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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#201

Post by mrfusion »

oddity wrote: post #104
mrfusion wrote: post #18

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

I've started learning Godot to replace Unity for the prototyping role, but under no circumstances would I ship a game in stock Godot except for a game jam. The stock editor workflow is solid enough and overall fairly pleasant, but the documentation is abysmal, features aren't up to par with the Unity of even a decade ago, and code quality is "improving". I also have absolutely no clue why the world needed an even wor…

Is anyone working on making Python work with it? That would be amazing.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#202

Post by Matl »

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.

It's worth noting that Jonathan's tone is very similar indeed.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#203

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

127 wrote: post #178
ashkankiani wrote: post #140

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 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.

Casey has been in the industry since before DirectX existed, worked for RAD Game Tools, and likely has code in more games than you've ever even played.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#204

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Matl wrote: post #200
panzerboiler wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You have been overly dismissive of Casey's work. I am reading it not as what Casey is doing isn't cool, just that it is not at the level to enable Casey to be himself dismissive of other people's work to the extent he is.

Has nobody looked at what Casey did for a living before Handmade Hero?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#205

Post by golergka »

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…

Why didn't that person add Blueprint to the comparison?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#206

Post by jessermeyer »

127 wrote: post #178
ashkankiani wrote: post #140

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 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.

Can you provide an example of that?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#207

Post by markus_zhang »

The more I read about these arguments the more I think it might be actually beneficial to male your own engines if you have 1) a small-medium size team and 2) not reaching for top notch graphics.

Does it make sense?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#208

Post by andrewallbright »

In this critique of unity they say that the back half of making a game is the half of suffering. In my experience, it highlights something else that is a massive problem in the game dev space. The game dev community is stuck in software practices of 2005, leading to naive implementation patterns.

As a hobbyist game developer of ~1year, one thing that struck me was how I have not found many good sources of teaching that explains how to make a maintainable game. How does one make a code base for a video game that has desirable the non-functional qualities like maintainability? That question doesn't really have an answer...

I think it doesn't have an answer because those teaching game development haven't really asked. I'm sure it's due to many factors.

For anecdotal, I've asked about testing and CI/CD for unity in online spaces. There isn't much content on these critical subjects in the video game education space. I usually get a mix of responses but one that stuck out to me is that video games aren't appropriate for tests and it just slows down game creation.

I think that thought process more than anything is what leads to back half issues. I think that the video game industry has lagged behind the rest of the software industry and there is a huge opportunity for disruption.

In 5-10 years people should think it's absolutely outlandish to start a complex software project such as a video game project without a CI/CD engine running a suite of sensible tests. I think today that is true for most software projects, although as a community were still wrapping our heads around "what is a good test?"

My 2cents

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#209

Post by ssimpson »

andrewallbright wrote: post #208

In this critique of unity they say that the back half of making a game is the half of suffering. In my experience, it highlights something else that is a massive problem in the game dev space. The game dev community is stuck in software practices of 2005, leading to naive implementation patterns. As a hobbyist game developer of ~1year, one thing that struck me was how I have not found many good sources of teaching th…

I feel the same trying do develop an enterprise application with Unity. When I worked for Unity I found it fascinating that game devs (not coming from game development) were “locked into” a particular version. I hope the package system can alleviate some of that but there is a real need for some automation and upgradability.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#210

Post by blensor »

jstimpfle wrote: post #190
bluescrn wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the other hand, porting to other platforms is probably never a no-op even when building on big 3rd party tech stacks. Many of the platform specifics will shine through to the high-level code. And personally I find it rewarding to learn how to properly layer the code in order to factor out platform concerns. Many of the differences between platforms will seem kind of dull and the different platform implementations…

That right there is the crux: "And personally I find it rewarding to learn how to properly layer the code in order to factor out platform concerns."

I like tech riddles and figuring out how to make stuff work, investors unfortunately do not.

If you constantly have to defend why you can't just do X if everybody else can just because the stuff is only available on Unity and you have to write the underlying plugins yourself it get's old pretty quickly.

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