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Why C++ for Unreal 4

forums.unrealengine.com

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Re: Why C++ for Unreal 4

#11

Post by admiun »

archagon wrote: post #5

On the other hand, I feel that tools like Unity are successful precisely because they let you tinker with your game in a WYSIWYG kind of way. It's really liberating to be able to work inside such a tight feedback loop, and it's a little weird to see a modern game engine distancing itself from that approach. (But maybe I'm missing something. What exactly is the role of the Unreal Editor in UE4? Is it mostly for things…

There's actually an interesting demo of the blueprints feature in the toolset:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hwhH7upYFE#t=384

Re: Why C++ for Unreal 4

#12

Post by danso »

> Developers seeking to take advantage of the engine's native C++ features end up dividing their code unnaturally between the script world and the C++ world, with significant development time lost in this Interop Hell.

Replace "C++" with "JavaScript/client-side processing" and "script" with "server-side scripting" and I feel like this adequately describes web-development.

Re: Why C++ for Unreal 4

#13

Post by [deleted] »

ajanuary wrote: post #7
kayoone wrote: post #4

Unity runs well with a Scripting approach and for everybody where thats not enough, you can still get the full source license. I think Unity did it quite clever in that the engine itself is c/c++ and all the interfacing with the engine is done through C#/Mono.

Unreal Engine 1 - 3 had a similar approach. The linked post describes why they no longer feel that approach is beneficial for them. [Edit] Is Unity's approach drastically different in a way that solves them?

[deleted]

Re: Why C++ for Unreal 4

#14

Post by CyberShadow »

There was a talk at last year's D conference how Remedy Games have used D as their "scripting" language:

http://dconf.org/talks/evans_1.html

I wonder if some of the same points would apply here. The short version of the talk is that D compiles much faster than C++, has limited C++ link compatibility (e.g. classes, but not templates), and overall has nicer syntax / language features than using C++ directly. Metaprogramming / compile-time introspection allow automatically serializing/deserializing data to allow updating data structures without restarting the engine.

Re: Why C++ for Unreal 4

#15

Post by thefreeman »

kayoone wrote: post #4

Unity runs well with a Scripting approach and for everybody where thats not enough, you can still get the full source license. I think Unity did it quite clever in that the engine itself is c/c++ and all the interfacing with the engine is done through C#/Mono.

Unity caters to new game developers though. I'm not saying you can't make real games with it, but I'd be surprised if it was used for AAA titles, and definitely not as much as Unreal Engine.

Also, I found this comment from later in the thread really interesting about how easy it is for hackers to abuse the reversibility of managed (.NET) code. Granted, this could just be due to poor design on the developers part, but giving hackers that kind of insight into the games design cannot be helping anything.

So with that, This could be a unity issue, mono issue, or just the game developers issue. For background reasons, I am a local memory hacker, tho the reason I am here on UE is im teaching myself how to develop games not for hacking purposes. The game im going to talk about is the only game I know that is MP only and uses the unity engine. This game has one big problem when it comes to hackers, what we do is simply edit the .net dll's to manipulate the game, no hooking, no debugging, no working out functions in assembly, it also meant that we could reverse the source to pretty much 100% usable source - this resulted in the end user being able to change things like the user id to stop them being able to be banned. Un-Ban able hackers? its destroying this game. [1]

[1] - https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?2574-Why-C-fo...

Re: Why C++ for Unreal 4

#18

Post by archagon »

thefreeman wrote: post #15
kayoone wrote: post #4

Unity runs well with a Scripting approach and for everybody where thats not enough, you can still get the full source license. I think Unity did it quite clever in that the engine itself is c/c++ and all the interfacing with the engine is done through C#/Mono.

Unity caters to new game developers though. I'm not saying you can't make real games with it, but I'd be surprised if it was used for AAA titles, and definitely not as much as Unreal Engine. Also, I found this comment from later in the thread really interesting about how easy it is for hackers to abuse the reversibility of managed (.NET) code. Granted, this could just be due to poor design on the developers part, but…

I think Unity also caters to indie developers with new game ideas, as well as to rapid prototypers. (The two often overlap.) Would we have gotten games as cool and varied as Receiver[1], Broforce[2] and Hearthstone with UE? I kinda doubt it.

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/234190/

[2] http://store.steampowered.com/app/274190/

Re: Why C++ for Unreal 4

#19

Post by pjmlp »

danso wrote: post #12

> Developers seeking to take advantage of the engine's native C++ features end up dividing their code unnaturally between the script world and the C++ world, with significant development time lost in this Interop Hell. Replace "C++" with "JavaScript/client-side processing" and "script" with "server-side scripting" and I feel like this adequately describes web-development.

You also need to add the dark magic tribal dance of making CSS/HTML/JavaScript work in a coherent way across all target browsers in mobile, desktop, TV, settop boxes and whatever else...

At least that is how it feels for guys like myself that lack designer skills.

Re: Why C++ for Unreal 4

#20

Post by pjmlp »

The whole C# vs C++ discussion going on the forum shows how little current generations understand of compiler design and language implementations, oh well...
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