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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#211

Post by leetrout »

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…

Spot on.

All the tutorials, articles, etc just cover small bits and nothing addresses the full software dev lifecycle as it pertains to games.

Managing binary assets across even a small team presents a set of challenges the normal web-devs like myself have been unlikely to encounter, as well.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#212

Post by adampk »

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 have thought about why it is much harder to follow the general best practice of Unity Tests + Automated Tests we find in web development and I think it is because the amount of "state" a video game has.

In the web we have our cursor and it clicks on an element. In video game design the character can widely vary when it interacts with an element such as a "door".

The classic "why doors are hard" might explain why having a "regression suite for happy paths" might be near-impossible.

Though that the core reason for using the Entity, Component, Systems (ECS) in their coming Data Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) it does help create far more maintainable code.

https://www.vox.com/videos/22661048/video-game-development-d...

https://unity.com/dots

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#213

Post by Ygg2 »

ratww wrote: post #191
Ygg2 wrote: 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…

> Performance is never a positive as much as a disqualifying negative. Features are what sell the software Except we're talking about video games, where time and time again performance was crucial in achieving new breakthroughs, from Mario's side scrolling, to Carmack's advances in FPSs, to... FFS, we're talking about Unreal 5, this version's selling point is mainly being able to do in realtime what was previously on…

> Except we're talking about video games, where time and time again performance was crucial

In that domain speed is pretty important, but even there it's not as crucial as you might assume. I'm not saying discount it altogether, just good gameplay will trump good performance. They aren't completely unrelated, but there are diminishing returns.

What are the titles that need to be that much performant? AAA titles are just rehash/sequels with latest monetization tactics tacked on. On low end you got shitty mobile games that only optimization is user conditioning.

That leaves you with Indies, that can use GameMaker/Unity and still get their game out.

Sure some AAA use Unreal to their absolute limits. In same way some people develop drivers for embedded hardware. You still don't want to develop games and software in general, the same way those few studios do.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#214

Post by zschuessler »

I'm late to the game but I'll throw in the opinion of a hobbyist doing VR development.

I gave Unreal 4 a solid shot: did the tutorials, watched videos, learned simple concepts and advanced concepts alike. After months of learning one weekend I thought "I'm not having fun anymore" because 70% of my time was troubleshooting build errors and vague bugs (I actually counted). I'm no stranger to build errors (I'm an engineer) and even for me it was a difficult task to fix them. I would go down rabbit holes for hours fixing vague errors. Further, just about every tutorial I came across for UE4 was outdated and didn't work.

I swapped to UE5 a few months before they released their first public version. It was an absolute beaut of a system to use in comparison: better UI, drastically fewer bugs, tutorials were accurate, and no build errors. Quite a bit Just Worked, A+.

Ultimately I went to Unity because at least for VR, there were better tools that were better supported by the package maintainers. Adding a new third party Thing to a project in UE5 was a guaranteed recipe for troubleshooting weird bugs. In Unity, everything worked flawlessly. And personally, I dig C# more than C++.

So, I did the same learning process with Unity: simple/advanced tutorials, plenty of time dedicated to picking up all the concepts over several months. I'd say Unity for a hobbyist is still the better route if you are planning on doing game dev part-time. It's just easier to use and breaks less.

This is the opinion of a hobbyist doing VR development part-time though, and I fully believe other comments from industry pros saying Unreal is the way to go. I can't comment on that but I will say Unity was best for me.

Both asset stores were pretty killer and I spent WAY too much money on assets and scripts. Prepare to have a checkbook handy if you get started with either ;)

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#215

Post by lgl »

tuvan wrote: post #181
fxtentacle wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seriously, how can the most used game engine not add proper multiplayer support in 20 years. They announced Netcode for game objects this year which seems OK but even that has "Clientside prediction" in "under consideration" category, any proper realtime multiplayer game on the market has this feature and rollback netcode isn't even under consideration. So if they achieve their goals, they will have a system that is…

AFAIK, Netcode for game objects is merely a rebranded version of a previously existing third party plugin called MLAPI that Unity acquired and hired its developer.

It is very close to what they already had before and was probably mostly to reduce the amount of complaints from, well everybody, regarding their non existent multiplayer, the deprecation of their previous multiplayer solution (however bad) before having any sort of replacement and the semi recent addition of the low-level networking solution that is mostly way too complicated and poorly documented for most average Unity developers.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#216

Post by Ygg2 »

werner1886 wrote: post #180
Ygg2 wrote: 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…

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.

> The only thing that matters is to be first.

To quote a famous asshole: "Real artists ship."

Or another "Perfect is the enemy of Good Enough™"

Network effects are real and being first to (idea) market has its own benefits. Who would have thought, speed of development has its own merits.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#217

Post by bstar77 »

It seems like Unreal is a terrible fit for smaller projects where visual fidelity isn't a primary concern. Would I ever build a roguelike, city builder or 2d platformer in Unreal? Wouldn't something like Godot or Unity be a much better fit?

AAA level graphics in nice, but there are many game genres that have visual fidelity very low on their respective list of concerns. With the rise of the Steamdeck, I'm sure there will be a rise in efficient portable-friendly games that can get that 7 hours of battery life. Not sure I would ever consider Unreal for those types of projects.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#218

Post by ecshafer »

bstar77 wrote: post #217

It seems like Unreal is a terrible fit for smaller projects where visual fidelity isn't a primary concern. Would I ever build a roguelike, city builder or 2d platformer in Unreal? Wouldn't something like Godot or Unity be a much better fit? AAA level graphics in nice, but there are many game genres that have visual fidelity very low on their respective list of concerns. With the rise of the Steamdeck, I'm sure there…

As a hobbiest, even if visual fidelity isn't a concern I would use unreal over unity. Unity optimizes for making a block move around the screen, but becomes increasingly convoluted in design. Unreal doesn't feel like you are just hammering random different unrelated systems together as much. If I were to do a 2d game I would use godot though.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#219

Post by edem »

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…

So which engine is this guy working on? I checked his twitter and his website but there is no mention about the actual engine (only that he is working on one).

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#220

Post by fulafel »

overgard wrote: post #46

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. It puts you in this awkward situation of, ok, do I develop against this stable thing only to have to replace it in 6 months, or do I do Unity's beta testing for them and waste a ton of my time dealing with their bugs? The other thing I really dislik…

Unreal uses GC (refcounting) too, no?
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