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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#161
post #69
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't even need to do that. If they are large enough where it would become millions there is a different license for them that they can negotiate with Epic. Note: it doesn't have a royalty

This is what CD Projekt Red did?

Just guesswork here, but I think they have an agreement that is cheaper and also includes CDPR engine developers contributing code back to UE that makes it better to use for open-world games.

In the UE5 Keynote it seemed more like a technical partnership than just CDPR licensing UE5 for a price.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#162
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…

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…

I think making the content he makes is very very cool! I think it empowers people and is super interesting! I think that kind of content is few and far between as well.

I just don’t believe that he has good judgement about what makes sense for people making games professionally in this specific context. And I think he could be much happier in his life if he just didn’t feel the need to shit on other peoples work.

You can do cool stuff in your corner of the world without being obsessed with what other people are doing.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#163
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 have been overly dismissive of Casey's work. HH is a treasure, and if you consider that he explained the how and the why of every single line of code, on stream, without cutting any corner, your consideration about the time spent become meaningless. There are people interested in copy-pasting and glueing together pre-baked parts to ship something, and there are people interested in developing a deep understanding…

yeah I think what he does is cool! Just like… ok if you’re that person you’re not using Unreal or Unity anyways.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#164
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…

If he’s all about saying modern software is crap, then his opinion isn’t very good imo.

I’ll say it again: I think he makes cool stuff! I just don’t think hes right about his judgement here

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#165
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think making the content he makes is very very cool! I think it empowers people and is super interesting! I think that kind of content is few and far between as well. I just don’t believe that he has good judgement about what makes sense for people making games professionally in this specific context. And I think he could be much happier in his life if he just didn’t feel the need to shit on other peoples work. You…

He’s not doing that to engines in this case, though. The quote in the article is complimentary of UE5. And whenever he complained about bloated tools he put his money where his mouth was, depite people claiming it was impossible, or that it would take several man-years.

If anything, you are the one “shitting on other peoples work” here by claiming he’s “spending a billion years”, or saying he’s not capable of judging something in his area of expertise. He’s one of the most knowledgeable experts in this field, make no mistake.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#166

Is Godot out of the question? Is it mostly a performance thing?

Yeah, I would not use unity or unreal. They're too big and too complex.

Godot is light and simple.

Unreal and unity offer sophisticated features for developers who can't take the time to do some low level.

But:

1. Inexperienced developers should not aim for high end graphics and features in the first place, so using those engines is irrelevant to them, they should learn to do simple things themselves. The big race for graphics quality belong to AAA games who don't use those engines.

2. Experienced developers are working for complex games, and are able to avoid the clutter of unity and unreal, because they know what game they want to do, or they work with custom made engines, tailored for their needs.

Unreal and unity are monsters, because they're generic and do everything at the same time.

Godot is the best solution in my opinion. Do small things if you can, avoid big things. If you want to do big things, have the ambition to do them right, and like actual professional developers, don't use unity or unreal.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#167
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Isn't that just p/invoke?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#168
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 think a balance needs to be found. Maybe what you're looking for in Casey is not what he provides. He tries to provide people with sound engineering foundations on which huge engines can be built.

I think this isn't what a lot of people (including me) are looking for. They are looking for a tutorial on how to build a relatively competent engine from scratch in a decent amount of time.

Which is entirely possible, I don't claim to have Casey's engineering chops, but in college (about a decade ago), I built an engine with dynamic lighting, physics, loading 3d models and integrated Lua scripting from scratch in about a month while doing my classes.

It was as I remember, between 10k and 20k lines, of not very pretty code.

While I wouldn't show the code as an example to anyone, even if I had it, I think people need to realize, that for their own game, writing the necessary engine plumbing might be entirely possible, and a lot more possible nowadays, and if people actually built a community around this attitude, a lot of tooling, whose lack can be painful now, might just emerge from folks.

I think if you can build solid engine foundations in a month, that's a lot less time than what you'd have to spend with wresting Unity's broken, undocumented, ship-of-Theseus, features (Scriptable Render Pipelines), doing frustrating trial and error, and mining obscure forum posts for nuggets of info.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#169
post #157
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

A game that illustrates that success is tied to performance is factorio. Because it can scale to absurd amounts, while still running on an old labtop. It’s in a genre with notorious performance issues and limitations as well as bugs, but they managed to put in the time and effort. Some of the lessons and solutions are quite educational even. There’s games that are ridiculously simple in comparison let your fans spinn…

> A game that illustrates that success is tied to performance is factorio.

Sure, performance is important if you are making a game with that level of simulation. Most games (or software in general) don't go for that level of simulation/performance.

For every Factorio, there are thousands of games that work just as well without that level of simulation. From FPS to trashy mobile games that are just a well disguised slot machine.

> There’s games that are ridiculously simple in comparison let your fans spinning for no reason, grind to a halt or crash.

Sure and Morrowind used to corrupt your save-files in a horrible manner. It still sold as hot cakes. Even though I remember it being a hog on my resources.

Warcraft 3 had an unpatched memory issue people used to extend its programming capabilities, until it turns out said issue could be used for RCE, so Blizzard had to break every existing custom map (like DOTA, not like custom melee map) to fix it. It started several independent genres.

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Point is you don't need to think about every ms of execution if you are writing 99.9% of software. Sure you can take some precautions and use some tried and true methods (using immutable trees for editing).

But even those come with caveats. You have only so and so complexity budget, will you spend it on features or performance? Almost always the answer is features.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#170
I've shipped Unity games, and had impact on some engine decisions for major companies (between Unity, Unreal, and a few others).

Unreal is a FPS engine with a gorgeous renderer. Unity is a rendering pipeline, physics engine, with a C# interface.

Are you making a movie? Unreal. Making a FPS (or third-person, I guess. an ego shooter? whatever.) Unreal.

Making literally anything else: Unity. It's that simple.

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