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

I didn't read the whole thread to see if it's already mentioned, but are you guys aware of http://skookumscript.com ? It's pretty interesting.....

 

I get this thread any time I google UE4.

I don't know how much you pay to google for the keyword "UE4"

What a joke!

 

Blender's default interface looks like it was built back in Windows XP days. That is why I use a dark theme that makes it sexy.

 

lmao this is a hella old thread and not even entirely accurate. When I made this I was trying to avoid Blueprints while I should have embraced them.

You can do pretty much everything in Blueprints if you want and they are extremely good for prototyping without turning your C++ classes into spaghetti code.

 

ontop of that ue4 lets you easily mix BP with C++

 

This topic is just a reflection of how much people fear changes.
"-Stick to what you know!"

It goes completely against the concept of game development where you should always be open to embrace innovation.

 

horses for courses, I guess...

If you like Blueprint, you will like UE4. Blueprint is at its heart, well documented, and capable of a lot.

If you dislike Blueprint, and are not already an old Unreal C++ guru from UE3 or UDK days, only bother if you have a ton of time and nerves to spare to scrape together the scarce documentation on C++ for UE4 from epic themselves, and hunt for all the information there is out there about it from devs using it.

In the End, you shouldn't expect UE4 to be such a jump in performance and features that the swap is worth all the weirdness you will encounter when you get into UE4 with a Unity mindset.
On the other hand, it might be interesting to see how UE4 does things differently, as long as you come to it with an open mind.


TL;DR: don't compare the two engines expecting to get out with an "a > b" result. Both are different, yet very close in what they can achieve. None of both is better overall, though one of them might be more suited to some things, and the other more to others.
In the end, you need to try both and decide for yourself which one you like more. Then settle down and no longer worry all the time if the grass would be greener on the other side.

 

BrUnO-XaVIeR on Unreal's forum

Seriously, can we (finallely) ban this guy out of OUR forums, please.

 

"Lets censor everyone who disagrees with me!"

He raises very valid points. People who have given both engines a fair shot are the only people looking at both engines unbiasedly. The Unity community in large seems very cult-like in that they regurgitate claims without even checking things out for themselves.

"Why do we need that confounded thing called a Car when my Horse works just fine??"

 

Look, we aren't in the kindergarten there. What's next, tracking people IRL and asking to ban them because color of their socks is wrong?

It doesn't matter who says what elsewhere, and people can criticize whatever they want.

Never noticed this happening.

 

So you've never heard these nonsensical remarks made before by people who have less than 5 minutes clocked in UE4?
-UE4 is only good for big teams.
-I don't need all those features out of the box I would rather buy them on the Asset Store!
-UE4 is only good for First person shooters.
-C++ is too hard
-Blueprints are too hard to read
-UE4 has horrible documentation (this was slightly true 2 years ago)
-Unity is better for solo devs!

 

Are you trying to start a flamewar or something?

I worked with UE4.
Some of those statements are true.

• C++ api documentation in UE4 is bad, especially when you need to check deep part of the engine. Most tutorials are written by one person, and figuring something out often required a code dive. *Maybe* it slightly improved, but I highly doubt it.
• C++ is also one of the very difficult languages, even though UE4 has facilities to make programmer's life easier and allows C++ to be used like a scripting language.
• Different approach to animation (animation is part of character, current animation retargeting mechanism is unreliable) will increase workload.
  
• I also hate blueprints and find them to be harder to read than text.

Done?

I'm very familiar with unity's quirks and weakness too. Except all of those were discussed to the death already.

 

And the Unreal community is created from a "fact": Unity3D is "bad" because no big studio made AAA games with him. It is also a biased view. (Most Unreal users are dreamers, fantasmants on AAA clones).
Some simply have trouble accepting that Unity3D is used because it meets the needs PERFECTLY.

One example is my case: I'm not a Cshap fanatic (since i learned with Unity and I already knew the C / C ++).
He is not afraid of change, (I tried ALSO Unreal, which -by the way- only works correctly on one of my 7 (!!!) configurations) but also findings AFTER testing.

Bruno-Xavier must be stopped behaving like an Epic's evangelist. : As someone who is on a mission to convert many to Unreal.
Disappointed to have paid his Pro license many years ?

EDIT :

 

really this is a common little quirk of how people reason, people try to defend anything they invested a lot of time or money into since they want to justify all that time or money as being the right choice.

Just try both without a bias, and figure out what meets your needs the best.

 

Here is a list of pros/cons I made a couple of months ago for myself to decide if it was right for me when I was getting hugely irritated with UT and spent some time building things with Unreal.

Unreal Pros

· Blueprints are really flexible and extensive. Do almost anything. Custom nodes are easy to code up.
· Persona animator system is really solid and can use blueprints built in.
· Debug linking system is ideal. Debugging in Blueprints is also ideal.
· Lots of back end basic game systems are included like a proper hierarchy of Character>Pawn>Actor. Unreal understands that most people are making action games with characters, death, respawning, etc.
· Input system is fantastically easy to use.
· Proven engine with the developers being the ones making lots of popular games with it.
· Video tutorials are excellent.

Unreal Cons

· C++ only.
· Obscene amounts of visual noise in the workflow. Buttons, panels, icons, toggles, foldouts.
· Visual Studio is hella slow. ReSharper takes 45 minutes to parse the project and 5 minutes to warmup when opening. VAX is faster than ReSharper, but is still slow.
· Documentation is severely lacking.
· Immense amount of bloat and things you’ll probably never use.
· Across the board, Build and Compiling is a manual task with no clear advantages to actually being manual.
· Everything is catered to C++ including naming conventions instead of being more human-readable.
· The entry barrier is high due to fundamental over-complexity of the engine, interface, design and workflows in comparison to Unity.
· Royalties on published titles.


Why you might use Unreal

· You want polished, complex and focused tools from a company with lots of published titles behind them.
· You want a backend with an inheritance structure for action games already built in.
· You are a C++ purist and think it is better than everything else.
· You are not a programmer, but have piles of free time to learn Blueprints and really want to make something.
· You want an open source engine and have plenty of time.
· You like having lots of Post Effects on by default and want some free AAA assets that you’ll never use.

Unity Pros

· Proper C# front end that is easy to understand. Easily use your own dll's.
· Minimal product by default, very modular and cohesive across the board.
· Not bloaty.
· Visual Studio and ReSharper are extremely fast.
· Automatically detects code changes and recompiles quickly. No manual operation.
· Documentation is very robust, includes examples and references in addition to almost all class and member information. Video tutorials are exemplary.
· UI system is very easy to use, flexible and easy to hook in code.
· Flat up-front cost or 100% free license with a startup screen. No Royalties.

Unity Cons

· Mecanim has crude/clunky workflow and interface.
· Terrain system is severely outdated.
· Input system is garbage, outdated and severely lacking.
· Heavily relies on 3rd party tools from the Asset Store to fill in gaps where it is lacking. Does not actively fill those gaps since there is already a 3rd party tool to do so.
· Does not have a proper visual scripting tool built in. (everyone complains about this, but is it actually an issue?)
· Large parts of the current lighting system are buggy with serious problems and inconsistensies.

Why you might use Unity

· You don’t like C++ or you simply understand that it isn’t 1979 anymore.
· You want a very lightweight engine or need something you can rapidly develop a very diverse amount of different things on for a huge amount of platforms.
· You want a proper front end to code on instead of raw engine source.
· You want to make tools or plugins for an established marketplace.
· You don’t want a bunch of bloaty features that you do not need.



In conclusion, if you're asking the question "Should I use Unreal or Unity?" then you should probably use Unity unless you're a C++ purist. If you're asking aimless questions like "What would it cost to make things like this trailer?" for the purpose of doing it yourself then you are way over your head and need to stop being delusional about creating a triple-a title.

There are plenty of objective comparisons on the internet between Unreal and Unity. If you know your skillset and budget, it is easy to choose. If you find it hard to choose, you may want to reconsider your objectives and assets until it is.

 

That being said between the advances to the C++ standard and the preprocessor macros included into the code base by Epic Games it isn't at all the same thing as working with C++ when it first came out (1983 by the way).

 

@LaneFox: Latest iteration of C++ is only a few years old, and it wasn't made in 1979 to begin with. Meanwhile C# doesn't have deterministic object life times and const methods.

Either way, some decent points, even though you're obviously biased in favor of C# and against C++. Unreal's Montage system could be very useful in Unity, for example. Ability to have "OR" transition conditions without writing scripting glue code would be nice too.

 

the macros are still just a hackish way to do what a modern langauge would do with attributes or decorators. But yeah Epic does improve on things as well since you you inherit from anything UObject based and reference it via UProperty you can have it garbage collected by the game engine removing a lot of the metal overhead of memory management.

@neginfinity also yeah montage makes creating movesets for a action or fighting game so much easier than in unity, and is really nice to work with. Samething goes for timeline objects you can use from bp

 

All engines have pros and cons, there is no best engine. It's more important when choosing one for a project to examine your assets, staff experience and project needs to make the choice and not which one is subjectively better by opinion.

 

Seriously tired about the 'AAA Unity vs Unreal thing'.
It's like saying that my Opel Corsa is "bad" because no one has ever won a Formula One Championship with.
or
A famillial kitchen oven is bad because you can't make an 'one diameter cake' with him. But during that time, millions of children around the world love eating millions of cakes build with.

I would REALLY curious to know the number of AAA projects made by the Unreal users.

 

IMO C++ is only good for engine development. For game level tier of code you need something less taxing for programmers. Pure C++ is needed only at the very high-end. Most indies should focus on maximizing their productivity and C# helps with that.

 

We talk about it for fun, if you've used Unreal and Unity for years then it's not even a difficult decision based on the project you're working on. I do have a massive list on either side, although it's becoming past the point of hollow now..

I will say it's nothing to do with AAA though, whether you're working on a mid sized project or a multi-million dollar blockbuster, the concepts are still the same. The bigger game just has more..!

@Quingu

Then don't use C++, as there is with Unity there's also scripting options for Unreal which has been used on some beefy projects like skookum..

 

Okay, being completely honest here.

The one thing that made me drop Unity was the fact C# is too easy to hack and Unity Tech never ever gave a cent to help developers fight piracy.

Despite features of either engines, there was quite a bunch of moments where I needed help from UT to shutdown pirates that were bursting both my Asset business and my gamedev business; while I paid UT for quite a considerable amount of Unity Pro licenses... When I talked to David in person and also Kaitlyn Becker about the issues that was taking like 90% of my revenue, they both weren't interested at all and I felt pretty much 'betrayed' after buying licenses from them for so long.

Since I am capable of developing engine features by myself, it was never a major problem to me when I needed to build something on Unity from scratch; but once I understood that UT isn't really 'Indie friendly' in case you as an indie approach them and ask for specific help on certain issues that relate directly to the engine architecture, I had to face the fact I should look elsewhere.

On the other side of the fence... EpicGames has being very helpful, they help promote projects free of charge and so they did for my own first UE4 game as well.
People pirate my stuff, I don't have to ask; Epic goes after them instantly! that directly help me to stay afloat with no costs or strings attached.
They constantly feed indie devs with assets worth millions of dollars, free of charge.
They, although being elitist at the past and I hated them for that, they pretty much swapped places with Unity Tech these days. Unity now is the one elitist if you ask me; put money on the table or forget about talking to them.

Still the community is awesome, but Unity Tech became something I do not recognize anymore;
It isn't anymore that cool company I once met. They got all the moneis? Cool, all hail to them, but something in UT have died and I'm not quite sure what.

The worst thing about UE4 I guess is the fact that now they are forced to tolerate me as a member of their community.

 

To be fair there is a string attached. You're paying them royalties. Naturally that's more of an incentive to them than if you paid a flat one-time fee (granted this is no longer applicable to Unity so it may change for them too).

 

Yes you are correct (as most of the time); I mean "no hidden agreements that I may regret later" with that.

 

To be fair, the sheer number of people trying to talk to them is going to mean that they are literally unable to respond to most. I don't interpret it as "elitist" so much as the opposite - they let anyone and everyone in on the ground floor and as a result can't mingle with the whole crowd.

Wow, that's pretty darn cool!

 

Isn't that how life works, though? Tit for tat, give and take, mutual interests, etc.

When the other side is financially interested in protecting your interest, that's the best kind of agreement. Unity's revenue does not depend on studio's revenue, only on number of seats. Therefore, in the end unity doesn't really have to go out of their way to protect its users.
Unreal's revenue depends on user's revenue, not on number of seats, therefore they have substantial interest in helping their users.

 

Last time I heard it was 4.13 of UE, probably many things have been changed. I have not lost my interest on UE, I am just not using it right now. Because I fear I would have to lurk with engine codes, so I have to make myself very fluent on C++(I hate node based blueprint, its a looks like a S***print to me . Don't have time memorizing things like people do with quran or bible ). Apart from so many "on going things", I actually get handful amount of time to do research and study. On that time, I usually invest my brain on C++. I hope one day I would understand it fully. I also fear that C++ alone will not save my day, a good overview of a game engine architecture and rendering is needed. Long time ago I had a rough overview of two books on that topics, I guess I will have to finish those books too? You see, the learning curve is going too steep. Is it normal? Or am I missing some easy path?

Unity has a clear abstraction layer between user code and engine code. At the same time, it does provide deep customization. On the other hand, it is kind of either weird or hard for UE4. I really do not understand their fetish for blueprint, it looks like an engine ready for artist, the style of documentation did not quite satisfy me last time I checked. :/ I learned a hard lesson while implementing some custom shading. I was told to use plugin trick or directly modify the RHI class, WTF!! May be things changed much recently, I dunno. But nonetheless, I will make it kneel before me someday, I promise u all

 

Well if you go to polycount or artstation probably half or more of the stuff is rendered in Unreal (the rest being mainly 3D modelling software). It's one way to get publicity on their main strength which is graphics - I'm sure it's not a coincidence that artists are using it to show off their work vs Cryengine or something else.

 

Because UE4 is packed with all shaders and advanced lightening tech you would need unlike Unity as you need to buy expensive plugins to make some good terrain, to have better shaders, to have bettre lightening and Effect.
CryEngine and Unreal 4 are free, you don't need to buy plugins to make your awesome looking characters or scenes.

 

Visual shader editor as well, that works very much like making a surface shader based on the unity standard shader but with nodes. A lot more artist friendly then writing in code or having to write your own vertex and fragment shaders.

 

Well that's it, that's their selling point, they no doubt saw an opportunity to market themselves for free on polycount and so forth and that drove their work on making the engine artist friendly.

What @kaiyum described as an inexplicable 'fetish' for blueprints is probably simply part of their attempt to market the engine to artists and almost certainly cannot be seen as a real attempt to replace c++ coding.

 

Could not agree more but bear in mind, we are talking about artists who want a portfolio for their sake. So they use free tools to achieve their goal in the most efficient way.

Except when you need specific graphical requirement. Then you would end up a fate like me

Did they change the documentation recently? Cuz I have not check it in recent times. Their documentation is centered around blueprint, it looks like they expect programmers to be fluent in c++ and a lot of things be known by default. On the other hand, unity's style is like this "Not everybody will have a BSC in cse/eee or such, lets explain in layman's term as well as in techy ways."

 

Then you can write a shader, or define your shader using the custom lighting input of a ue4 material editor

 

.usf and/or material function, is it not what you are referring? Let me ruin this for you then, unreal's shader development docs is surprisingly rich(!?!) https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/Rendering/ShaderDevelopment/index.html

I want some forward rendered object which will be treated in post processing phase differently or will not be affected by post effect system at all! It turn out to be a fairly simple 3 pass system in unity. However, I am not sure how I would do this on UE4

I don't see how UE4's shader development is a thing of reality for me

 

yeah depends on what you want to do, but it can be limiting that ue4 only has a deferred rendering path, with no forward path

 

If I read their roadmap correctly forward rendering should be part of UE 4.14.

 

I've got a very outside perspective, since I've hardly ever used it. I just think it's reasonable to assume that Blueprints followed on the tail end of a market opportunity to sell the image of the engine as a graphical powerhouse to artists. Could be wrong though.

 

I wonder how they handle transparency then.

 

What about the compilation issue, with Unreal you can build and compile to native standalone code, with Unity you cannot.

Unity still lacks IL2CPP to Standalone, so all your code is relatively easily extractable if you build to a Mono standalone target.

And it is probably is faster.

How does the multiplayer compare, my understanding is that Unreal is inherently multi-player, client/server?

Whilst Unity is inherently single player with the Unet multi-player system still 'in the works'.

 

Yeah I mentioned it to Epic a few times they needed an FR+ grid or something of the likes, I'm far from an Epic evangelist.. Like everything else it has it's fair share or quirks and it's own set of problems..

But if nothing else the core systems are solid, it's well featured and you don't find yourself doing many "work-arounds".. The logic behind the engine is about as good as it can be "really"..

I've asked many times of specific instances on why people find Unreal difficult? I've never really got a straight answer, it's like everything else. Based within it's context for a lot of things it is far simpler than Unity, IF you're willing to accept Epic's way of doing things. That's not a constraint on the type of game you make, it's more a of a constraint on how you achieve a specific game in which I've seen games range from pretty nice 2D all the way up to massive MMO's.

Talking about MMO's, I assisted with a project where they had two coders. The game was made mainly in C++, so by their perspective it wasn't THAT difficult, they also switched from Unity.

If ease of use is the main goal than Unity could learn a thing or two, like setting up a character in BP's takes 10 minutes. It's about 15 BP's for a char controller, it works efficiently and smoothly.. The combat system can easly tack on to it and doesn't require more than another hour to set up.. Not to mention there's a boat load of examples for most types of games out there, I have to admit the C++ documentation is vague.. It's kind of like you're expected to reverse engineer some of it.

I spend most of my time setting up materials and messing around with UI's tbh, the actual game and core logic in a 1st / 3rd person FPS / RPG / Topdown is very simple.. It's much more difficult to set up a decently smooth camera / inventory / combat system / AI / good looking particles and shaders in Unity... Or well you can buy them of course...

If I had one criticism, the interface and backend is a little all over the place. Like it has over-rides everywhere (YAML, /INI's), CVAR's (which are cool when you're debugging a build, not so much in editor), that little eye icon you forget to click to bring up another 1000 options, sub menu's for char setups, sub menu's for meshes, sub menu's for particles and sub menu of a sub menu for a sub menu. I understand why "kind of", it's because it's packed full of "stuff".

This is where they could learn from Unity.. What Unity really has going for it is the asset store, like you can have in-built animation systems / fully featured blocking tools, frameworks galore, shader systems etc. etc. so if you have the $'s than it's neither here or there.

End of the day, great games have been released in far worse than both Unity and Unreal.. Don't quote me on this but wasn't Torchlight made in Torque? Bastion was some sort of Mono XNA framework thingy, that's had thousands of games released from it.

 

Actually, I think Torchlight was made with Ogre3d. There are a few commercial releases made using the Ogre3d rendering engine. And GMStudio also has lots of commercial releases that use it, though I wouldn't compare the numbers to what Unity has going.

 

Do you think this is really the case? There's no way to know either way, but I'm on the fence about it.

On one hand, it's awesome to have easy access to shared community work. It encourages sharing of work because you can profit from it, and it encourages use of each others's stuff because that can make development easier and it's often really well priced. I've used some really great assets at a fraction of the price I feel that they're truly worth.

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff up there is of... less than professional quality. For the prices requested that's not too big a deal, you do get what you pay for. On the flip side, I feel that the price competition probably makes it harder for people to provide truly professional quality stuff, because that does require lots of effort and support and those things cost money to provide.

 

What we need is for Unity to pull an Apple, change their policy to be stricter, and start applying it retroactively.

 

This is very true. Just now I'm doing some freelance work with a pretty popular asset and wading through a fair amount of mess - hot potato function calls that go around the block before they actually do anything, public delegates that are assigned directly so you don't know where they came from, core scripts added to random gameobjects and made children of random things in the scene so you can't find them, repeated code ... whenever I see this stuff I think to myself that I must be too much of a perfectionist with my own asset store stuff

 

I baught shader forge, flowgraph scripting, some post effects expensive packages from the Asset Store to try to fill the gaps.Still it is not as good as UE4 shader editor, not as good as UE4 Blueprints, and not as good as UE4 post effects and particles effects or UE4 lightmapping is still faster and mixed mode lightening just works for example.
There is no mystery and i am not making a AAA game, but UE4 delivers out of the box above graphics because it is tooled and build mainly for AAA games.

 

Well, there are certainly many games taking advantage of the asset store. Where the Unity Asset store come in handy is speeding up specific game workflows, whereas something like Unreal has better end to end core implementations for professional results.

Let's take quite a high end example, if you wanted a char to recieve impact the throws them into a wall. Which in turn causes the wall to crumble / fracture and said wall interacts with the char. Unreal caters for those kind of scenario's, blended physics based animation (Phat tool), Apex, IK system and ragdoll all working harmoniously.

Now, if we're talking about games like Torchlight then it's far more simplistic, in which the goal really for an asset store side is just to speed up implementation and Unity Asset store has the tools to do that.

I understand there are a lot of iffy tools / systems out there, but some of the decent one's do give you a leg up when it comes to iteration speed.

Again, it's a matter of context.. Really depends on what you're working on.!

 

The New 3DS does support Unity in fact. Also remember that Nintendo includes a Unity license with all their Wii U dev kits

 

You might want to check the post date of @Blaveloper. May be back on the days of 2014, there were no 3ds support from unity.

 

Yeah I know that I just felt I should give a reminder that the New 3DS does support Unity