Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 319 posts

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#261

Post by evilturnip »

skullt wrote: post #241
evilturnip wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember he mentioned something about his role to that effect in one of his handmade hero streams. Can't remember which exactly, but he did mention he did a bunch of code contributions to the engine. Possible I am misremembering.

In any case, he has experience in working on and shipping actual 3D game engine code.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#262

Post by vanviegen »

skinpop wrote: post #144
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 think that's fair. Sure HH has been going on for eight years, but on average Casey is only putting in 3-4 hours per week. That's not even half a work-day per week. Not to mention that he spends a lot of time explaining every single decision he makes and does black-boarded lectures on pretty much every subject covered in the series. I think it's reasonable to assume progress would be at least 3-4 times faster…

That's assuming each episode doesn't take him any preparation time.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#263

Post by pyinstallwoes »

msie wrote: post #258
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?

The influence bots used the wrong GPT3 model.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#264

Post by krapp »

mrfusion wrote: post #201
oddity wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This[0] appears to be the main project working on Python. As with all language ports, YMMV.

I personally would wait until after Godot 4 and the new GDExtension system are out and, if it's possible, people start making language support as plugins rather than needing to recompile Godot from source.

[0]https://github.com/touilleMan/godot-python

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#265

Post by sph »

runevault wrote: post #237
sph wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know. I'm saying there IS a need for Unity, while Casey argues that either you go full UE5 or you write your game engine. Black or white.

UE5 is too complex for most indie devs, not good at 2d and pixel art, and writing your game engine as a small team is a good way of spending 2 years on engine code, instead of, you know, actually developing a game.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#266

Post by andrewmcwatters »

akyu wrote: post #35

As a hobbyist I found Unreal to be far better than Unity. The technical debt that Unity has continued to accrue starts impacting you even as a casual user. It's a bit of a mess to be honest. Unreal on the other hand has a very solid architecture and goes out of its way to be reliable and maintainable. Plus you have the full source available in your project to search through if you want to dig into the code. The code…

I can't take any hobbyist game engine that doesn't implement multiplayer out of the box seriously. It's so stupid. QuakeWorld had it in 1999, and because game devs are too afraid of networking, you get a bunch of people saying "Oh, it's too hard," or "Yeah, but your networking model is dependent on what game you're shipping."

No you dunces, you will always need to serialize something. You will always need some semblance of tickrate, or at least you will always need game events. The more simple features game engine developers don't write increase the risk for users who will inevitably not implement them themselves.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#268

Post by ratww »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #253
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 be…

The whole point of the series is teaching the necessary skills for understanding, writing and maintaining something from scratch, like an engine if need be, but also something like SDL too.

Like it or not, this is interesting to a lot of people. Plus, someone has to maintain and contribute to those libraries like SDL. This is where you learn to.

Plus if you want to see libraries being used there are countless other Youtube channels doing it. This one is just daring to be a bit different.

About the elitism accusations, I frankly don’t see it, and I believe you are strongly projecting your own insecurities here. There is even a semi-official “port” that uses SDL2, done by an audience member.

Accusations of the community being “anti-library” are unfounded, especially considering Casey’s first notable work was in a company that would sell high performance libraries for games (RAD Tools).

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#269

Post by dogleash »

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?

The solution is to git gud.

There certainly was actionable advice in the couple of his videos I've seen (I haven't watched many, he's a wandering talker). But the underlying theme is about development process and frame of mind. Just adopting a list of techniques would miss the "greater than the sum of it's parts" value.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#270

Post by rasz »

skullt wrote: post #241
evilturnip wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the things he did as the tooling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhvnJWKfELc
Post reply on HN