Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 319 posts

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#141

Post by sph »

kensai wrote: post #138

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 programmab…

Mostly spot on, as someone else said: "Sweeney hasn't written any of that rendering code in a decade now." And probably more than that. He's got other stuff to attend to, than writing modern 3D pipeline code.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#142

Post by Jensson »

fxtentacle wrote: post #139
kensai wrote: post #138

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 programmab…

In my personal opinion, it's the opposite: Unity is a black-box machinery with a C# interface bolted on. But as soon as you touch the limits of the black box, your sand castle breaks. UE4 is the full but raw deal. If you stay within Blueprints, things are easy and predictable. But if you need to exceed its limits, then you have the C++ needed to recompile everything, but things are messy and ugly down in the basement…

Unity is primarily the renderer and physics engine, everything else is really easy to just write yourself as c#, and unity in no way hinders your ability to write everything else in c#. If you want to change the renderer or physics engine then you have a problem, yes, but unity isn't for people who wants to customize the renderer or physics engine.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#143

Post by sph »

rtpg wrote: 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 get Casey's point nor your dislike for him either.

I think that between writing your game engine and going full UE5 there is space for a middle ground of smaller, simpler engines. If I were to write a game today, unless I wanted that AAA look with UE5, that middle ground is where I'd look and be most productive. Still waiting for Godot 4 here.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#144

Post by skinpop »

rtpg wrote: 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 think that's fair. Sure HH has been going on for eight years, but on average Casey is only putting in 3-4 hours per week. That's not even half a work-day per week. Not to mention that he spends a lot of time explaining every single decision he makes and does black-boarded lectures on pretty much every subject covered in the series.

I think it's reasonable to assume progress would be at least 3-4 times faster if his focus was solely on the code. So what you call "a billion years" is actually more like a total 2-4 months of fulltime coding.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#145

Post by Ygg2 »

werner1886 wrote: post #137
rtpg wrote: 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…

You clearly have no idea what's he is all about. His message is very clear: Modern software is crap. It's orders of magnitude slower than it should be, it's buggy, and,yes, bloated. And if you ever used any piece of software today I don't see how you can you not agree with it... He is never advocating NOT using engines, but rather that one can be much better and more efficient developer with just a little bit knowled…

> Modern software is crap. It's orders of magnitude slower than it should be, it's buggy, and,yes, bloated.

And, that's where he lost me. Software was always crap. Emacs = Eight Megabytes and constantly swapping.

Because even if you squeeze every last cent of performance, someone will have a great idea that will spend each dime you saved and then even add some debt on it.

Performance is never a positive as much as a disqualifying negative. Features are what sell the software. Why would people use/pay for IDEs over a free text editor.

And if you listen to Casey's advice, well, be ready to rewrite your entire stack because almost no software today is willing to do what you need. It's a good advice if you know you'll keep programming for next 120-30000 years. And don't have any competition willing to cut corners.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#146

Post by chmod775 »

rtpg wrote: 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…

> 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.

It takes some rather strong motivation (and opinions!) to make your own. If you were fine with whatever was already there, you probably wouldn't bother...

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#147

Post by saint_angels »

as a professional Unity developer, I think Unity would be a much, MUCH better engine, if Unity Technologies would make commercial games with it, in-house. Just like Epic games do. Then they wouldn't tolerate all the crap unity devs have to deal with

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#148

Post by fulafel »

rtpg wrote: 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…

The "not shipping" criticism is too harsh I think - most game projects fail to ship after all, and having worked on some non-shipped games plus having worked on standard setting components shipped in zillions of games is a respectable career.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#149

Post by Danieru »

Jensson wrote: post #136
dogles wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# remains a plus for a lot of game code, but not as much as you might imagine. C++ usage in Unreal is really a small restricted subset of C++. For typical gameplay code, you play within their rules for uclasses/ustructs/etc and it feels pretty much like any other managed GC language. Meanwhile, for places where it matters, "raw" C++ is of course always available. Re: iteration time, Live++ [1] integration has mature…

> 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 uni…

FYI, you will want to launch the editor from inside visual studio. Here is a wiki game documenting the workflow: https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.26/en-US/ProductionPipelines...

Launching the editor from visual studio makes the code and compile workflow quicker. On our project we take map ids from the command line. Thus I can set my visual studio to open a specific map when I hit run. Compined with a powerful cpu and optimized include what you use header usage the iteration time is compatible to a large unity project.

Unreal has a ton of hidden magic most people only learn from other people. Which is fine if you are working at a studio with other more experienced devs. Not great if like me you started as a hobbiest.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#150

Post by throwuxiytayq »

Arelius wrote: post #108
cyber_kinetist wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the background Casey was in, then his thought process becomes a bit understandable. He worked for a long time doing R&D at RAD Game Tools, which is a company that provided various game development middleware and tools. So his interests naturally gear more towards low-level game tools/systems development rather than high-level design and scripting, which is why he couldn't understand the value propositi…

> He also worked on The Witness team with Jonathan Blow and others, but mainly on engine programming. Just to be clear, he came into the project much later and didn't contribute nearly as much to the game as i.e Jonathan and Ignacio.

His contributions seem limited in scope but very significant: https://youtu.be/YE8MVNMzpbo
Post reply on HN