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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#271

Post by rasz »

torginus wrote: post #188

A magical property of Unreal is it's open-source-ish nature. Industry leading people constantly contributing features at high quality that become integrated into the engine. I contrast, for Unity, you have to shop around in the Asset Store for that does the thing. An example for it is procedural shattering - some guy needed it in their game and now it's standard in Unreal. For Unity, you have to buy it from the store…

When I hear Unity first thing that comes to my mind is another asset flip scam and performance problems.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#272

Post by runevault »

sph wrote: post #265
runevault wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be clear I agree with you. I use Unity for my hobby stuff because I have 0 interest in using either their subset of C++ nor Blueprints (the only things that visual scripting style things appeal to me are 1. Shaders and 2. content generation in Blender). Just the way you phrased it made it sound like he was against UE as well.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#273

Post by rasz »

Matl wrote: post #200
panzerboiler wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have been overly dismissive of Casey's work. HH is a treasure, and if you consider that he explained the how and the why of every single line of code, on stream, without cutting any corner, your consideration about the time spent become meaningless. There are people interested in copy-pasting and glueing together pre-baked parts to ship something, and there are people interested in developing a deep understanding…

> You have been overly dismissive of Casey's work. I am reading it not as what Casey is doing isn't cool, just that it is not at the level to enable Casey to be himself dismissive of other people's work to the extent he is.

You mean like that time he cobbled together terminal emulator in a week running at >1K fps after some MS drone called it a doctoral thesis project level of difficult?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#274

Post by Ygg2 »

ratww wrote: post #223
Ygg2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 j…

That's a gross simplification of how the market of games works and why people buy them. Plus, you're claiming that both AAA and mobile are money-grabbing schemes where performance and features affected by performance don't matter, which couldn't be further from the truth. Not to mention that very often good gameplay also requires appropriate performance. This is still critical in titles not targeting high-end hardwar…

> That's a gross simplification

Sure it's a simplification. But it is the truth. AAA are generally that way now, because people don't want to bet a lot of money without it being a sure fire bet. And it's same for game mills in mobile land.

> Not to mention that very often good gameplay also requires appropriate performance.

Yes, but point is good performance. Casey insists performance is thing to optimize for. When in reality it's like n-th thing to focus-on.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#275

Post by 127 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #203
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.

Casey has been in the industry since before DirectX existed, worked for RAD Game Tools, and likely has code in more games than you've ever even played.

...and I've been programming games since 0x13h ModeX and contributed to core industry software. Which means absolutely nothing. It's quality times quantity. Not time and acquired credentials.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#276

Post by rasz »

tomatowurst wrote: post #120

If you are an indie developer and have never worked with C++ before, don't even think about UE5, if you plan on ever finishing your game. Stick with Unity. Unreal makes money from royalties. Think about the odds of indie game developers generating more than $1MM vs an established studio who has shipped games/films before. You've been warned.

On a flip side Unity game has greater chance to be made by incompetent people, as evidenced by all the asset flips

https://crappygames.miraheze.org/wiki/Asset_flipping

https://www.makeuseof.com/what-asset-flipping-gaming/

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#277

Post by ratww »

Ygg2 wrote: post #274
ratww wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a gross simplification of how the market of games works and why people buy them. Plus, you're claiming that both AAA and mobile are money-grabbing schemes where performance and features affected by performance don't matter, which couldn't be further from the truth. Not to mention that very often good gameplay also requires appropriate performance. This is still critical in titles not targeting high-end hardwar…

> That's a gross simplification Sure it's a simplification. But it is the truth. AAA are generally that way now, because people don't want to bet a lot of money without it being a sure fire bet. And it's same for game mills in mobile land. > Not to mention that very often good gameplay also requires appropriate performance. Yes, but point is good performance. Casey insists performance is thing to optimize for. When i…

> Sure it's a simplification

Yep, a gross and incorrect one, invented only to advance an argument that doesn't match reality. Performance and ms-per-frame is still highly critical in AAA-land, despite your opinions on current gaming trends. There are people working hard on it, including the Unreal and Unity teams.

> Yes, but point is good performance. Casey insists performance is thing to optimize for. When in reality it's like n-th thing to focus-on.

Again, this is a bit of a misrepresentation, and probably a bit of projection. His rants are often about specific issues he finds, and mostly about low-hanging-fruit issues that cause real usability problems for end users.

He might write and teach how to write high-performance code and high-performance architecture, but it was not to the detriment of code quality, speed of development or architecture quality. The architecture of Handmade Hero, for example, is significantly better than most "make your own engine" shows on Youtube.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#278

Post by rowanG077 »

werner1886 wrote: post #137
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…

You clearly have no idea what's he is all about. His message is very clear: Modern software is crap. It's orders of magnitude slower than it should be, it's buggy, and,yes, bloated. And if you ever used any piece of software today I don't see how you can you not agree with it... He is never advocating NOT using engines, but rather that one can be much better and more efficient developer with just a little bit knowled…

So you think UE 5 could be 100+ times faster? For reference that means we would be able to run UE 5 games for the PS5 on the PS3 twice in parallel. I doubt you really even believe what you just wrote.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#279

Post by jstimpfle »

blensor wrote: post #210
jstimpfle wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, porting to other platforms is probably never a no-op even when building on big 3rd party tech stacks. Many of the platform specifics will shine through to the high-level code. And personally I find it rewarding to learn how to properly layer the code in order to factor out platform concerns. Many of the differences between platforms will seem kind of dull and the different platform implementations…

That right there is the crux: "And personally I find it rewarding to learn how to properly layer the code in order to factor out platform concerns." I like tech riddles and figuring out how to make stuff work, investors unfortunately do not. If you constantly have to defend why you can't just do X if everybody else can just because the stuff is only available on Unity and you have to write the underlying plugins your…

It is not a riddle. I see it as a general lesson in software architecture, that might help you just as well to factor the use of libraries, for example.

> If you constantly have to defend why you can't just do X if everybody else can just because the stuff is only available on Unity and you have to write the underlying plugins yourself it get's old pretty quickly.

Well this is a different point, not the one about platforms.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#280

Post by blensor »

jstimpfle wrote: post #279
blensor wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That right there is the crux: "And personally I find it rewarding to learn how to properly layer the code in order to factor out platform concerns." I like tech riddles and figuring out how to make stuff work, investors unfortunately do not. If you constantly have to defend why you can't just do X if everybody else can just because the stuff is only available on Unity and you have to write the underlying plugins your…

It is not a riddle. I see it as a general lesson in software architecture, that might help you just as well to factor the use of libraries, for example. > If you constantly have to defend why you can't just do X if everybody else can just because the stuff is only available on Unity and you have to write the underlying plugins yourself it get's old pretty quickly. Well this is a different point, not the one about pla…

It actually is the one about platforms because Unity has established itself as the standard in game dev (and I am saying that as a Godot VR game developer who is trying to break through that)

So "every" company that builds something in that space targets Unity first, Unreal second and after that maybe something like Godot. Most of the things can be implemented by developers not using Unity as well but while others are actually building the game, you are building the framework below it. That is a noble thing to do and will help the community in the long run but has zero advantage for shipping your game on time.

The best example is Meta's OpenXR support. They released it on Unity first (as they do all their other features) and Unreal game developers were complaining that they can't use passthrough because Meta hasn't rolled out support for Unreal for several months. So while the Unity developers were already happily working on their projects, Unreal devs were waiting and not even having a timeline when it will be possible.

In our case with Godot it's actually a question of, do we put in the time to port to Unity or do we put in the time to build support for all the things we need that are already available for Unity. And how often do we expect that situation to come up in the future

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