Any reason I would choose Unity over Unreal?

The reason why I choose You-nity over Unreal is the system requirement...
Unfortunately, unity is getting as heavier as unreal lately...

 

I seriously doubt that. Unreal used to turn my cpu fan into a jet turbine, even for very simple scenes. Unity has never done that.

 

Agreed. Unreal is effectively unusable on my fairly decent laptop. Unity runs like a breeze.

 

Lightmap baking. Potentially infinite memory and CPU usage. My personal record was 20 gigabytes of ram being used for baking process (with atrocious result). I remember that some people managed to hit 80gb.

 

It uses a less complex language and API that provides a near instant code/play/test cycle.

 

@Harry3D good job resurrecting a thread that should have left dead. Now every no-resource idea guy will throw something more in it.

 

It is the prophecy, every 1000 years, this thread revives to haunt the living!

 

hahaha Oh my...

Nonetheless, I think it's useful for people researching on internet to have some updated data, engines are evolving very fast. What was true in the beginning of this year may not be true now.

 

All 3D engine has strong and weak points, what matters is what you are able produce with it , you have choice as you could use one for current game and another 3D engine that would feet better some next game.
The choice is always about if it suits your current needs and if you are enought at ease with it,

 

I bought Unity 5 Pro @ $1500 but now the new upgrade to Unity Pro 2017 is $2400!!!

• Pay nothing until April, 2017; at that time, 12 month commitment period starts at $75/month/seat
• After first 12 months, option to renew for 12 more months at $125/month/seat =$2400

If you want to own it after the second year, you have to pay $2400 altogether.

If you choose to end your new subscription after your commitment period, your Unity Pro subscription will revert to Unity Personal

Great customer rewards!!

 

Can you not get Plus?

 

Got Plus when I realized there was no option to buy Unity Pro, I thought the Plus was the upgrade buy you don't even own pro with that! AND if you make a certain % with your game you have to pay Royalties to Unity.

I think at this point Blender should have cleaned up their UI, created their own asset store, got enlighten etc because they don't seem to be anyway sharks. Unity seems to be trapping people.. if you accidentally got Unity plus and found out the Unity Pro is available for $75 a month and you can upgrade.. you can only upgrade at $125 a month... they are becoming untrustworthy in the way they present deals.

 

Forget owning it. You aren't meant to own it any more. You are meant to keep paying Unity forever.

And since this is a Unity versus Unreal thread, Unity is still cheaper then Unreal in most circumstances. However the cost is not a significant enough difference to make it a reason to choose between engines.

This is flat out wrong. Unity doesn't charge royalties. Ever.

Untrustworthy? Or did you just not read the details properly?

 

One of the reasons why Unity is as expensive as it is is because it doesn't require you to purchase your own licenses to use the middle-ware it ships with. Blender being an open source product wouldn't cover the licenses for Enlighten and any other middle-ware. Thus you'd have to pay for it yourself. Last I had heard it was a five digit figure to license it.

 

You do not pay royalities to unity. You pay for subscription, and that's it. No royalties. And as an individual you're ONLY required to pay for subscription if you earn over $100k from using unity. That's of course, unless you REALLY want that dark skin.

You pay royalties with Unreal engine if you earned more than $3000 with your game per financial quarter. You're also obliged to provide financial information to Epic Games on demand.

I've written a big comparison myself once, and now I no longer think such comparisons are useful. Whoever want to make games, will just make games, without dwelling too far on feature lists. Speaking of which available information can be flat out wrong (Someone said me once that Unreal 4 has a Mecanim equivalent. Well, it doesn't).

 

BLender will never get enlighten. Never.

Blender is GPLed. Enlighten is not. You cannot combine GPL software with proprietary code.

 

Untrustworthy meaning the wording/sales pitch.. they made it sound at first that there was no way to own Unity pro, then I received a second promotional message stating it's possible if you subscribe for two years.. the first year being 40% off.. but for an upgrade you're paying almost double.

 

Stingray is not dead yet and from what I see is shaping up really good.

 

Haha - UE4 will still get your GPU burning on the lappy and Unity core engine remains patiently waiting until you instruct it to exercise.

 

Because you made an account here on the Unity boards... that's it. Your one of ours now. There is no escape. >

 

What's the point of having a graphics card in your laptop if it doesn't get utilized more than an Intel GPU would have?

 

It's easier to use than Unreal

 

I mean maybe it's a matter of getting used to either one or the other. But my sensation is that Unity is more straightforward. It's GameObjects and Components, you know this and you know everything.

With Unreal everything seemed a little tricky. Every aspect has its own specific workflow and you have to learn the ins and outs.
Again this is probably just a matter of getting used to. Maybe Unreal needs a better documentation.

Who knows. But all in all Unity was way easy to jump into for me, where Unreal is not.

Oh and Unreal interface was slow sometimes, and it crashed for me a lot. Where for me Unity crashes once or twice... a year.

 

I never even used Unreal before

 

So then how do you know Unity is easier to use?

 

Don't draw a conclusion about an engine before you've had the opportunity to sit down and properly learn it. We've had people on these forums that have struggled to pick up Unity because they were approaching it in a way that it wasn't intended to be used only to have far fewer problems once they started approaching it like it was meant to be.

 

This. Spreading misinformation about other engines doesn't help anyone.

For me the main draw of Unity is I have several years experience in Unity, and only a few hours in Unreal. But that doesn't help anyone starting out.

The other big draw is Unity is the de facto industry standard. I see about ten job ads requiring Unity for every one requiring Unreal. Again this is just in the local market, mileage may vary.

 

@Carve_Online I quote you & reply not to you, as I see you seem to know all this already & we agree. But I quote you to validate & strengthen your points for others who may be reading this thread.

Changing engines at any point in the process is nothing but a 100% BACKWARDS progression. Especially when talking these engines.

Scratch what I just said. It's now 200% backwards bc I forgot about the learning part.

Difficulty in learning isn't so relevant. It takes a good amount of time regardless of how easy or hard it is to learn. Even "easy" or "small" in gamedev is long & huge. Doesn't matter much the context.

From my experience in gamedev, the "gamedev community" (hundreds of communities & thousands of people)... well... the majority should never be listened to. Even among "advisors" and sometimes even "seasoned developers"...they are of (IMO) poor opinion.

I say that to say this: You don't want a consensus. You want a very small <1% sampling of experienced, intelligent, thoughtful individuals to give their opinion. Which in this context is "It most likely doesn't matter what you pick. Just get to work already!"

You are smarter today than I was in the past. /ApplaudWisdom

I definitely agree to this. Idk what Unreal is like, but one of Unity's biggest strength is in rapid prototyping.

 

What we need is a modern language that beats out or matches C++, but friendlier and modern.

Before C++11 was released, C++ felt like an archaic language. It feels alot more updated now, but still a remnant of a language from 1983.

It's amazing how little the tech industry has actually advanced. Sure, computers are faster, ram/hdd is bigger, and GPU's exist... but with some exceptions, a lot of things are just hacks to make the same tech faster (i.e. CPU's) with ever-increasingly bloated software (microsoft?)

But even with increased hardware capacity, we still have alot of the same problems or handicaps. (ex. Multi-core CPU's with absolutely pathetic Multi-core support...if it even exists in apps.) I can't wait until HDD & RAM become the same thing (I always forget the incoming tech name for that).

And same AAA handicaps (a rush to profit over everything else, an obsession with cutting edge graphics even when performace dips to horribly low fps, and clone-happy decision making.)

It's not just languages and decade-old bottlenecks that are an issue though. Even with the "Indie Revolution" innovating everywhere; games are still pretty damn stagnant. Some titles that are 20, even 30 years old, are equal matches to some of the best games today. Not because of our sense of Nostalgia, but because they have more depth or more innovative gameplay or game systems. (i.e. Starflight has no equal / clone even 30 yrs later. Fallout 2 rivals Fallout 3 & 4 in different aspects even when the newer ones dominate infonitely more in art.)

I believe the reason is because there are so few people in this type of industry. Even fewer with the experience, desire, or opportunity to create such tech innovations. And some of it has to be done in teams, and so companies have to invest... So there's plenty of room for advancement, but very few people actually doing anything.

I think that's why we have these epic celebrity-individuals hailed as innovators. Theyre among the few actually doing stuff, so of course they succeed.

I mean look at Unity, started by 3 gamedevs. Now it has helped thousands achieve their dreams and advance the industry.

We just need a few more tackling a language better fit for 2020. That's why I really dislike people who criticize Jonathan Blow for wanting to make a new language for game developers. We NEED people like him. Otherwise we'll be stuck in the 1980's forever...

 

Which part of C++ makes it outdated? What does it lack that other languages have?

Wtf did I just read? Did you ever open up task manager and saw that more than one CPU was being used?

You do realize those 2 are used for completely different purposes right?

There are tens of thousands of languages out there. Pick one.
If that's not enough for you then just make your own.

 

There was a period where I was sure I wanted to use UE4. I did attempt for several months to use it exclusively, mostly with some simple test games and experiments.

Unreal has it's benefits, for sure, especially in terms of the default graphics quality. Shadows just look nicer, screen space reflections are great (without having to buy add-ons), motion blur and other effects that just make simple scenes look nicer without much effort. However, all that glitz comes at a price, because it just feel more heavy than Unity.

Visual scripting can be a plus or minus depending on your background. While the concept of visual scripting is appealing, I found even simple stuff I could do in 2 - 3 lines of code required a full screen of spaghetti.

C++ can also be a plus or a minus. C++ is definitely powerful, and the de facto standard for game development. However, in practice, I found Unreal requires a lot of special non-standard macros and such to interface with the engine. I'm sure that would make more sense given more experience with it, but it was fairly complex to (for example) make a Blueprint component out of C++ and integrate well into the editor. Something that, in Unity, you can do by just declaring a public variable and seconds later it appears in the editor.

Having the source code sounds really great, but it has it's downside as well. While you could just start hacking away with your own additions and fixes, every time a new version comes out from Epic you'll have to merge things yourself, which may or may not be trivial depending on what you changed.

I also found that there was too much hidden structure that you needed to wrestle just to get a basic prototype running. With Unity, it's basically a blank canvas and you do whatever you want from scratch. With Unreal, it starts with a sort of game framework, and you will spend hours just trying to clean the slate.

Finally, and the real reason I stopped evaluating Unreal and went back to Unity, it just wasn't stable. On a regular basis, I would say nearly every other day depending on what I was doing, the engine would crash. To make matters worse, it takes a solid minute or two to open the editor, making frequent crashing unbearable. Even things that seem like common actions would cause crashing. For example, I found that deleting a texture, without first deleting associated materials, would cause a crash. And, on a few occasions, the crash corrupted my game so just opening the project would crash before even getting to the editor. Maybe they have fixed some of these bugs by now, but I wouldn't really be comfortable investing time in a big project knowing it could crash at any point and corrupt the whole game. I mean, I know you can restore from backups or source control, sure, but it doesn't instill confidence in the platform.

I still think that Unreal is probably great for some people, and that's fine. There should be options. But, for me, Unity is much more productive, light-weight on resources, and the flow just makes more sense. With all the time/money you save with higher productivity, you can put that to making better art or effects and probably have something that is competitive graphics-wise.

In addition I find rapid prototyping to be a serious game-changing advantage for Unity. I've played with a number of different game concepts and ideas over the years, and with Unity and the Asset Store, you can have a playable prototype up and running from scratch in a matter of hours. There were many concepts that sounded good in my head, and after spending a day prototyping I found they didn't work. With something like Unreal (and their much more scant asset library) that same prototype can take 2 - 3 times as long. If the idea doesn't work, it's just more time lost.

But, that's just my experience and opinion. Every project and developer has different needs, and it's always good to use the right tool for the job. For me, that tool is Unity but everyone should at least try different engines and see for themselves.

 

It was definitely true in the past that it was the standard for game development but I feel it's far more accurate now to just say it's the de facto standard for game engine development. Actual games are more commonly being developed in languages like C#, Java, Lua, Python, etc.

 

I'm pretty much in the same boat.

Unreal Engine overall, has a more complete and sophisticated toolset. And with my artist background, I appreciate Blueprint and the built-in material editor a lot. I really wanted to make a game with Unreal Engine.
The issue for me is, that Unreal is definitely more prone to crashes and glitches than Unity. Unreal is also not so suitable for games that aim at lower-spec computers as well.

Another great advantage of Unity is the huge and friendly community.
And like Boredmormon said, there are a lot more serious developers, using Unity which results in a lot more Unity-related jobs.

With 5.5, UT addressed also some stuff that I really missed as an artist, like the Shuriken improvements and minor things like the new selection-outline. And I'm a fan of the new FX stack, which is a lot more optimized than Unreal's FX stuff.

 

Used to be the de facto standard. It's still the standard for engine development. But for game development C# is far more common these days. Mostly due to the dominance of Unity.

 

When you read someone's reply and notice they have a strong opinion about something they clearly know nothing about...

I will just pass off this embarassing post of yours as wanting to argue for the sake of arguing.

When you want to argue just to argue, try sticking to topics you actually know a little bit about. Otherwise your statements will reveal incredible ignorance about the subject at hand.

/NoBait

 

If this is true, then that is incredible scary, seeing as how Unity doesn't excel in these areas either.

*shudders* even thinking about it now...

 

Actually, I installed the latest version of Unreal Engine on my Windows machine and MacBook Pro after writing that post and it runs pretty stable on my Windows PC now. But on my MacBook Pro, it's still horrible, while Unity runs quite smoothly there.
Mind you, that I use my MacBook just for Emails, internet surfing and photo editing.

And you're right Unity isn't that stable as it used to be. There are also quite a few bugs in 5.5, that broke some things for me. Like some materials, that came from UT itself.

I think both engines are fine for game development. It's pretty much about your own preferences and needs for a specific project.

 

Well Unreal doesn't work too good on my MacBook Air - unusable frame rate in the editor. (They know the reason: a driver issue, but have no intention of fixing it). So that's good enough reason for me not to use it.

Having said that the Projects window when you first open Unity 5.4 is pixelated and garbled for a second or two when I first open it on my Macbook Air but after that it works fine.

 

Funny I'd suggest that's a good reason not to buy a Mac.

 

If I knew how to use both well, I would use Unreal for something that needs stunning graphics, because Unreal has everything there out the box.

I really like the Unreal speed level design videos.

 

I researched U4 a bit and I don't like it at all. I have years of C++ experience and I made my own amateur C++ engine in the past. The main problem of Unreal is that it's not general purpose by design. It's an FPS engine which is great for making something like Unreal Tournament but its sucks for pretty much anything else. It's high-end rendering is a drag for mobile platforms which are very popular among Unity developers.

In Unreal you can't even have your own main loop, AFAIK. At Unity they are currently working on fully scriptable render loops. This is a very powerful feature for people who know what they are doing. In Unity you can have almost everything the way you like it. In Unreal a lot of stuff is forced on you and to change it you need to hack some hardcore C++ code.

It may seem strange but Unity is more appealing to experienced programmers. That's because such guys always want to do everything in "their" way, with full system abstraction API. This is not easily possible in Unreal.

 

Saying "researched" leaves me with the feeling you didn't actually evaluate it and you're basing your opinions on statements others have made. I've found that never actually gives you a good idea of the capabilities of an engine. You're always better off checking it out yourself.

If you absolutely needed to modify the main loop you can always modify the source since everyone has access to it.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/API/Runtime/Launch/FEngineLoop/index.html

 

You don't have to try everything to know it. Only kids do that. Evaluating engines is very time-consuming and everybody is looking for some cues. I'm sharing some cues I found. Unreal feels to me very bloated, restrictive and complex.

It's not about "capabilities" either for me. It's about coding satisfaction and productivity. C# removes whole layers of complexity from C++ and adds an excellent framework.

 

Frankly, at this point in time, I would prefer of using Cryengine 5.3 over UE4 due to C# (looks almost like Unity) and new FBX importer. I think UE4 is an amazing tool but I still cannot digest their business model.

PS. Here is how to define a C# entity in Cryengine:

 

Back in September when Xamarin was bought up and Mono's licensing was modified the group working on getting Mono functioning in Unreal 4 started working on it again (they had previously stopped because UE4's licensing had become incompatible thanks to Epic). Who knows if we'll ever see anything from it though.

https://mono-ue.github.io/

 

I do like watching the Unreal Twitch streams weekly updates. Which is weird since I don't even use it. Its kind of interesting to see the company at work and the people behind it. Well, some people watch Zoella. I watch updates of game engines I don't even use. Each to their own I guess. My favourite is Plaid Shirt Guy. To anyone who hasn't worked at a games company before. This is the required uniform!

 

So basically you didn't do the job you claimed to do and are expecting people to take your opinion seriously.

 

Or he is a professional adult with a finite amount of time, who is sharing his cues because they form a useful opinion to share.

From what I understand, he is not expecting anything from anyone. He is just sharing his opinion, and ryiah is simply trolling him for it (typical - which is why Ryiah is on my ignore list.)
Also Ryiah's opinion is not something to be taken seriously. Hence the whole ignore list part. So IMO this is strange for you to be joining the bandwagon to attack him for simply sharing his opinion.

Also when you have enough experience in gamedev in general, you can safely make a lot of common assumptions about things based on limited information & anecdotal reporting from specific individuals. I feel safe referring other people to consider Unity over Unreal or CryEngine, despite knowing very little about either of the latter. However I do know enough passive knowledge to know that neither of the two latter are leaps & bounds above Unity. I do know Unity's strengths, the common pitfalls in gamedev which NO ENGINE solves, and what it means to create your own game engine (something I also refer people to do, as there's a lot of benefit to doing so).

I could also figure out a lot of assumptions that are very likely to be true if I were given limited knowledge or experience with Unreal or CryEngine, because I know what it's like to develop games & feel competent as a programmer and developer. I'd never blast someone for not working for months on a game engine but having an assumption about it.

Especially given the fact that almost all game engines are just a means to the same end.
All game engines are very similar, even when they are so very different.

 

Part of being a professional in the IT industry is keeping yourself up to date in the technology available. If you do not have enough time to do it on the job then you need to make time off the job. If you have a family this may very well require you to do so after everyone else has gone to bed. That's simply how this particular industry is and failure to keep yourself up to date can compromise your ability to hold a job.

On a related note I spent part of this weekend evaluating SabreCSG and RealtimeCSG to see which I preferred.

 

Except people here who have actually used UE4 have already pointed out how Quingu's cues didn't form useful opinions to share at all.