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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#111
post #96

Beyond game engines one of the things that drives me crazy about commercial software is when I find a bug, document it thoroughly, and submit it to the company only to be ignored. Even with a support contract and on rather severe bugs it can be way too hard to get something fixed. I know I'm not the only person being bitten by this bug, it's all over the help forums and Reddit yet the company doesn't seem to care at…

This is frustrating. I’ve been on both sides of it, what’s happening is that the team is likely juggling thousands of bugs in similar or greater severity, as well as their roadmap for new features. Some things just get deprioritzed over and over, even though everyone knows it sucks. It usually takes a rogue engineer in their extra time, or a dedicated “user love” budget (which I always implement on my teams) to fix i…

I completely get all of that; it's just frustrating when you know exactly what the bug is, and can almost see the code causing it as well as the fix in front of you (conceptually), but ... you can't actually fix it.

For example I once spent weeks working around a memory leak in a piece of very expensive commercial software; it was not a fun experience and extremely hacky, although it did work (I later heard there were problems after I left though, causing subtle financial issues and which took quite a long time to find/fix :-/). I don't expect anyone to fix our problems for us, I just want to fix my own problems.

I don't expect everything to be Open Source; I'm fine if it's not. I also don't expect them to drop everything to fix this bug for me. But it is critical for our business, and please, let me sign an NDA or something and let me fix this bug. Everyone wins with this.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you need to understand that all current (serious) game engines primarily use C++, in order to provide maximum performance at the low-level. But C++ is incredibly unproductive as a language for actual high-level game development, since C++ takes ages to compile and has more weird and dangerous footguns than any other language. So developers often end up binding a scripting language onto their C++ core, s…

Unity is currently working to make Unity compatible with .NET 6 / CoreCLR, but they don't yet have a release date for that yet. The progress is being tracked in this megathread: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-future-net-development...

That's interesting. I think it will take quite some time though, it's going to be a monumental task.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#113
post #90
post #74

Not to tone police that much but I really don't get people like Casey. Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these "bloated" tools. Just completely dismissive of everything that doesn't align directly with his values (which don't include actually shipping game!) I like people who write their own engines and make bespoke things for fun. Just really dislike…

I don’t understand the point about the difficulty of grayboxing with Unity. Can you elaborate? All my projects start with programmer art — often just the built-in primitive (cubes, spheres, cylinders, planes).

https://joewintergreendev.tumblr.com/post/152188146576/repos... Here are a set of videos that compare UE4 to Valve's stuff. Just like making it easy to drop a bunch of stuff in and texture things nicely.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#114
post #74

Not to tone police that much but I really don't get people like Casey. Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these "bloated" tools. Just completely dismissive of everything that doesn't align directly with his values (which don't include actually shipping game!) I like people who write their own engines and make bespoke things for fun. Just really dislike…

[deleted]

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#115
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you need to understand that all current (serious) game engines primarily use C++, in order to provide maximum performance at the low-level. But C++ is incredibly unproductive as a language for actual high-level game development, since C++ takes ages to compile and has more weird and dangerous footguns than any other language. So developers often end up binding a scripting language onto their C++ core, s…

>The problem is that C# isn't a language intended for embedding, and you need a lot of effort to bind the two seamlessly. I don't think that it's actually very hard to do it, I've done it easily for Java and I think I remember doing it for c# as well: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/netco... It's honestly just a few lines of C code that you point at some c#/java method and run it. The truth is…

> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/netco...

Well that's something I've never heard of, seems like a pretty recent API. Though it doesn't explain how to call C++ functions from CLR (not the other way), which is the most tedious and error-prone part. It also doesn't explain how to expose foreign C++ objects to CLR either.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#116
post #74

Not to tone police that much but I really don't get people like Casey. Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these "bloated" tools. Just completely dismissive of everything that doesn't align directly with his values (which don't include actually shipping game!) I like people who write their own engines and make bespoke things for fun. Just really dislike…

I freaking suck at modeling and I've been at it for years. Been working with Unity and shipping stuff for a decade. It helps to know how to get the right partners I guess, but I've always been able to get stuff done with Unity. Now the momentum I have with my app store, maybe there aren't many ideas anyone could throw at me where I have to do much more than load up a few things I already own and push stuff around. I barely write code... But its' a lot of experience, unity has gotten massively better. I used to write a lot of C# and trained collaborators on Playmaker. Now it's more focused on just keeping the working directory clean, I don't really like their collab stuff, I prefer to maintain my own git.

What I do and have done is never the same as what most people do for spit and polish, but I'd say Unity has the functionality especially now for people who "can't 3D model too great". I'm pretty sure Unreal can function similar too, maybe with a slightly steeper curve but some neat efficiencies. I think that reality is aaaalmost here though.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#117
post #105

It depends on your projects needs. I built a music visualizer in Unity, and have no idea how I would of done this in Unreal. It was a small project, and I'm already using it to make videos. My biggest issue with Unreal is how hard anything is outside of Blueprints. C++ is much harder than C#, for my project I both load audio files locally ( you select your own music to play), and download some from a server. I'm pret…

cool project, I'm sure you can build this with unreal too just a steeper learning curve though payoff would be higher quality graphic rendering.

Thanks for checking it out!

Assuming Unreal does add their verse programming language later this year, I'll be open to recreating the same project with Metahumans instead.

Maybe I'll even apply for an Unreal grant!

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ can be used instead of Blueprints.

Thanks I understand that, just that the whole engine seems to be a huge blob that is difficult to approach. Maybe I should just focus on one part.

i would imagine it's easier to delve deep into UE since their source is actually available. I dont know if you can step into unity's code at all.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#120
If you are an indie developer and have never worked with C++ before, don't even think about UE5, if you plan on ever finishing your game. Stick with Unity.

Unreal makes money from royalties. Think about the odds of indie game developers generating more than $1MM vs an established studio who has shipped games/films before.

You've been warned.

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