Live data from Hacker News

An Unreal Decision

martiancraft.com

1–10 of 105 posts

Re: An Unreal Decision

#2
I've been bitten before by some of the problems regarding Unity and collaboration with source control. Everyone wants to test out their changes on the same scene, but it just blows up when you go to merge... even if you use a dumb merge strategy like ours or theirs (as a Git user) it seems to break things. Unity seems really cool, but I'm never going to use it again for any project with more than one programmer.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#3
I recently started getting to know Unity3d and it was extremely easy and quick to learn. One annoying discovery was that their variant of JavaScript is not real JavaScript, it's "UnityScript". It took me quite some time to convert a simple script that I had written for node.js to UnityScript.

I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift. For someone who is just doing a bit of indie development, that's too expensive.

So I checked out UE4 also. You can subscribe for a month for $19 and then continue using the version that was the current version during your one month of subscription. If you need updates later on, subscribe for another month.

UE4 is harder to learn but looks a lot better than Unity OOTB.

Anyway, I hope Unity will be competitive again regarding pricing with the imminent announcement of their 5.0 release.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#4
> The other big obstacle was that the UDK tools which were Windows only. MartianCraft is a shop of (mostly) dyed-in-the-wool Mac folk who’d rather not spend their days using Windows.

That really doesn't seem like a great way to run a railroad.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#5
post #3

I recently started getting to know Unity3d and it was extremely easy and quick to learn. One annoying discovery was that their variant of JavaScript is not real JavaScript, it's "UnityScript". It took me quite some time to convert a simple script that I had written for node.js to UnityScript. I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift. For someone who is just doing a bi…

If you're interested in writing games in Javascript, you might like to take a look at PlayCanvas [playcanvas.com] which has Unity/UE4-like tools for building WebGL/Javascript games.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#6
post #3

I recently started getting to know Unity3d and it was extremely easy and quick to learn. One annoying discovery was that their variant of JavaScript is not real JavaScript, it's "UnityScript". It took me quite some time to convert a simple script that I had written for node.js to UnityScript. I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift. For someone who is just doing a bi…

If you're interested in writing games in Javascript, you might like to take a look at PlayCanvas [playcanvas.com] which has Unity/UE4-like tools for building WebGL/Javascript games.

Has WebGL solved the local storage limitation yet? I've been waiting for a few years for that. There's still no way to "install" a game into a browser, as far as I know, and redownloading 1GB+ of assets every time the game loads isn't an option.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#7
Haven't used the tools much, but I'm subscribed, and simply in awe of Unreal's internal UI system (used for the Tools), and hope EPIC release it in some more independent form.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#8
post #3

I recently started getting to know Unity3d and it was extremely easy and quick to learn. One annoying discovery was that their variant of JavaScript is not real JavaScript, it's "UnityScript". It took me quite some time to convert a simple script that I had written for node.js to UnityScript. I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift. For someone who is just doing a bi…

Why would you choose to develop for a game in JavaScript anyway? The language devs use for Unity tends to be C#. The design of the language fits the framework much more. I've been using C# with Unity and using JavaScript on webpages for years and JavaScript has always been much more cumbersome and error-prone to write nontrivial logic in. So many errors all the time that would've been found at compile-time in C#. Maybe Unity's JS is different; I haven't used it.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#9
As someone who tried to develop a Unity game on a big team, it was hell. The collaboration is horrible, there are conflicts all the time for no reason. Simply getting the source, running the game and updating would produce conflicts. We also had to buy the cache licenses to make it somewhat workable.

But the worst was the support. It was worthless. Anytime we would open a ticket, they would simply google and return us links to forum threads that didn't address our issue. When we asked about missing important features or bug fixes, they told us to buy something on the asset store.

Re: An Unreal Decision

#10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're interested in writing games in Javascript, you might like to take a look at PlayCanvas [playcanvas.com] which has Unity/UE4-like tools for building WebGL/Javascript games.

Has WebGL solved the local storage limitation yet? I've been waiting for a few years for that. There's still no way to "install" a game into a browser, as far as I know, and redownloading 1GB+ of assets every time the game loads isn't an option.

You could always package the game as a node-webkit app.
Post reply on HN