in https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Unreal_Engine_4_-_Academic_Installation are a little lacking.

1. Build a new reference image with a baked in install of the launcher and downloaded engine.

2. Manually install launcher and download engine as an admin

3. Download the source code and compile it yourself in visual studio. No suggestions on how to turn that into a distributable package.

 

I want to put it out there but it's not put together to be distributed to users without admin rights easily.

 

Cheers

Da'flibble

[Garacesh]

Hang on, what?! Maya and 3dStudio Max are free for education? Why did nobody tell me this?!

 

Also, whilst the Unreal Engine would be kinda useless here, it's still nice that it's definitely free for everyone, rather than free for personal use.

I liked the old Unreal level design (UnrealED from GOTY436) but I looked at the new UE4 and was like "Uh.. HUH?!"

[googlemad]

Unreal Engine is an absolute nightmare to deploy and the latest update flat out refused to work on our media image so we had to quickly create a fresh one!

 

It's massive too so hopefully you have large hard drives to cope! (And you need powerful hardware, it didn't run very well until we upgraded the PCs in question to 12GB RAM)

 

Good software though when it's up and running

[googlemad]

To be honest the quickest way is to set yourself up an Unreal account download the launcher then just install that on all the PCs log in as your Unreal ID and kick off the latest engine download. Probably an overnight job!

[daflibble]

Well I made progress on packaging up Unreal Engine 4.10.

 

1. Downloaded the launcher and installed on lab machine.

2. Copied C:\Program Files\EpicGames folder to my packaging work area.

3. Created an MSI to drop the files and create shortcut to UE4editor.exe. This took several days and a few calls to friends that are professional application packagers as I used AdminStudio and it really does not like very large sets of files. AdvancedInstaller and the Old WISE packager I'm told are much better at dealing with these large file sets but have other issues.

4. Wrapped it all in a PSAppdeploytoolkit wrapper script to try and keep our environment consistent.

 

It works although wants to create firewall rules when you login to the machine with admin rights, it works without this. I see from reading the Unreal forums it's to do with some phone-home analytics that you are allowed to remove.

 

What is now my problem is due to the size of the package I want to deploy it running from the SCCM DP share rather than as a modern application model package which gets copied into the local cache.

[free780]

Sorry for the thread resurrection. I've been fighting with this for the last few days. I don't mind users updating it themselves. Trying to get that working is hard. We have it on 150 PCs. I managed to get it to launch as system account via a SCCM package so the launcher can auto update. Given uses Full Control over c:\program files\epic games. Which is fine when downloading Unreal Engine as a standard user. But then it wants to run prerequisite Exes as administrator. I can run these as a package in SCCM but the launcher still wants to run them. In this Security /GDPR world obviously we want to get away with granting admin rights. Packaging 40GB seems excessive also it would need to deploy out of hours. The other option is to have a build and capture with a pause and reimage everything nightly when a new version is released. Projects are large and so have to be saved locally. So unless you force Onedrive On demand Files Sync you run the risk of losing student work.

 

Having an updater that runs a Service like Chrome does would be a better solution. Anybody found a way of keeping Unreal Engine up to date?

[bdoor319]

On 10/02/2016 at 07:11, daflibble said:

Well I made progress on packaging up Unreal Engine 4.10.

 

1. Downloaded the launcher and installed on lab machine.

2. Copied C:\Program Files\EpicGames folder to my packaging work area.

3. Created an MSI to drop the files and create shortcut to UE4editor.exe. This took several days and a few calls to friends that are professional application packagers as I used AdminStudio and it really does not like very large sets of files. AdvancedInstaller and the Old WISE packager I'm told are much better at dealing with these large file sets but have other issues.

4. Wrapped it all in a PSAppdeploytoolkit wrapper script to try and keep our environment consistent.

 

It works although wants to create firewall rules when you login to the machine with admin rights, it works without this. I see from reading the Unreal forums it's to do with some phone-home analytics that you are allowed to remove.

 

What is now my problem is due to the size of the package I want to deploy it running from the SCCM DP share rather than as a modern application model package which gets copied into the local cache.

 

Greetings, sorry for making another zombie resurrection of this post, but we have been trying to work with the Epic Games Launcher and the Unreal Engine to run with out the need the for Administrative Rights for a user at our institution for about a year now. Could you perhaps send me a detailed instruction sheet on how you did the steps above. I have the Epic Games Launcher installed in a VM and it is currently installing the Unreal Engine 5.5.4. Thank You very much for your assistance.

[mthomas08]

Wait.. you guys have PCs capable of this stuff?   

[J-14P]

13 hours ago, bdoor319 said:

 

Greetings, sorry for making another zombie resurrection of this post, but we have been trying to work with the Epic Games Launcher and the Unreal Engine to run with out the need the for Administrative Rights for a user at our institution for about a year now. Could you perhaps send me a detailed instruction sheet on how you did the steps above. I have the Epic Games Launcher installed in a VM and it is currently installing the Unreal Engine 5.5.4. Thank You very much for your assistance.

Might not be exactly what you want but I'll chime in.

 

We have Unreal Engine in our environment but I opted to go for the Unreal Engine offline installer. You can apply for it as an Education institute for free. It completely strips out the Epic Games launcher, but has the draw back of no access to the store and some other online features.

 

The only extra thing we have to do is add the firewall rules in the install script.

 

Our students run the software fine on non-administrator accounts. No complaints so far.

 

https://forms.unrealengine.com/s/edu-offline-request

Edited June 10, 2025 by J-14P

[bdoor319]

51 minutes ago, J-14P said:

Might not be exactly what you want but I'll chime in.

 

We have Unreal Engine in our environment but I opted to go for the Unreal Engine offline installer. You can apply for it as an Education institute for free. It completely strips out the Epic Games launcher, but has the draw back of no access to the store and some other online features.

 

The only extra thing we have to do is add the firewall rules in the install script.

 

Our students run the software fine on non-administrator accounts. No complaints so far.

 

https://forms.unrealengine.com/s/edu-offline-request

 

This is a great find. We will look into this. Thank You for this. 

 

For those that have installed the other methods not using the previous non-offline installer, are you able to share the processes.