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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#301

Post by markus_zhang »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #243
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.

Yeah thanks I actually played some of them. Very interesting. Also agreed Epic will never make another Unreal I, neither a remake nor a new game. If one wants one has to build one's own.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#302

Post by ratww »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #294
dogleash wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>The solution is to git gud. someone unironically espousing this as a "solution" to a struggling creator will never understand why other frameworks become popular when they cater to helping them out instead of throwing a book at them. That's why Unity is more popular among small creators. They don't necessarily want to be an engineer, they want to create art. This mentality spreads outside of programming to other sof…

> someone unironically espousing this as a "solution" to a struggling creator

Nobody is, though, and if you see other replies with the “git gud” text you’ll see this is used as a way to attack anyone who cares about performance.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#303

Post by uwuemu »

markus_zhang wrote: post #194
torginus wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This advice is a bit generic - but look at either the official examples or tons of github projects that have C++ in them and try to understand how they work - that's the thing that worked for me.

Thanks! That's one good piece of advice actually. I'll try to find similar projects.

First of all, you have to manage your expectations and be mentally prepared for the fact that you will just not get most of the engine. UE is a massive project (and that is an understatement) and you will be a VERY good student if you just grasp the gameplay framework (core functionality in c++) and a few specific things (if you understand rendering, you may fiddle with the renderer, if you're an audio engineer, mess with meta sounds etc.). If you just look at the amount of code being pushed into the UE repo, you will soon realize that no single person will ever be able to grasp and contextualize even 10% of the engine. It's just not happening. With that out of the way, what I found incredibly helpful was the Ue4/5 cpp game courses on Udemy from Stephen Ulibarri.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#304

Post by anonymoushn »

mbesto wrote: post #282
ratww wrote: post #251

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. 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 h…

> or someone in this thread, complaining that Unity or Unreal have low performance? I don’t think so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31069502 > That's extremely reductionist. He's saying that modern software is crap regarding performance. And whenever he does complain, he manages to demonstrate it. Did you even read the thread I was responding to?

As far as I know, UE doesn't have crap performance. Some features of Unity might have crap performance, and the solution used by studios shipping games in Unity is to not use those features or use them very carefully.

I'm not GP, but I read the thread, and it seems like you think that this guy has severe performance problems with every piece of modern software, and therefor he has severe performance problems with UE and Unity. He doesn't though. If he did, he would probably publish some rant about the particular problems he has with these particular pieces of software

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#305

Post by curyous »

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 think you might have missed his point. The gist of it is that almost all modern software is at least 100x slower than it needs to be, for no good reason.

Conventional software practises result in unnecessarily complex code that takes much longer to write and to execute than needed. The problem is so endemic that there isn't really even a good programming language available that makes it easy to use the capabilities of computers.

Fortunately there are a few pioneers trying to improve things, constructively creating solutions such as JAI. Casey is fighting against the fact that not only are industry participants unaware of the problem, buy they actually fight to write bad code to ship bad software to customers because they believe that is the pinnacle.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#306

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

127 wrote: post #275
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well then, perhaps you have inside knowledge to share that justifies your claim that Casey hasn't done anything "impressive" enough to justify his take?

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#307

Post by johnnyanmac »

ashkankiani wrote: post #299
johnnyanmac wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>His point stands up completely. You can follow handmade hero and have your own 2D game engine up and running in roughly 1 week's time. No, Casey can follow Handmade hero and have his own 2d game engine up and running in roughly a week, at least in "get it done" mode instead of educational mode. I'm an engine programmer myself and I sure wouldn't have my own engine spun up that fast because I'm 20 years behind Casey…

The point was that for cases where Unreal 5 isn't suitable for your needs, what's the best alternative: - Using Unity and potentially all the baggage that comes with it - Making your own engine Therefore the crux of the argument was to prove that making your engine wasn't as complicated as people are making it out to be. From my perspective, the question he posed in the tweet is a valid consideration. What actually i…

>the crux of the argument was to prove that making your engine wasn't as complicated as people are making it out to be.

the question posed is fine, the framing seems (potentially uninentionally) inflammatory, for a topic that is basically the gamedev equivalent of emacs vs vim. I feel like Casey should know better at this point, but maybe this was an honest blind spot. Or maybe he was intentionally invoking Cunningham (which seems unnecessary given his presence. But hey, it's effective)

>and show how long it takes me to make a 2D game engine in that same amount of time just by following HMH, but also with the ability to use existing libraries. I bet it'll be less than a week

depends on what we define as "game". I've done a fair number of game jam games in 2-3 days with a variety of technologies, from tiny 2d game frameworks to Unity. I could make something "playable" in a few days. I'm sure in a week with my experience that I could roll together something neat to show off to friends.

But I wouldn't consider any of those projects close to "shippable". And being a game dev I can talk your ear off for hours about the difference between "playable", "shippable"[0] , and "competent"[1], and the steps/polish needed for each.

To spare you that huge lecture, I'll just mention that gamedev, once you go past the "solo indie project" scale, is a multi-disciplinary collaboration between (but not limited to) programming, art, sound design, and writing. on any project past this solo indie project scale, you'll need tools to accommodate the non-technical folk, and those tools take time to develop and maintain. You can either play double duty as gameplay and tools programmer, have a dedicated tools maintaininer/go-between for the artists (because it always becomes a full-time gig), or make use of already made tools that already have these considerations in mind. In that latter case, an engine is invaluable.

[0] i.e. 99.9999% of games you'll find on steam are basically the benchmark of "shippable"... but how many of those in a random sample would you actually play for more than 5 minutes?

[1] you know, an actually good game that you'd pay money for, in an age where at least a bunch of mobile crap is free to screw around with for 5 minutes. If you're trying to make any revenue whatsoever, that's the bar being set.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#308

Post by mbesto »

anonymoushn wrote: post #304
mbesto wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or someone in this thread, complaining that Unity or Unreal have low performance? I don’t think so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31069502 > That's extremely reductionist. He's saying that modern software is crap regarding performance. And whenever he does complain, he manages to demonstrate it. Did you even read the thread I was responding to?

As far as I know, UE doesn't have crap performance. Some features of Unity might have crap performance, and the solution used by studios shipping games in Unity is to not use those features or use them very carefully. I'm not GP, but I read the thread, and it seems like you think that this guy has severe performance problems with every piece of modern software, and therefor he has severe performance problems with UE…

> and it seems like you think that this guy has severe performance problems with every piece of modern software

You didn't read the thread then. The parent of my parent commented that they thought performance was a problem. I was just responding to that inference. That's all.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#309

Post by dogleash »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #294
dogleash wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

>The solution is to git gud. someone unironically espousing this as a "solution" to a struggling creator will never understand why other frameworks become popular when they cater to helping them out instead of throwing a book at them. That's why Unity is more popular among small creators. They don't necessarily want to be an engineer, they want to create art. This mentality spreads outside of programming to other sof…

If not blatantly obvious, I was being flippant.

You seem committed to the idea anyone is advocating yac-shaving by a highly constrained developer. I'm not seeing that.

Like anything in software projects, the path of least resistance will get you to the quality floor. Trivially actionable advice doesn't exist because it will become part of the quality floor. That's just the evolution of software.

That doesn't mean there isn't actionable advice that's low on the learning curve. But like others skill, there is an unavoidable learning curve, it also takes time to apply the skill, and choosing when to apply it is a skill in and of itself. That's just life in development.

I'm not saying to never sacrifice quality to get products out the door. But there's also nothing wrong with acknowledging when that's being done. And the state of affairs is that performance is very frequently sacrificed, leading to a pretty damn sorry looking status quo.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#310

Post by ratww »

mbesto wrote: post #282
ratww wrote: post #251

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. 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 h…

> or someone in this thread, complaining that Unity or Unreal have low performance? I don’t think so. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31069502 > That's extremely reductionist. He's saying that modern software is crap regarding performance. And whenever he does complain, he manages to demonstrate it. Did you even read the thread I was responding to?

That's my post and I didn't complain about UE5, nor said that Casey Muratori did. Let alone saying that UE5 performance is crap.

Also, please read to this part of my comment if you want to understand the situation:

> 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.

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