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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#171

Post by bluescrn »

ashkankiani wrote: post #140
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…

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…

These days, if you're making a game, even a fairly small indie game, you usually want it to run on as many platforms as possible.

Even for a 2D game, there's big advantages to using a ready-made engine that natively supports many platforms, from mobile to high-end consoles (across OpenGL, D3D, Metal, and proprietary console rendering APIs).

If you're building a game engine as a fun/learning project, that's cool. But if your goal is to make a game, pick a ready-made engine as a starting point. Whichever you choose, you'll probably end up both loving it and hating it, but you'll get a heck of a lot more game-making done than if you go down the 'build your own engine' route.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#172

Post by golergka »

tonguez wrote: post #25
golergka wrote: post #13

I've worked as professional Unity developer for 8 years after learning it as a hobbyist for 3, and I'm happy to finally be rid of it. It's good for prototypes and beginners, sure. But when you start to build big projects, you learn that al those learning resources guide you towards using awful architectural practices, and that there's a million of edge cases and weird bugs that would absolutely kill your project but…

“…since ~2015, Unity as a company have been more and more interested in developing shiny prototypes of new features that would look great in presentations, but it would take forever to finally get them to be production ready, and they would be rid with problems even then. It's as if Unity cared more about increasing numbers of newcomers than retain old-timers and studios which already invested heavily into the engine…

It's not profit above all else. It's short-term profit above long-term profit, because management doesn't plan on staying that long, or just isn't capable of building a long-term thinking culture.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#173

Post by jimmySixDOF »

suyash wrote: post #23
mrfusion wrote: post #18

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

for me would be lack of AR/VR support as that is what I want to build apps/games for.

Unity is the engine most used by indy VR devs & even the few using UE are not happy the new Nanite and Lumen enhancements don't work in XR.

But don't take my word for it there was a good Unity vs UE twitter thread just last week [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/andrewpprice/status/1514168832738607111

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#174

Post by fxtentacle »

Jensson wrote: post #142
fxtentacle wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In our case, we jumped ship because Unity had bugs and were unwilling to fix them for years.

I believe it still is effectively unusable for anything requiring realtime multiplayer.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#175

Post by rawoke083600 »

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…

Who is "Casey" ?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#176

Post by maccard »

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…

I'm not really sure where this came from, but it's pretty much nonsense.

Tim Sweeney hasn't written rendering code (or engine code) in years, the Unreal rendering team is enormous these days.

> 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.

How much of that is familiarity with C# vs unfamiliarity with C++? I find it pretty unbelieveable that someone couldn't reproduce 2 weeks of work in "months".

> UE5 is a very pretty FPS engine with a low-level plugin interface and a scripting language.

Unreal has its roots in an FPS, and that shines through in places, but this hasn't been true for over a decade. The gameplay framework in UE4 is suitable for (and has shipped) many different genres of games. Looking at even wikipedia's list [0] will show you a laundry list of games that are not FPS games that have shipped with Unreal. There are major ARPG, beatemup, open-world shooter, racing, straight up RPG games, and there have been other games announced that don't fit in those categories (e.g. RTS games).

> 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,"

This is a ludicrous take on Unity. How is it "more flexible" than Unreal? And the claim that it's "not as pretty" is also bizarre (well, up until very recently at least), Unity's pipeline is just as programmable as Unreal's, and sure at the very very very top end of the range of outputs it tops out Unreal, but an "average" PBR pipeline in Unity and an "average" PBR pipeline in Unreal with zbrush sculpts and substance textures/materials is going to be comparable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#177

Post by werner1886 »

rtpg wrote: post #164
werner1886 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you see his points and still disagree that's fair enough

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#178

Post by 127 »

ashkankiani wrote: post #140
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…

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 the point here is that he has some really spicy takes that one can not call balanced or objective by any measure, while not doing anything that's impressive enough to actually deserve to be taken seriously when it comes to such sweeping claims.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#179

Post by bullen »

The reality is that the only tech all companies are hiding in plain sight is Skin Mesh Animation and Unity doesn't even implement that in a vertex shader!

They use a compute shader which means they have to send all meshes every frame.

Here Autodesk plays a huge role in bottlenecking the tool chain and that is all perfectly legal.

Monopoly by standardizing tech.

Everything else involved in making a game is much easier from scratch.

Combine that with the fact that all computers without keyboard and mouse are wasted energy and you'll quickly realize that if you only need to support Win on X86 and Linux on ARM your porting is trivial if you use OpenGL (ES) 3 which is the final GL with VAO.

Add HTTP, OpenAL and use .dae, .obj, .ttf, .wav, .tga and .zip and you're done!

Also don't use anything much beyond C and you can't fail.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#180

Post by werner1886 »

Ygg2 wrote: post #145
werner1886 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, software of the past wasn't that much better, but relative to hardware it ran on it was much more performant.

I think the main point of his view is that with current hardware advances we should be able to have a cake and eat it too. We can have both the features and the speed, but we don't care about that. The only thing that matters is to be first.

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