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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#241

Post by skullt »

evilturnip wrote: post #230
127 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He was a programmer at RAD game tools, which is industry standard for game tools. He also was the principal game engine engineer on The Witness, and has probably worked on other 3d games in the industry.

> principal game engine engineer on The Witness

Is that true? He is listed in the credits under "Additional contributions in programming by", and in his blog posts about the "Walk Monster" problem, his role sounds like that of an independent contractor brought on late in the project.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#242

Post by leshow »

ratww wrote: post #236
leshow wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-perfor…

If there is no conclusion then you are just un-productively saying "modern software sucks".

My point is, if the claim is that modern software is bad, what do they offer as the solution to that?

> 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.

This is barely a statement. I've never heard "performance is impossible" from anyone, and it's amusing you would accuse me of a strawman and then introduce one like this.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#243

Post by whywhywhywhy »

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #39

Talking on sidelines, I really, really hope there is a new Unreal single player game that follow the veins of Unreal I. However, I do think given the complexity of post UE3 engines, it is extremely difficult for even a large community to push such a game out. Years ago I heard about a project that tried to recreate Unreal I in UE4 but never heard much about it. It just takes too much time and effort. What's your call…

Won’t ever come from Epic. Think with Fortnite their future has to be these mass multiplayer half social experiences where their advantage is just the speed they can ship content to it. It’s pretty impressive technically.

But if you want games like old school Unreal I suggest you google “Boomer Shooters” where there are a lot of indie FPS games now that imitate that era.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#244

Post by TillE »

MattRix wrote: post #222
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…

As a game developer, there are two main reasons we don’t write tests: A. because the game design is constantly changing, so any tests would slow down iteration time. B. because the game has so much state it would be very hard to accurately recreate it.

You can do a ton of productive testing just by clearly separating different systems, especially game logic from rendering etc. This is just good code hygiene. Better game-specific tools can also be created, as companies like Larian are doing.

It's not really very different from testing other big complex software. Everybody has evolving requirements. But the general culture of game development is to ignore automated testing entirely, which is awful.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#245

Post by tcfunk »

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…

600 work hours give or take the 20,000 that got him the expertise required to sit down and write it in the first place. Do you end up with your own game engine, or a clone of Casey's game engine? That depends on what you already knew going into the series.

Not dismissing the value of the series here, just saying the average would-be game developer likely does not have the same skillset as Casey and, unless creating game engines is the goal, would be better served by Unreal or Unity.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#246

Post by frenchie14 »

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…

If you haven't seen them yet, Factorio has a few Friday Facts that talk about (and show!) their automated tests. It's quite impressive! One advantage they have in this area is that the game is a fully deterministic simulation, so testing is just a matter of setting up initial state and validating output

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#247

Post by bick_nyers »

I used to sell Blueprint code on the Unreal Marketplace so I am biased in preferring Unreal over Unity.

One nice thing about Unreal is how easy is it to give a modkit to users with Blueprint. You can keep all of your proprietary stuff compiled in C++ yet exposed to Blueprint which is pretty easy for any regular non-programmer to pick up. I have been playing around with the Conan Exiles modkit recently and you basically get access to everything that an actual salaried game developer would have access to. Heck, I could even turn it into a VR game purely with Blueprints (I'm actually working on this in my spare time, which admittedly, is few and far between).

Seeing the control flow of Blueprint live while debugging is also great for non-programmer, as it allows them to easily reason about what is and isn't happening.

You can talk about rendering pipelines and the marketplace all you want but Blueprint is the killer feature for Unreal Engine.

You could make Python scripting for gameplay logic a first class citizen in Unity, but even Python is harder to work with than Blueprint for less-technical creators and users.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#248

Post by bick_nyers »

MattRix wrote: post #222
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…

As a game developer, there are two main reasons we don’t write tests: A. because the game design is constantly changing, so any tests would slow down iteration time. B. because the game has so much state it would be very hard to accurately recreate it.

Agreed. I think the only way to have good test automation in games is to quite literally develop an AI that plays your game.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#249

Post by ratww »

leshow wrote: post #242
ratww wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-perfor…

If there is no conclusion then you are just un-productively saying "modern software sucks". My point is, if the claim is that modern software is bad, what do they offer as the solution to that? > 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. This is barely a statement. I've never heard "performance is impossible" fro…

The phrase “software is crap” was said by someone criticizing Casey Muratori, not by himself or by me. It was a mischaracterization.

If you want to paraphrase him correctly, he has claimed several times that there are several low-hanging-fruits performance-wise in modern software.

> I've never heard "performance is impossible" from anyone

First, I said “impossible or impractical”. This comment section is littered with the second. Second, this is not an exaggeration, nor refers to you. It actually happened: a FAANG product manager told Casey it would take several years and a PHd degree to fix some performance issues in a MS product that Casey had diagnosed. Casey then proceeded to create a performant proof of concept with feature parity over a weekend or so.

> what do they offer as the solution to that?

Are you asking for a silver bullet? Because there are none. The first step towards a solution for low performance in modern software is stopping the automatic reactions of saying performance is unnecessary, impractical or even impossible, whenever someome with enough knowledge of the problem domain claims otherwise.

The path to faster software involves actual hard work, rather than attempting to publicly shame people who offer solutions.

I really don’t think this is unreasonable at all.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#250

Post by mbesto »

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.

Isn't the reason that Unity/UE have crap performance because of the capabilities they offer? For example, you can run the app on multiple platforms.

This is the Electron or Hybrid app argument all over again. For 95% of the applications built, the ability to launch on Win, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS far outweighs the bloat and performance hit you have. But for the few AAA titles out there, then yes supporting native support might be worthwhile.

I mean, thats what modern software development is all about - tradeoffs.

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