Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

> One of the most infuriating things about Unity is they tend to deprecate/stop maintaining working things even though the replacement is still in preview and/or not ready.

A.k.a. life as a software engineer at Google.

I've found that this is just such a common experience, not just with Unity, but everywhere. I think the real problem with Unity is that it's hard to get good guidance about whether to choose the new/experimental path or the old/deprecated path. There are random packages (ProGrids? New input system?) that are marked experimental but ready for production use except the documentation is not as good as it should be. Then there's stuff like DOTS, which is much harder to use in production.

> Also, while I'm generally a fan of C#, I think it was somewhat of a poor choice for games.

This is more of an implementation quality issue than a language design problem. Unity was stuck on an old version of Mono for a long time, for a licensing reason or something like that. I'm aware that newer C# versions have much better GC performance, but it's not something I have personal experience with.

Unreal engine has native support for networking. You add some configuration to your objects to determine how they should be replicated over the net and flip a switch in the settings, and now you have a multiplayer game.

> Re: iteration time, Live++ [1] integration has matured a lot in UE5. That means compiling most code changes without having to restart the editor (or even in-editor game session). Again, not much different than Unity here, though both can break and require editor restarts for certain types of changes.

A week of doing things in unreal engine 5 C++ has resulted in more editor restarts than years of doing things in unity. They are not really comparable. And this is from someone who have written a a few hundred thousand lines of C++ at Google and no professional experience with C#, getting to a productive state in unreal engine C++ as a solo developer is a huge slog compared to unity.

If you do most things in blueprints then unreal might be fine, but for an experienced programmers blueprints feels extremely slow and clunky to work with. I want to write code.

Somebody wrote this comment. It was spot on.

"UE5 is very pretty because Sweeny is a rendering god. But its hell to do any real programming with. A project that took me two weeks or so in C# is taking months to reproduce in C++ and Blueprints.

UE5 is a very pretty FPS engine with a low-level plugin interface and a scripting language. The further you get from an FPS the more unwieldly it becomes.

Unity is a programmable physics simulator that happens to have a render pipeline bolted onto it. It is much more flexible, though sadly not as pretty,"

Am also asking myself. Did the company behind Unity going public last year or so not help with the situation? I mean extra money and public scrutiny usually do.

Roughly 600 episodes translates to roughly 600 work hours. That's 15 weeks. And now it's a full 3D game engine. Because he's not doing it contiguously and instead doing it once a week or so (there are breaks sometimes), it's continued over many years. So by episode 40, he's done about 1 normal work-weeks worth of work (and in truth, constantly starting and stopping affects the productivity, as does doing it live and explaining yourself. Imagine your productivity hit while doing pair programming, basically).

In that time, he's already got a hot reloading 2D engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBCOijN2fNA . And he's not exactly implementing it for speed of getting something done, but for educational purposes, by doing things like explicitly not using libraries, implementing PNG decompression, math functions, and doing software rendering first, and then switching to hardware acceleration even though he knew he would eventually do hardware acceleration anyway.

His point stands up completely. You can follow handmade hero and have your own 2D game engine up and running in roughly 1 week's time.

Furthermore, it's pretty disgusting to call an educational project that's had hundreds of hours poured into it "spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these 'bloated' tools." Do you know how many people his educational videos have helped? The amount of patience and dedication it takes to answer all of these beginner questions and explain things way below his level of experience in terms of difficulty qualifies him for sainthood in my opinion.