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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#231

Post by dgb23 »

Ygg2 wrote: post #169
dgb23 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sl…

That’s right but the point I was trying to make that there are whole categories of features you cannot implement if performance doesn’t allow it.

I‘m not looking at this from a pure business perspective because it’s not fruitful. We all know that you can produce crap and make a huge buck, because of marketing, dark patterns, manipulation, exploitation, luck and so on.

I‘m saying there are good examples where building things from a lower layer up does not only make sense, but is necessary for creative freedom and quality they achieved.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#232

Post by bstar77 »

ecshafer wrote: post #218
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.

I tried Unity for a while for 2d game development and really hated the workflow, so I floundered for a couple years trying to figure out what path to take for some of my project ideas.

I've shipped 2 games in Phaser, but did not like the experience at all- optimization was a nightmare and structuring a non-trivial project was surprisingly hard. I've since switched to Godot which has been a dream so far. I would use Godot for 3d development as well, but I realize that anyone that prioritizes visual fidelity will likely look elsewhere. Godot 4 will have huge improvements there, but nothing at the level of Unreal or even Unity.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#233

Post by edem »

ratww wrote: post #225
edem wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

He's not currently working on an engine per se (at least not publicly), but he's has a streaming channel where he teaches the fundaments needed for understanding and potentially being able to build one.

So he is all bark no bite. Got it.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#234

Post by fassssst »

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…

A fair amount of software is about either filling in forms to populate a database or rendering views of a database. In that context, tests and maintainability matters because you're generally implementing business processes.

Traditional games are more like art, or rather more like novels than textbooks, where you write it once and put it out there.

That's of course changing with live service games so I suspect testing and maintainability will become increasingly written about.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#235

Post by leshow »

ratww wrote: post #192
rtpg wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 he’s all about saying modern software is crap, then his opinion isn’t very good imo. That's extremely reductionist. He's saying that modern software is crap regarding performance. And whenever he does complain, he manages to demonstrate it.

What's the conclusion though? Modern software is crap so you shouldnt use any libraries and roll your own implementations of everything?

Sounds like a recipe for lots of bugs.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#236

Post by ratww »

leshow wrote: post #235
ratww wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he’s all about saying modern software is crap, then his opinion isn’t very good imo. That's extremely reductionist. He's saying that modern software is crap regarding performance. And whenever he does complain, he manages to demonstrate it.

What's the conclusion though? Modern software is crap so you shouldnt use any libraries and roll your own implementations of everything? Sounds like a recipe for lots of bugs.

Did you had fun knocking this strawman?

Nobody said or implied that you need to eschew libraries and write everything from scratch to achieve performance, and it is frankly a very dishonest way of conducting this conversation.

Especially considering that we’re talking about someone (Casey) whose previous job was pretty much selling high-performance libraries (RAD Tools).

The claim from the (to be cheeky) “anti-performance” crowd is that it is impossible or unnecessary to extract more performance from modern computers. All that we’re saying is that things are not so black and white.

“The conclusion”, if you need one, is that people saying that more performance is impossible or impractical as a knee-jerk response are often wrong.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#237

Post by runevault »

sph wrote: post #143
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.

He's not saying don't use UE5. He's saying what's the point of Unity now that UE5 exists.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#238

Post by ratww »

edem wrote: post #233
ratww wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not currently working on an engine per se (at least not publicly), but he's has a streaming channel where he teaches the fundaments needed for understanding and potentially being able to build one.

So he is all bark no bite. Got it.

Where did the guy even bark? He publicly praised Unreal Engine 5.

Also, why does he have to be working on an engine? He has worked on some others and is one of the few with enough credentials to criticize. In this case he’s not even criticizing, just asking questions which are not really trivial to answer.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#239

Post by tomc1985 »

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…

Why are so many afraid of "negative energy"? Let the man be weird. He doesn't exist to serve your opinion. Open your mind, dude

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#240

Post by runevault »

pjmlp wrote: post #152
cyber_kinetist wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you need to understand that all current (serious) game engines primarily use C++, in order to provide maximum performance at the low-level. But C++ is incredibly unproductive as a language for actual high-level game development, since C++ takes ages to compile and has more weird and dangerous footguns than any other language. So developers often end up binding a scripting language onto their C++ core, s…

Actually since Burst and DOTS, Unity has been incrementally replacing C++ with C# Burst subset.

Burst is such an interesting project. The fact that, because they know what they are trying to do more than a c++ compiler really can due to the intended use cases, they can be more aggressive with optimizations like SIMD. I remember a talk where they were discussing replacing c++ code with the Burst stuff as you mentioned, and I recall the biggest reason being they could write more succinct code that kept the speed because they weren't having to convince the compiler to do a lot of optimizations they needed to keep it fast.
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