Don't jump ship to UE4 unless you're ready/capable of learning the API / C++

That pretty much sums up 90% of the people who download Unity and come onto these forums with big MMO and FPS dreams.

I've seen a couple of old Unity forum members who never completed a single project in Unity now on the UE forums recruiting people for their new project thinking UE4 is now the magic pill. And do they learn? No. They are looking for 10 team members and the game is some big FPS/MMO with visions of grandeur.

Sorry, but I just facepalm each time I see this

 

Oh, I remember that recursive code still after 25 years removed from being a sophomore in college. In C it was and Big Bang fast but it left out the obfuscating Square.

 

This isn't actually news Captain Obvious

 

This thread is pointless. C++ and CSharp are not that much different, Both Languages where based on Original C anyways. Most of these languages like Java and Objective C comes from Original C, The Inventors of these languages just added a couple of extensions.

In my experience if you know 1 programming language. Learning Another one is not so hard to pickup.

Stop being lazy and but your mind into to it and you can accomplish anything.

P.S Im sticking with Unity 5 for now. Im a mac person and i refuse to install windows on my machine since Unreal 4 engine does not support Mac OSX.

 

From the UE4 FAQ:

There is also a Linux implementation in the works per the last live stream broadcast.

Cheers,
-D

 

Yes Unreal works also for OSX.
But you should take that with a grain of salt. I've already found a fair chunk of mac related issues. You also need a quite beefy Mac to run UE4 properly. I wouldn't suggest any of the macbooks, because these ship only with mobile/integrated graphic cards.

Unity gives you definitely the better experience on a Mac at the moment.

 

Quite true. In the live stream, they owned up to the fact that the mac implementation still has some kinks. Like Unity when Windows development was introduced, they said they're working to make sure the experience is the same in both versions.

And beefy is definitely required. For reference, the full recommended build(s):

Cheers,
-D

 

Wandering a tad off topic, which is UE4 API / C++. I'm not sure how this thread relates to Unity much at the moment

 

:mrgreen:

 

I disagree. Using C# or JS or really any other interpreted language is going to yield less desirable results than a lean and better optimised language like C++.

I suppose Unity would be fine for prototyping due to the speed of development but I wouldn't trust is for a high end finished product.

 

I know, it works both ways

 

We need "necromancer" badge on those forums. The thread was over 1 year old before Yozies dug it out.

 

Having a necro is really only harmful to Unity users if it contains out of date information about Unity itself - ie depreciated API and so forth, or out of date information on performance characteristics/bugs/etc.

 

Yeah I agree with @hippocoder the necro thing some people get upset about but often there is no reason to. Threads such as this comparing C++ to C#, Unity to UE etc were relevant years ago and will be relevant for at least a few years from now. Better for people to post in here than to create thread after thread on this stuff like we used to see happening every week.

 

You guys need to lighten up a bit. Never said I was upset or that would be a bad thing.
however, giving "recognized necromancer" badge to someone would be fun and even though some info is still relevant (prices changed, api changed, versions changed) trying to start dialogue by responding to post from one year ago might not work well simply because the person might not be around the forums anymore.

 

I think pinning labels on users isn't fun in this respect. I wouldn't be offended but I figure some people will harmlessly ask questions then be labelled a necromancer, which might prevent them from asking for help. Still, there's lots more fun to be had, I know Unity's planning some forum niceties.

I'm more of a hands off guy. I will step in if it seems as though it will be harmful to forum users, not controlling their every move or preventing them.

 

No way! I do not want to lighten up. Already been out of the sun for so long I am getting my pasty white on.

Seriously, if my post came across as being angry, riled up or whatever well it wasn't written that way. We used to have people in here posting about this same topic literally every week. It went on for I don't know maybe months? If that is going to start again it'd be great to keep it in here.

And a lot of the old threads are still very valuable. Sometimes I really like it when a person stumbles upon one & revives it because until that point I never knew it existed and find some good interesting information in the thread.

There are some people who scream NECRO every time any thread over a certain point is revived. And I think the same as you are saying about that stuff. Geeesh... chill out folks. Do you never read any articles online that were published a year ago? Do you never read any books that were published more than a year ago? So what is the big deal about it here? lol

 

Have impression I haven't gotten my point across. Maybe lack of non-verbal information in text has something to do with it.

The tone of original post was half-joking. Not negative, as you (and hippomoderator?) assumed.

 

I'm not being negative or assuming people are negative. Perhaps your perception of others is a reflection of your own negativity. Perhaps assumptions of assumptions lead to more assumptions until we can safely assume that you're wrong about me thinking you're wrong.

 

The thread still contains usefull comparisons, also lets keep it on topic. If anyone has questions I can help answer them since I use Unity professionally and use ue4 on side projects.

 

You are oversimplifying quite a few aspects and you are also not considering newest developments at all. As you seem to have a very strong opinion, discussing the topic in a differentiated manner appears like a waste of time.

 

A bif part of the push to c# lay in the fact that it 'compiled' to a runtime interpreted 'scripting' language via cli rather than being compiled right down i.e. here. Upshot was that you could use a compiled runtime to abstract the target platform from the code for anything written in c#. This also reduced the 'compilation' overhead in exchange for a hit to runtime performance. It was also weakly typed and had garbage collection (again at the cost of performance and system resources). Because .net was a specification rather than an implementation the Mono Project brought a runtime to Linux and the language took off as a platform independent rapid application development tool. This was the plan as it was designed to compete with Java, not C or C++.

Unreal and Unity are both awesome! I still can't knock unreal for prototyping though, I can't imagine playermaker (disclosure I don't own a copy) comes anywhere near blueprint before you start looking at the AI components and the material editor. Basically if the material editor was a woman I would be seeking a divorce. Unfortunately any performance gains you get from C++ are probably lost to the BP integration though. It also doesn't reach as many platforms as Unity last I checked, has a really poor marketplace by comparison doesn't benefit from this level of community, etc.

Working in C# is a pleasure by comparison to C++ (unless you are a C++ vet who subconsciously uses that syntax by default) but there are a few things that you can do with C++ that I wouldn't really know how to approach in C#. Unity's true strengths are it's compatibility, the marketplace and the community and - this is a big one - it's permissive licensing. Not only for the engine but also the marketplace assets - Unreal marketplace assets can only be used with the Unreal engine legally.

Ultimately I would suggest trying both but neither is trivial to understand end-to-end but even if you did stray that way I'd bet you'll be back for the community and the marketplace at the very least. The great thing for us is that in this race there is no way to back the wrong horse, both do a fantastic job and both are getting better all the time

 

There's no such thing as "less performant language". The only thing that can be less/more performant are compilers/interpreters/VMs for said language. Because the only thing that has impact on performance is how well specific compiler translates language constructs into assembly and in case of interpreters/VM how fast. Looking for evidence? Just compare performance of Mono used in Unity with current Mono runtime or modern .NET. Or JVM, say 3.0 with JVM 8 (which is current version I think).

I'm sure someone could write C# compiler that would compile it into native binary, no .NET/mono needed. In fact, I'm pretty sure someone is working on it. Would performance be different? Maybe. Would it be better? Most likely yes.

It's up to compiler to generate performant code out of sources, if performance fails that's compiler's (and programmer's unless he did absolutely everything to optimize his code) fault, not language's.

 

Personally I would have titled it differently. Something like "Don't jump ship to UE4 unless you don't need an awesome community". I honestly haven't spent that much time with the community for Unreal 4, but my brief exposure left me feeling like it was far less awesome than Unity's.

 

Judging by my exposure to both communities, Unreal's community is friendlier, but Unity has few power users (who only ever hang out in "General/Offtopic" section and never answer anything in any other thread). So it is the same thing. - hit a complex issue and you're on your own.

---------

There's a lot of nonsense in this thread.

The OP is right that getting somewhere with Unreal 4 will take more time. The engine has significantly steeper learning curve and has its own quirks.

However, anything else that is related to language comparisons is a bad joke and apparently often comes from people with little or no programming experience. I'd say some of the info is misleading to the point of being harmful.

Speaking about engine comparison, each has its own advantages, disadvantages and it goes somewhat like this (keep in mind that each advatnage doesnn't necessarily have the same "weight" or importance):

Unreal: source code access
Unity: better animation retargeting (can retarget root motion easily)
Unreal: better animation system overall
Unity: more intuitive object model
Unreal: superior lighting results out of the box, faster lightmap baking
Unity: easier prefab management
Unreal: more features out of the box including node-based material editor, visual programming tools and ai decision trees
Unity: Easier to get started with
Unreal: Easier to finish project/fix issues you've run into.
Unity: Prefabs
Unreal: Handles more objects easily

etc, etc, etc.

So, just pick your poison and stick with it.

 

I hate to break it to you but pretty much everyone knows at this point. Both engines are fine. I'd love to give UE4 a proper go one of these days, I'm just too busy with my game at the moment.

Thing is, the API is the easy part, which is kind of the gist in this thread. It's no harder than learning the Unity API. The difficulty comes when you want to be ambitious with either engine.

 

Not really, C++ is much more beautiful that C# in all aspects. The problem with Unreal is that everything you do, you have to do it in Unreal "way", and I kinda dislike how it is. Personally I feel that Unreal dev's really fail to deliver an API.

 

Kinda, though IL2CPP is more of code translator than compiler, as it first translates IL asm into C++, then compiles resulting c++ with existing c++ compilers (most likely either gcc or whatever microsfot made V_V). I was rather talking about "clean" C# compiler which would take C# sources and translate it directly into native code.

 

Well, there's endless supply of clueless newbies and you'll be able to direct them to that thread.

Frankly, you'll need to free up 1 month of your time to get used to the engine. Especially if you're really familiar with unity. If you're already fine with unity, though, there's not much point in that.

It is not true, because out of the box you'll have more stuff to learn in case of Unreal engine. Maybe it won't be "harder" but it will definitely take more time.

All compilers are code translators.
All C++ compilers use intermediate format (*.obj, *.o, etc) which is close, but not quite machine code for underlying platform.
Even though I really dislike C#, there's not much reason to desire "pure" C# compiler. The language does what it is supposed to do in its current state just fine.

 

IL is never being interpreted. When a method is about to be called for the first time, JIT-compiler compiles its IL code to machine code. All the consequent calls to the method will execute this already compiled machine code.

This is how C# looks when it is finally executed on CPU (optimizations are off):

Code (CSharp):

1.             var a = 0x1234;
2. 000007FF001639A3  mov         dword ptr [rsp+20h],1234h // write a
3.             var b = 0xabcd;
4. 000007FF001639AB  mov         dword ptr [rsp+24h],0ABCDh // write b
5.             var c = a + b;
6. 000007FF001639B3  mov         ecx,dword ptr [rsp+20h] // read a
7. 000007FF001639B7  mov         eax,dword ptr [rsp+24h] // read b
8. 000007FF001639BB  add         eax,ecx // add them together
9. 000007FF001639BD  mov         dword ptr [rsp+28h],eax // write c
10.             Console.WriteLine(c);
11. 000007FF001639C1  mov         ecx,dword ptr [rsp+28h] // read c
12. 000007FF001639C5  call        000007FEF970D400 // print c
13.             Console.ReadLine();
14. 000007FF001639CA  call        000007FEF970D730

 

I have to disagree. Yes there are merits to a heavily optimised compiler and runtime.

But this will only take you so far.

If a language is more strongly typed, the compiler can make better judgements about that code. For example memory allocation can be more precise.


This is just the science.

 

Performant: DNE

Why are people using swear words and talking about technology that that is already old in a thread that is old and long ignored as if that made them credible and knowledgeable?

 

That's true, but in programming, we tend to use this word for convenience.

But that's fine, if you haven't heard it before.

 

While Performant isn't a word yet (outside of programming), it probably will be. A dictionary isn't about dictating the language, it is more a collection of observed words that make up the language. I suspect like many words, they're of non English origin spoken on forums and so forth, that get picked up.

We are all free to shape our language, it just depends on if the word sticks around or not

 

Wiktionary claims it's a French word that is now being found used in English.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/performant

 

I once had an English Professor that had a T-Shirt that said something along the lines of: "English doesn't borrow words from other languages, it drags them into back alleys and mugs them.". She was the best English teacher I ever had.

On-topic Ramblings:

While I've only tinkered with UE4 a bit, familiarity with UE3's guts has shown me that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Blueprint is effectively a high-performance byte-code interpreted language (with some exceptions) that wraps low-level engine abstractions of C++ language constructs. So was Unrealscript. It's just not represented with text.

C# gets compiled to a high-performance byte-code JIT (or AOT/IL2CPP'd) language. that wraps low-level .NET abstractions of IL language constructs.
After plumbing the guts of multiple engines (I haven't seen Unity's source), you start to see where the similarities are.

There are things each engine is good at, (Unreal having the clear advantage in visual prototyping and ease of getting a pretty result quickly, Unity having the advantage of a more mature asset store, the ability to use any language that compiles to .NET (if you REALLY don't want to use C#), and has the edge in # of platforms supported. It's also easier for many programmers to get something running quickly, if they don't already have familiarity with visual scripting tools.

There will always be people who get in over their head, and blame their tools instead of improving themselves. I used to work for people like that, who didn't try to learn the tools and instead looked for the next panacea or bandage to their current problems.

With IL2CPP and the changes to .NET overall, I think the performance gap will decrease further over time, and it will boil down to the team and the right tool for the job.

 

I've been learning Unreal Engine in my spare time for a few weeks now, I had plenty of C++ experience prior to staring on Unity, this was like 9 years ago so my biggest concerns as far as the code side of things were:

1. Memory management: not having the GC I will have to retrain myself to destroy all object instances to avoid memory leaks.
2. Pointers: Haven't dealt with pointers in almost a decade.

After a few weeks and 2 video tutorials completed I can say:

1. Memory management: Unreal will manage your memory as long as you define your variables as unreal properties.
2. Pointers are confusing but I'll get a hang of them in time.

So my original concerns as far as C++ goes were really not that big deal, one thing to keep in mind when learning Unreal is that most learning resources are heavily focused on Blueprint usage, only 1 of the video tutorials goes somewhat heavy into C++. Syntax can be confusing at times but I also remember how awkward it felt to declare arrays when I first started coding in C#.

I'm no Unreal expert by any means, no one should claim to know an engine or API after just 2 tutorials. But I'm slowly getting more confortable. Unreal has a steeper learning curve for sure, its structure seems to be very rigid compared to Unity, but that's not necessarily a bad thing considering this structure was created by professionals with decades of experience making games who also make their own AAA games.

Unity is very flexible and generic, you learn the concept of game object, parenting and mono behaviours and you are set, but in my opinion it's so flexible that you run the risk of shooting yourself in the foot by trying to create a revolutionary game architecture. This actually happened to us.

 

In the days of 2.64 Unity was like the Winnebago of licensed game engines.
Today, Unity is somewhere between a Toyota and their higher priced Lexus line of licensed game engines.

Unreal for more than fifteen years has been (and still is) the McLaren, the Porsche, the Ferrari, the Maserati of licensed game engines. The closest anyone came to knocking them off the top was Crytek, but they have risen and fallen although with Amazon's investment in them they look to be on the rise once more.

They all get you from point A to point B; you can step into the Toyota, turn it on, get to where you need to go and it practically drives and maintains itself.

The Ferrari on the other hand will also get you from point A to point B, is more performant, gives you a ton more control (but complexity scales with that) and you'll spend more time maintaining it. The Ferrari actually requires you to know more than just putting a foot on a pedal; you actually need to have at least a general understanding of automobiles - why they are built the way they are, what the parts are and how they work together to really enjoy driving the Ferrari... and for those that do there is nothing like it.

That doesn't mean its better; it depends on your needs, the talent of the team and if they think they can make the Toyota get the job done which in a lot of cases they can. Nobody will be making a game as high quality as Battlefield, Call of Duty, Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed or Borderlands anytime soon with the Toyota but then again if you are making a game like Candy Crush, Rust or Republique (sp?) its fine.

 

What if...

Toyota, Fiat, or even Lexus are actually the game engines out there, like GameMaker, Blender, etc. They get from point A to point B, but it wont turn as many heads as super sports cars.

And then Unity is like Ferrari. Anyone can really use a Ferrari or Lamborghini... (note I said use, not buy)... they have systems to keep people from losing control of the car. So you look good, everything's fine, and you'll get from point A to point B without crashing.

And then Unreal is like Formula 1. More suitable for a a bigger team, who refuels and change the tires and such, and only pro racers will take full advantage of the "engine" ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) .. but a single guy with no experience? Might not just drive much slower, it might also crash and quit the whole project.

Finally CryEngine is one of those roadsters. It's just weird.

 

It's theorical.
I've seen some UE4 projects made with Bleuprints only, and there is some interesting games made by one guy or a very small team, and you'll see eginners using UE4 without major issues starting making games, there is lot of learning materials.
Once you know the basics coding and tools of UE4 or Unity, they stay 3D engines, a simple TPS game with some AI is as simple with Unity or UE4. And UE4 has experimental BP to C++ tool now also, so you keep easy visual scripting while able to package the game very close to C++ performance.

 

I agree the C++ docs are very sparse but in a way it makes sense. If you go through all the Blueprint learning you have pretty much learned the API. Once you have learned the API and what things are called and the game framework writing the C++ code makes a lot more sense.

 

yeah unity does have way better docs, but what i have found useful for learning ue4, is actully look at the ut4 project and picking it apart to learn how it works. Their is also a tower defense game that comes with ue4 that is a good place to start when it comes to learning the engine.

 

Yeah that too, I spent awhile on that tower defense game and the shooter game. Then I decided I wasn't going to go 3d so it didn't really matter but it was a fun exercise

 

I've been in IT for over 20 years and one thing that's universal is devs love to argue over their tools. The tools used rarely matters in the end. What matters is whether or not things get done in time and the code isn't a complete wreck that blows up in your face post launch.

Personally I love the ease of use with Unity, the great documentation and I also like the asset store. If Unity lacks something you need odds are you can pick it up third party and get documentation and support specific to that from the vendor.

 

They are Volkswagon Beetles.

Unity is definitely not a supercar game engine. They are far, far away from that still. But you are right about Unreal, Unreal is definitely more like a Formula 1 vehicle than a supercar.

And the analogy to the roadster for CryEngine is perfect, didn't think of that, but it fits where they are in the grand scheme of the industry perfectly.

 

Blender is a bit like Willy Wonka's glass elevator. It'll do just about anything you need but it's covered in buttons and good luck trying to make sense of most of them.

 

this, it actually has good tools in it, but S***ty UI/UX design, and S***ty default keyboard commands, and breaks a lot of convention and standards used by all other 3d apps. With a overhull to its UX it could be a really good tool.