51–60 of 94 posts
How does it compare with Unity?
It's interesting that Unreal releases end up always on the front page, but when Crytek released the source code of Cryengine 5 for free ~3 weeks ago [1] (with DX12, official C# bindings, volumetric clouds, no royalties, even better renderer, VR support for all major VR headsets, Python scriptable editor based on QT, a humble bundle including Ryse assets etc.) it didn't even scratch the front page. I know most people…
I personally at least cannot care much about CryEngine as long as its DX only. What is interesting about UE4 is how it is effectively a universal engine for all platforms, including the web.
If anyone told me 10 years ago that Unreal and CryEngine would be, for all practical purposes, free... It's wonderful time to be a gamedev (tech-wise), I presume. Writing your own graphics engine now seems to be more in line if you really enjoy writing your engine more than the game itself - or if you really want to do something you can't do easily with engines available.
All these engines make some efficiency sacrifices for generality and feature set. You can get better performance if you have a specific problem to solve and you design your rendering around it. For many games that's not going to make sense but for certain VR applications it still might.
For my VR projects I've gone down both paths and there are pros and cons to each. For many projects though the biggest advantage of these engines are the editors - writing your own rendering engine for a specific use case is a lot less work than building an editor that can compare to these tools.
Unreal has Unity beat in my mind simply because the Unreal developers are actually building games with their engine (Paragon), which really puts the code through it's paces and makes for a far better testing environment than an artificial demo or two from Unity, that doesn't represent what a full game really uses resource wise per frame. This can definitely be seen in the usability of the software alone, where Unity…
Availability of source is another big advantage over Unity I believe. When you run into a problem in Unity you're pretty screwed. At least with Unreal you have the option of diving into the source and figuring out what's going on so you can either fix it or find a workaround.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing it's more an inherit problem of how Hacker News works. Good posts get ignored all the time. Just take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest And not every Unreal post gets to the front page. The exact same link was submitted way earlier and if the dupe check would have worked this wouldn't be on the front page because nobody would have seen it.
Tech isn't the only important factor with software, community matters a lot. I've used Unity, Cryengine and Unreal. Crytek has some great tech but they are very deficient in supporting the community and Epic has invested a huge amount of resources into training, content, tools and even no-strings attached grants for devs working in Unreal. I'm not surprised at all that this has translated to more goodwill for Ue4 on…
Even strictly just on the PC gaming side of things, Unreal's adoption rate among game devs is miles and miles ahead of CryEngine. Is it really that hard to imagine why the community cares more about Unreal Engine than CryEngine?
This has been true for years, idTech, while being arguably technically more impressive, was being written about far less because while it's ostensibly licensable, nobody actually did it.
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As a Linux user, most other engines, including CryEngine, have nothing to offer me. Unreal was also the first "free" open source release of that class of engine.
Well, it's not Linux is the primary target for commercial game engines (Unreal included) in the first place. Desktop Linux is a tiny niche (measured to below 2%), and Linux gaming even smaller part of that. Heck, even OS X which got around 10% doesn't get much love, gaming wise...
Not for developers. And both Unreal and Unity have Linux editors and support compiling for Linux.
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I'm running a mid 2012 macbook with a Geforce 650M and unreal runs very well, runs even better when I boot into windows. Looking forward to trying the new Metal renderer. For me, Unreal wins on its its extensibility, being able to expose custom functionality to the artist, access to the source even if only for reference.
O_o This is my machine: iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2015) 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 32 GB 1867 MHz DDR3 AMD Radeon R9 M380 2048 MB All I can say is the engine runs like rubbish on it, so I'm flat out astonished to hear it runs 'very well' on your 2012 macbook . This is the compile time for running a 'hello world' project with a few tests: [2016.03.20-09.44.43:606][ 0]Log file open, 03/20/16 17:44:43 [2016.03.20-09.44.…
[1] - http://www.amazon.com/3Dconnexion-3DX-700028-SpaceNavigator-...
[2] - https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/14140/why-isnt-3d...
If anyone told me 10 years ago that Unreal and CryEngine would be, for all practical purposes, free... It's wonderful time to be a gamedev (tech-wise), I presume. Writing your own graphics engine now seems to be more in line if you really enjoy writing your engine more than the game itself - or if you really want to do something you can't do easily with engines available.
Graphics engines aren't particularly hard to write though once you grep the shader pipeline, as many/all of the latest effects are available for free online (FXAA, HDR, Deferred Lighting etc), though an engine will nicely package them together for you in a ready to use fashion. The biggest problem with this pre-packaged software is when something ultimately goes wrong, which it always does. Then you find yourself dig…
That's like saying "car's aren't too hard to build once you understand the four stroke cycle". Did you read the changelog? The manpower involved is immense.
(Of course you can write a much much simpler engine yourself, but we aren't talking about those.)
Another great example of positive impact of open sourcing. They open sourced unreal engine some time ago, thanks to that we see 92 changes from community alone in this release.
It's open source with a pay x% once you get big enough to make $y thousand a year. It's proven effective and I hope more open sourcers copy the business model. Imagine if Mozilla was supported like this instead of being paid for customer data. It would be a game changer.