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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#251

Post by ratww »

mbesto wrote: post #250
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.

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…

> 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.

Is anyone, Casey or someone in this thread, complaining that Unity or Unreal have low performance? I don’t think so.

Casey Muratori’s performance rants of the past were almost always about specific pieces of software and in the most public of those he managed to show how to fix those in an acceptable timeframe.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#252

Post by Ekaros »

mbesto wrote: post #250
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.

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…

I find it weird to say that UE would be crap in what it delivers in performance. Or that someone could do better. At least if it comes to real-time graphics rendering and processing. Not saying there isn't likely warts and issues in the gameplay side...

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#253

Post by skocznymroczny »

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 find him to be elitist sometimes. The community he built around himself likes to gatekeep by defining what is considered "from scratch" and what isn't. I looked up his youtube channel, and it seems he spent few weeks writing an abstraction layer over WinAPI. You could just download SDL and get it over with in a day (and support more platforms). I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's a difference between using a large framework/engine, where you only give inputs in and get outputs out, and using small libraries to abstract over specific parts of logic. And even after a year of work, the "engine" seems to be very unimpressive, capable of doing some basic 3D graphics.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#254

Post by kunos »

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

Not really. Most of the times Casey & Co. (Blow et others) have entire rants bitching about photoshop, visual studio,windows, websites etc. They tend to present videogames as example of "how it should be done".

They (again, as Casey&Blow and the rest of the group they seem to belong to) have this weird attitude of automatically dismiss anything that doesn't belong to whatever microsubset they are already very experienced in.. so Rust is shit, C++ is shit, GC is shit, smart pointers are shit, get/setters are shit, public/private is shit, memory safety doesn't matter and so on.. all this while not offering any alternative other than "git gut". I tend to agree with a lot of the rants to be honest but I also perceive their suggested solutions as total non starters for large scale development.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#255

Post by ratww »

kunos wrote: post #254
ratww wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Not really. Most of the times Casey & Co. (Blow et others) have entire rants bitching about photoshop, visual studio,windows, websites etc. They tend to present videogames as example of "how it should be done". They (again, as Casey&Blow and the rest of the group they seem to belong to) have this weird attitude of automatically dismiss anything that doesn't belong to whatever…

That’s an unfair mischaracterization and generalization, considering that very often those “rants” are often filled with genuine analysis, criticism, comparisons.

Or, in specific cases, such as OOP criticism, with very vocal disclaimers that his view deviates from the mainstream. Are those people not entitled to an opinion?

The last time one of those happened publicly, Casey was able to provide a proof of concept in a very short timeframe, despite claims that it was impractical and borderline impossible to fix.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#256

Post by leshow »

ratww wrote: post #249
leshow wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

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

Again, what solutions? Until you can define what these are I'm not sure what his position is or what he's advocating for.

No offense but I've exhausted my interest in the topic, take care

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#257

Post by ratww »

Ekaros wrote: post #252
mbesto wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I find it weird to say that UE would be crap in what it delivers in performance. Or that someone could do better. At least if it comes to real-time graphics rendering and processing. Not saying there isn't likely warts and issues in the gameplay side...

> I find it weird to say that UE would be crap in what it delivers in performance.

I don’t think anyone is saying it. Grandparent poster is inferring it incorrectly.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#258

Post by msie »

bullen wrote: post #179

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…

Huh?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#259

Post by ratww »

leshow wrote: post #256
ratww wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

> The path to faster software involves actual hard work, rather than attempting to publicly shame people who offer solutions. Again, what solutions? Until you can define what these are I'm not sure what his position is or what he's advocating for. No offense but I've exhausted my interest in the topic, take care

> Again, what solutions?

I am talking about actual concrete solutions. “Do this code change and the bottleneck will go away”.

This person offered ACTUAL CONCRETE SOLUTIONS to performance issues. He literally opened bug-tickets and discussed with the team, and provided proof-of-concepts, but a FAANG manager attempted to shut him down.

This is not some snake oil salesman offering magic performance beans, this is someone who actually knew what they were talking about, and was able to diagnose performance problems in the operating system and solve it, for free. This isn’t some hypothetical, he REALLY did fix it despite being told it was impossible.

EDIT: Like the sibling poster said, the systemic solution is to "git gut". Which is clearly impossible as long as developers and managers foster a culture of dismissing performance, or in some cases inventing excuses not to work on it, as was seen in the Casey/Microsoft debacle.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#260

Post by snarfy »

pfist wrote: post #226
snarfy wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Blueprints there was Kismet. My last kismet project looked like an ER diagram for a government database. Kismet had decent grouping objects to where you could organize your Kismet, but even my largest and most complex kismets could have been replaced by about 100 lines of unreal script. It's just not as expressive as code. I miss unreal script.

I used Kismet for years and fought with its limitations on a daily basis. By far the biggest limitation of Kismet was that every graph was tied to a level. If you wanted to do any general purpose programming, such as mechanics shared across every level, you had to duplicate your graph for every single one of them. It was a very tedious and error-prone process. Blueprint is leaps and bounds ahead of Kismet. It's built…

You are really trying to entice me to open up UE5 again, aren't you :P I opened it, saw verse script was nowhere to be found, and quickly closed it.
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