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Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

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Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#71

Post by georgeecollins »

markus_zhang wrote: post #65
justinlloyd wrote: post #53

As a software developer I've worked with Unity and Unreal in a professional capacity for many years, and shipped quite a few games on both engines. Unreal is powerful, but really shows its game development studio and FPS game roots. Unity has limitations, I won't deny that. And both engines have their own issues and different frustrations in using and deploying them. I have also shipped games on internal, custom buil…

Just curious how does one go deeper into UE if not interested in Blurprint stuff?

C++ can be used instead of Blueprints.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#72

Post by georgeecollins »

suyash wrote: post #23
mrfusion wrote: post #18

Is Godot out of the question? Is it mostly a performance thing?

for me would be lack of AR/VR support as that is what I want to build apps/games for.

Godot works fine for VR, particularly if you are developing the Quest. I am making a VR game in Godot. Check out:

https://github.com/NeoSpark314/godot_oculus_quest_toolkit

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#73

Post by User23 »

charcircuit wrote: post #47
tedunangst wrote: post #41

I'm unclear on the unity source availability. It's impossible to fix a bug because you don't have the source? But you're staring right at it, which implies you do?

Unity's source is not open source. They let you look at the C# code, but not modify it or redistribute it. You can purchase a license to get the source code including the engine code.

Fun fact: this is the traditional (read greybeard) definition of "open." See, for example, the Open Group.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#74

Post by rtpg »

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 people who lack the imagination to wonder why some people just want to make games rather than spend their life writing engine code, and actively shitting on stuff that exists. Just so much negative energy to put out in the world.

Of course in practice Unity _is_ a major pain in the butt but UE has the nice aspect of actually working for very large projects and shipping stuff. Yeah there's obtuse stuff, but in practice what happens is you join a team and then you actually learn to use it. In exchange you have releases.

The one thing that really is rough for me with _both_ UE and Unity is that they're both very oriented towards teams with dedicated art people who can put out assets to use. BSP-based workflows where you can quickly greybox out levels to playtest (basically giving level designers without art sense a fighting chance) are much nicer with older engines.

There's a nice missing middle that Valve kinda fills with Source, except everyone that has worked with Source seems to dislike it for other reasons. But I'm sure we could make 3D engines with nicer usability for people who, for lack of a better word, can't 3D model too great.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#75

Post by dogles »

minism wrote: post #30

Having worked in Unity as a hobbyist for about a decade and considering the switch to Unreal due to obvious issues Unity is currently facing (3 rendering pipelines being the main one), I'd like to hear more input from the programmer experience in both engines. I think C# in Unity hits a really nice sweet spot: You have a powerful and expressive type system, can use nice high level features like async/await, you get (…

C# remains a plus for a lot of game code, but not as much as you might imagine. C++ usage in Unreal is really a small restricted subset of C++. For typical gameplay code, you play within their rules for uclasses/ustructs/etc and it feels pretty much like any other managed GC language. Meanwhile, for places where it matters, "raw" C++ is of course always available.

Re: iteration time, Live++ [1] integration has matured a lot in UE5. That means compiling most code changes without having to restart the editor (or even in-editor game session). Again, not much different than Unity here, though both can break and require editor restarts for certain types of changes.

To double-down on OP, by far the biggest advantage Unreal has for professional development (aka anything you want to ship) is full source code. I've worked in both but can't imagine going back to a black-box engine. Unity/Unreal are both MASSIVE codebases ported across every modern platform imaginable and guess what: there a plenty of bugs in both. I can't imagine going back to an engine where I can't A) see what it is doing and B) fix issues without waiting weeks/months for a patch.

[1] https://liveplusplus.tech/

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#76

Post by thejosh »

I really want to like Unity.. but they make it hard. There are a bunch of ways to do one thing, and those ways are probably deprecated. I really like their direction for DOTS, but their communication with their community is pretty much dead. They made a single post after a very long time with an update, and provide no real roadmap.

UE5 is pretty good, having not used UE4. I like how they keep everything backwards compatible, so it's pretty good. I like blueprints and how you can use their C++ bindings pretty easily from it.

I also like that UE5 is dogfooded by Fortnite, so they actually have skin in the game to make the editor better, instead of just relying on royalties.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#77

Post by jandrese »

Beyond game engines one of the things that drives me crazy about commercial software is when I find a bug, document it thoroughly, and submit it to the company only to be ignored. Even with a support contract and on rather severe bugs it can be way too hard to get something fixed. I know I'm not the only person being bitten by this bug, it's all over the help forums and Reddit yet the company doesn't seem to care at all.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#78

Post by thejosh »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #64

Unreal is trash for 2D. However, if I was making a 2D game, I'd use Defold or Godot or GameMaker or raylib or libGDX, not Unity. Only reason to use Unity for gamedev these days is if you wanna get a job at a mobile game company Also, both are FPS / TPAA engines. Unreal especially. Sure, you can make it do other things, but it's just not a natural fit for, say, an isometric 4X game....not that there's an openly availa…

Unreal isn't built for 2d, you can tell the games they were built for (Unreal Tournament, Fortnite, etc).

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#79

Post by Ralfp »

mysterydip wrote: post #38
doikor wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it is not just making a game engine but you also have to build some kind of a editor, script/animation tooling, plug-in support, etc. Basically if you are big enough that you can make your own engine the engine also has to be usable by non programmers making the actual content for your game.

Tools can be nearly as important as the engine. I've read several postmortems where the lack of good tools made the asset creation and testing pipeline take way longer than necessary, leading to delays and crunch to compensate.

Tiger Engine that Bungie uses in Destiny supposedly took hours to rebuild a level and didn’t do incremental builds or cache so fixing that one bad light on the map was potentially days of wait.

Still better than earlier versions of Frostbite Engine from EA Dice that took week if no cache was present and ran on server farm that took raw assets together with metadata and spit out final game assets.

Re: Unreal vs. Unity Opinion

#80

Post by dleslie »

thejosh wrote: post #76

I really want to like Unity.. but they make it hard. There are a bunch of ways to do one thing, and those ways are probably deprecated. I really like their direction for DOTS, but their communication with their community is pretty much dead. They made a single post after a very long time with an update, and provide no real roadmap. UE5 is pretty good, having not used UE4. I like how they keep everything backwards com…

As a long time Unity dev, now: Wait for a feature to exist for two major revisions. It might still be deprecated in a future revision, or removed entirely; but with two revisions they'll generally have smoothed out all the rough parts.
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