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So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

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Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#71

Post by dbrueck »

aschearer wrote: post #42
spywaregorilla wrote: post #18

> I heard Blueprint sucks! > Blueprint actually rules. Look, I get it - why would a visual scripting thing be good? They're all shit! I agree. > Blueprint is the only one that's any good. It's amazing. It will also help you learn the engine. Everything you do there will be applicable to C++. No matter who you are, you should start in Blueprint. It's 100% true that you can build an entire game in Blueprint. Yeah, with…

How do people using Blueprints deal with: - Find and replace a variable - Change a variables type - Merging changes from multiple commits - Refactoring - Finding all references I'm a fan of visual coding and use it extensively in YWDHT but have found the above challenging. I'm curious how Blueprints solves these issues, especially for larger teams.

Earlier this year we completed a huge refactor that involved, among other things, getting us almost 100% off blueprints (now we use them just for little bits of presentation logic in UIs).

BPs are amazing for discovering how to use the engine - they provide a sort of guided exploration of things, especially when you don't know what you don't know.

For us they really, really, really broke down when it came to version control, multiple people working on the same BP, code reuse, and refactoring. Arguably, at least some of this was our fault - I think you're "supposed" to do the major coding not in BP and then use BP mostly for really high level stuff, and we didn't always do that.

Anyway, it's been wonderful not having those issues anymore. Gone are the days of changing one thing and then git saying that 100 files have uncommitted changes!

Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#73

Post by nottorp »

owenpalmer wrote: post #33
jaimehrubiks wrote: post #31

> It's free until you make a million bucks USD, and only after that is it 5% gross, and only in quarters where you made more than $10,000 USD. So most folks never end up paying anything. There are no subscription fees or anything. To clarify, if you make a million bucks, and then one dollar, you only owe them five cents. It sounds very fair to me, what are the general thoughts here?

I'm surprised they can sustain such low pricing

They’re financed by blood diamonds. I.e. tencent making their initial funds from gacha on the Asian market and now trying to buy legitmity with it.

Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#74

Post by yAak »

crustaceansoup wrote: post #69
aschearer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people using Blueprints deal with: - Find and replace a variable - Change a variables type - Merging changes from multiple commits - Refactoring - Finding all references I'm a fan of visual coding and use it extensively in YWDHT but have found the above challenging. I'm curious how Blueprints solves these issues, especially for larger teams.

I've only been on medium-small teams, but I'll give it a shot: Merging is essentially as banned as we can make it; we use Perforce, and set all .uasset files (Blueprints and other UE assets) as Exclusive Checkout so only one person can edit them at a time. This is recommended by Epic. When we do need to merge things, it's mostly a manual process of opening the Editor on two branches and duplicating all of the changes…

Sounds very similar to the problems of using XIBs/Storyboards in iOS dev. (aside from the perf. cost you mention)

Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#75

Post by andybak »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #58
aschearer wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do people using Blueprints deal with: - Find and replace a variable - Change a variables type - Merging changes from multiple commits - Refactoring - Finding all references I'm a fan of visual coding and use it extensively in YWDHT but have found the above challenging. I'm curious how Blueprints solves these issues, especially for larger teams.

Not sure why this is downvoted. > - Find and replace a variable > - Finding all references I think the basic search tools are pretty good. I can't say I expect find and replace to be super common. I would prefer to do such things one at a time. > - Change a variables type I would say you really shouldn't be doing this too often. It's compiling to statically typed code under the hood so this will frequently cause a lo…

> I can't say I expect find and replace to be super common. I would prefer to do such things one at a time.

This seems like a very strange thing to say. I presume you do text-based coding as well? Multiple cursors, search/replace, bulk refactors and other semi-global operations are a huge part of my normal workflow and I can't quite fathom how visual coding would change the need for that.

Regarding refactoring - I'm not sure what you describe really is "refactoring".

Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#76

Post by blt »

jimmaswell wrote: post #3

> Read the documentation on the Gameplay Framework. All of it! Is it just me or is this an unviable learning strategy? My approach for learning anything has always been to follow small tutorials, build an intuition, and only consult docs when I need some specifics.

Your style will get you through a project, but you'll miss out on useful but nonessential features.

For example, a lot of C++ programmers miss the full spectrum of std::algorithm. A lot of Python+NumPy programmers miss out on some useful indexing tricks.

I'm still suffering from not taking a rigorous approach to unix shell.

Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#77

Post by brucethemoose2 »

owenpalmer wrote: post #33
jaimehrubiks wrote: post #31

> It's free until you make a million bucks USD, and only after that is it 5% gross, and only in quarters where you made more than $10,000 USD. So most folks never end up paying anything. There are no subscription fees or anything. To clarify, if you make a million bucks, and then one dollar, you only owe them five cents. It sounds very fair to me, what are the general thoughts here?

I'm surprised they can sustain such low pricing

The side benefits are enormous. Its not like Unity where Unity fees are the bread and butter for the company.

Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#78

Post by brundolf »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #18

> I heard Blueprint sucks! > Blueprint actually rules. Look, I get it - why would a visual scripting thing be good? They're all shit! I agree. > Blueprint is the only one that's any good. It's amazing. It will also help you learn the engine. Everything you do there will be applicable to C++. No matter who you are, you should start in Blueprint. It's 100% true that you can build an entire game in Blueprint. Yeah, with…

My hangup with blueprints has always just literally been: I'd like to type them out with my keyboard instead of using a mouse

I wish they offered like a "Bluescript" language or something, that just maps 1:1 with blueprints but lets you write them out as code

Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#79

Post by babypuncher »

bastardoperator wrote: post #56

Or you can wait for Source 2 which is rumored to be dropping on September 23rd with CS:2

I'm not convinced Valve is all that interested in pushing Source 2 as an alternative to Unreal or Unity, and their organizational structure would probably make them a pain to work with.

Re: So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine

#80

Post by babypuncher »

Pxtl wrote: post #8

I can't help but be reminded of the people who jumped from Twitter to Threads. Ultimately, the recent wave of enshittifications of major products - Unity, Twitter and Reddit off the top of my head - It's a hard reminder that lock-in and governance matters. Software is a long investment, so it's time to start thinking very hard about how the software you use is run, and how much control you have if it all goes sideway…

Twitter usage is down 30% and probably still declining, so I wouldn't say their enshittification saw no consequences.

When something has momentum it takes a lot to slow it down, but that does not mean doing so is impossible.

Unity is a different case though. Unity is retroactively applying these new terms to existing licensees, even if their game already shipped years ago. Unlike Twitter, they are directly hitting their customers wallets in a very nasty way. And unlike Twitter, Unity isn't the only well established player in its market. Already in-development projects might not switch, but this is sure to give studios pause when evaluating potential stacks for future games.

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