Full Unreal Engine 4 Developer Kit $19/MO + 5% / Why can't Unity Offer the same!

Paid, but they have their own integrated RTGI system in the pipe.

 

Also of relevance: Is the cost of (UE4) Enlighten more or less then the cost of a Unity Pro license? I did some research and came up empty - darn confidentiality agreements.

But you're right, Epic is working on their own solution for developers who want to further improve the "wow factor" of their levels. I'm more concerned with the visual GUI editor progress myself; the standard light mapped stuff is already plenty pretty for my purposes over there.

On another note, Unity is still king (*when comparing major 3D engines) when it comes to 2D tools, but I know Epic's Michael Noland has been working hard to develop a nicely optimized 2D workflow over there. Will they ever catch up? After my game is completed here, I'll have to re-evaluate to see where each tool set stands.

-clarification added-

 

Yeah, it's hard to find actual numbers on Enlighten. I wish the industry wasn't so tight-lipped about this stuff. I also agree on the GUI thing, and hopefully they'll show off some stuff about that in the coming weeks. Needless to say, if it takes less than three years to come out I'll be side-eyeing the hell out of UT.

 

On another note, Unity is still king when it comes to 2D tools, but I know Epic's Michael Noland has been working hard to develop a nicely optimized 2D workflow over there

Taking a such demanding engine to make simple 2D games it's non sense in some way.
Even my Radeon 6700 is a little under the minimum spec they ask, to make 2D games people will want a tool that can run on low and older PC hardware. Why they would choose a very demanding UE4 tool to make 2D games ?
And will their 2D games run on small PC and laptops ?

Maybe it could also be that Unity evolved over the time and got bigger and bigger and thus extremly difficult to manage, while UE4 was written from scratch.
In the technical part i'm not sure that there is a real management problem.Perhaps they could decide to hire more engineers and put them on the right tasks to speed up making the missing tools and features. I don't know if you can put a team working on some shader area, other on tools etc ... ?

 

Yes, I'm certain they won't make it so that the power requirements would scale down for smaller projects like they did with everything else they've ever made.

Unity Technologies already has more than 200 employees. I'm not certain that hiring more people is the solution.

 

200 employees on the technical programming side , im' not sure? Caus a company needs people on the structure side , advertising and other stuff, not only programmers.

 

You are wrong. Unity Pro is slow on 2D, only good for simple 2D stuff.
Did you read the recent thread?
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/speed-comparison-2d-unity-vs-monkey.248926/page-2#post-1682759

 

It's also riddled with a lot of really messed up physics glitches.

 

Still worlds ahead of what UE4 offers in that regard.

 

It's important to point out that, at this very moment, Unity has only had native 2D support for eight months.

 

Unity is 3D mainly from beginning, they changed things to have the 2D and the result is not so bad as Unity is a whole system with Physics , shaders, particles, advanced Screen effects you can mix with your 2D games, and a complete editor and tools to speed up your game creation.
Lot of people want tools and need plugins , they don't want to write a 2D engine or program in Low level API like Jmonkey.
The thing is Unity even Free version for 2D i think will ever be better than UE4 for 2D, specially as UE4 needs a big PC, have Royalties, and it is more a big 3D Engine than 2D. Reading : 3D game made with UE4 draws attention, but 2D game made with UE4 sounds pretty weird.

 

I think you're confusing minimum specs for development vs. the minimum specs of your final product. UE4 can be scaled down pretty well to reach a larger audience depending on your needs.

Per their custom 2D tool kit, it's just another tool in their arsenal, targeted for both 2D and hybrid 2D/3D games. And given their development track record, I certainly wouldn't dismiss how good it might become. But in the present, Unity still holds an advantage in that area. Also, it has its own roadmap!

 

Yep they have interesting feature like 2D terrain spline and other, but this is developped by community not UDK engineers.

 

No, it's bundled in with UE4. It's one of the experimental plugins they include.

 

Well im' not sure 2D to work entirely with BluePrints, i don't see what advantages they could have in 2D area, perhaps making advanced tools but we got that style tools in Unity using plugins.
That sounds weird using such powerfull system to finally not using it's real potential and finally make 2D games.

 

...for you. Everyone needs different things.

I raised this with Unity a couple years ago. It's a problem Unity is aware of and actively working on. https://github.com/pbhogan/InControl is quite amazing though.

Thank god there's no strumpy integration since it's been bettered by shaderforge. Who knows what the future will bring. Unity 5 improves mecanim with leaps and bounds.

You seem to think lightmass is actually good. It's not very good really. As with all things it will be improved no doubt. It's not in Enlighten's league though, hence UE developers licensing Enlighten when they can.

Epic has a decade head start. I'd say Unity's doing a good job in the race, if that's what it is.

And that is Unity's strength. When you look at things like Killzone Shadowfall, you see how much middleware the typical AAA game uses. Hint: it's a lot, like Unity. Why reinvent the wheel?

And licensing is not necessarily more expensive if you need to throw a TON of engineers at a problem, then maintain it for a decade.

 

I will be waiting for news in Unite, Hippocoder! In Unity learning area, mainly in projects (my favorite, Project: Stealth), is so fun to test it would be hard give up on Unity so easily. The graphic (assets, characters...) set up in Unity is faster than other engines and it speed up the process for a solo game dev as me.

I will keep following Unity for news!

 

That is exactly the main problem. A unity employee said himself that Unity source code is a monolith and that is why they are slow at fixing bugs. Any programmer will know that that means: development of new features is very slow and there are lots of bugs all the time.
They should have started from scratch for Unity 5, but instead they try to patch Unity 4. I as a programmer already know what the result of that will be...
Sad but true.

 

This is getting fixed. Plenty of monolithic code is being thrown out for 5, along with a bunch of depreciated stuff. This alone cleans up things for rendering and more. A lot of Unity is middleware. Bear in mind that Unity supports a hell of a lot of platforms...

 

This is getting fixed. Plenty of monolithic code is being thrown out for 5, along with a bunch of depreciated stuff.
This oculd explain why Unity 5 takes so much time to come out.

 

Oh cool, thank you, I'll check it out.
But don't you agree that it is pretty silly that Unity provided an engine where you could only change controls at startup? Every work around is a bit exhausting, especially when it is clear how it should work.

No doubt that Shaderforge is better. But still so many users wished for a built-in solution and I just don't know why Tim C. has stopped working on it. Maybe it was a threat to Shaderforge?! /conspiracy Do someone know the official statement?

I'm also looking forward what Unity 5 will deliver, but than again I heard some features are delayed (Apex Cloth).

I can't myself say which one is better as I haven't used Enlighten nor Lightmass. Anyways the enviroments baked by lightmass do look good to me. What exactly isn't good? It sounds like you had some issues. Could you provide some material and explanations?

...for you , @thxfoo: +1

I assume you get those information because your working a bit closer with UT than the rest of us, good to hear. Would be cool if the UT staff says this to us though.

 

Years in the life of an engine developer:

You have a great new architecture team working on a completely modular forward thinking expandable engine design, Mr. Edev (Engine dev) is ecstatic thinking about how simple middleware integration will be with gateway classes for hooks and swappable modular design. Everything is well documented, your team have tested the functionality a thousand times all looks sweet for Edev.

Monday: Today is the release of XEngine and everyone is excited, a speech about all the new technology and workflow processes makes everyone proud. We do our presentational procedures, return to our desk and send out our well made manual to the rest of the teams..

Tuesday:

Bob from art team half reads the manual, decides it'll take too long to read properly and manages to break the material system, bob reports this an issue to Edevs team and we explain to him how it should be used, Bob then replies with it might not just me who has this issue. You should automate the process to avoid user error, Edev works on this whilst another call comes in from Julie, Julie believes that the engine workflow should be like X even though you had a suite of testers confirm that process X was the best way to do things. But Julie is a senior project manager and escalates when you talk logic, Edev starts shifting the design to match Julie's process. Meanwhile Bob is still waiting and escalates again, whilst Edev is documenting Julie's changes but low and behold Edev gets brought onto a conference bridge whilst trying to work on another issue, drops the documentation for Julie and places a note to finish it off later. Edev has had enough, he's out of there for today.

Wednesday: The night before Fred had logged a few issues which Joe the support guy fixed, but didn't understand the full impact of his changes. Edev walks in to people screaming after the push had been made, managers spin up a bridge and decide to make sure this doesn't happen again, reviews and change process must be established. Whilst Edev is busy on a thousand other things, including the documentation he was supposed to do now a large part of his time is taken up with procedure.

Six months from that faithful Wednesday: Rinse and repeat the above, more engineers have been employed to cover the increasing scale of user wants and needs. Bosses and clients want you to integrate the latest tech NOW!, but the modular gateway system Edev originally made has grown interdependencies, hmm! So you continue down the path of integrating systems as quickly as possible, this beautiful modular design has now officially left the building. More fingers in every pie, more changes, more problems, more demands, more procedures did Edev mention more problems?

A year from that faithful Monday: Edev is long past caring how things should be and Edevs engine code resembles this:

 

Good description. But that's the reason you should start from scratch from time to time.

And what helps a lot is if the people that have the final word are experienced software developers/engine designers like Tim Sweeney at Epic. Those people will decide to do what is the best from engineering point of view. I was lucky and only ever worked in companies with only software engineers up to the top, I would die a little having non-techies decide technical questions...

 

Yeah, Murgilod is right. Michael Noland, the lead developer working on Paper 2D, is one of Epic's Senior Engine Programmers. He's appeared on a few of their weekly Twitch streams.

The Unreal code base is newer, primarily because Epic was willing to rewrite everything for UE4 to get it right. This means their code will almost certainly be easier to maintain at this point, but I also get the feeling that the team at Epic might be better at this whole process - the speed and quality of their updates has been impressive, with a larger (if newer) tool set to boot. Who knows whether this is because they have more experience (they certainly have a smaller team) or because they have a more efficient workflow, but either way, it would probably benefit Unity to consider a similar code overhaul in the future (Unity 6?).

I think we're on the same page!

 

It's beautiful having a technically minded man at the helm of the company, it really does help. But it's one of many scenarios and even with the best at the top a company you have to bend to your customer needs. Which in Unity's case is us, so I don't want to be mean but we are the problem in many accounts.

I 100% agree with you, they should take the best out of what they have and dump the engine. Start from clean code and all them lessons learnt should be implemented. It'll speed up everything, the point of my previous "in the life of" post is whilst you start out with all the knowledge / talent and good will it never ends up the way you wanted it to and at some point an engine will turn into an administrative nightmare.

We want backwards compatibility between major releases whilst being able to do X and support all these platforms, we need things done now etc. it doesn't leave much time for Unity to re-focus on what the actual route cause is and do it right from the ground up.

So they'll continue to limp through.

 

I agree. I am using that InControl code for messing around with game controllers and it works really well.

 

Epic Games has the advantage that if they break your project, the customer can fix it (due to open source and total transparency on github). For example, a small minority of UE4 projects got broken by a bug in 4.2 that caused the editor to crash when a Blueprint was opened. It occurred deep within their blueprint code. Boring to debug and complicated. After giving Epic a repro case though the community got a hot fix really quickly by simply syncing up on github (4.2.1 preview at the time).

To be fair to Unity though I cant say I've ever crashed beyond like 1 or 2 times. I've never really encountered any bugs either that hindered my project in anyway. It's rock solid too me. I will probably be doing projects with both engines depending on the needs, etc. Atm though I am more actively working on my Unity game. Got a friend helping me finish it off. Both of us are happy with Unity honestly. But our scope for our games aren't too bad. (we both have low expectations; we're just making what we really want to make in our free time

edit-> So my point is I don't understand why their codebase would need a rewrite. Heck, I could probably compare the sources from UE3 & UE4 and find lots of stuff they kept if I looked hard enough. I have ue3 source from some work I did with it at my job

edit2: Didn't mean to pick on the guy I quoted. He didn't suggest Unity need to rewrite their codebase. post was aimed at suggestions from others. Sorry for confusion

 

You seem to be under the impression that the code for the UE4-Editor and the UE4-Runtime are the same if I am understanding your post. The ue4-editor has a lot of extra DLLs it loads and yes- it requires 64-bit just in-case you have a lot of assets. But a ue4-runtime game doesn't need to be 64 bit- it can be 32 bit. Checkout their Flappy chicken game which runs on mobile platforms. Havent actually downloaded it myself yet. (sorry my point is the editor has a lot of extra overhead. Just Slate UI alone adds a significant overhead)

But yeah- their editor is a lot more 'power hungry' then Unity. I can minimize the unity editor and forget its running. UE4-editor maxes out my fan at all times.

 

Big difference between a re-write from scratch and cutting all the clutter out and re-writing a cleaner more modularised setup. In the AAA space it happens all the time, but we didn't have to pander to millions and / or care about backwards compatability..

How many people do you think would complain if a new lightweight powerful Unity 5.0 had no upgrade path for your projects? Would it be acceptible or would it cause an uproar?

P.S I'm glad someone else admits slate being heavy, mention it to most people and they jump up and down.

 

Yeah you understand what I meant

Ah you're the guy I really meant to quote. I suspect given more years with Unity I'll come across many more bugs that will kick me out of my honeymoon phase with it. But at the moment- I think calling for a straight up 'restart from scratch' is just going too far. Sure, there are some basic things it needs like a 64 bit editor.

You know there is one thing I felt that is crazy broken. That skinned cloth stuff. So yeah- start all over on that! But I think that is what they have planned already. Perhaps you can give more detail for the 'happy noobs' like myself about any other areas you think might be broken or point me towards some threads?

 

Version 4.3 looks rather impressive. Epic really cuts the bait.

 

Compare speed of development of UE4 and Unity. This partly has to do with the state of the code base. You are lucky if the bugs don't affect you, but for the people that wait for specific fixes it is hard if this takes forever and then seeing UE4 where it takes days at most. And the same for new features.
Read the 28 pages of the "official-how-can-we-serve-you-better" thread. Lots of people complaining about bugs that take forever to get fixed if they are fixed at all.
They should not throw away everything, but a complete refactoring to a modular architecture will surely speed development and bug fixing up. I hope they do that for Unity 5. They should break backward compatibility to be able to really fix all major problems. People that aren't able to update their projects (because they created monoliths like Unity 4 itself) should stay with 4.x for their current projects. This would be better in the long run. If not now when is the time to clean things up?

edit: just to add one concrete issue: Unity added async level loading to have huge levels. But only part of that is done on another thread. So the render thread is still blocked if you use that, which completely defeats the purpose of that feature. The work on the render thread should be minimized and spread over multiple frames. If the design of the render module had this usage in mind this would be piece of cake, but it is obviously not designed for that.

 

Ah yes I never did read the 'official how can we serve you better' thread in detail. I will go check that out! Thanks for your reply

 

They just created a Flappy bird clone. Called Tappy Chicken, those guys at Epic are really working hard towards the 2D side of their engine.

It'll take you to time marker 22:26 where they talk about Tappy Chicken.

 

Thats actually quite old and exists since the first version of UE 4.

 

Yeah, I agree. UE4.3 is pretty impressive. Here is a link for anybody else that might be curious about it:
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unreal-engine-43-update-preview

Epic has definitely figured out how to quickly add features and release updates to subscribers. Unity needs to figure out how they can match Epic's pace. This forum thread was originally about why Unity cannot add a new subscription plan to match Epic price, but the pace of updates is equally important. It is scary to think how many cool new features Epic will add to UE4 between now and whenever Unity finally ships Unity 5. Heck, Epic will probably add a new improved GUI before Unity even manages to ship Unity 4.6.

 

I've mentioned several times it's available to UE3/4. The problem is you can't afford it, period.

Here's what people are missing: Sure, UE4 is a cheap entry fee, but your $1500 toward Unity pays for a hell of a lot of AAA grade middleware used in practically all the top games out there. UE4's strengths are in it's rendering pipe. I'm ignoring blueprints and node based shader editors in this argument because you get those in Unity for around $100 all in for both playmaker and shader forge - particularly during one of their many sale periods.

In any case that brings us to price - what do you get?

Unity5 - you get Umbra (killzone shadowfall), Enlighten (Battlefield 4), Fmod designer, and a bunch of other cool things to play with for $1500 (or free depending on feature split TBA)

UE4 - you get Epic's own code for 5% of your profits. I'm ignoring the sub since $19 a month isn't something anyone cares about spending for an engine I'd think.

So yeah, let's be fair.

 

@Teo

As hippo was saying, the cost of UE4 and all the middleware is about the same as a high spec European car with some royalties thrown in. If we compare the two including middleware Unity is DIRT CHEAP!.

Again it depends on the size of your team, if you have 10 users Unity is by far cheaper.

You do get access to other benefits through UDN, but Unity support contracts aren't that expensive. Depends on the situation really, UE4 and Unity for enterprise studios is a whole different kettle of fish TEO.

 

Comparing playmaker and shader forge to what you get in UE4 is like comparing a toy car to a real car. The stuff in UE4 is deeply integrated into the system, the stuff can interact on a level that is not possible if you add it on top as an addon.

 

@hippocoder

Why you think Unity have money to buy Enlighten and Epic don't? I am pretty sure Epic have enough money to buy Enlighten as tool for UE4, they don't do it because probable they don't want to do it. I suspect they have a hidden ace about GI and they will show it at the right time. Also Enlighten is not the only answer for dynamic GI. There are many other solutions. And you miss the think that UE4 is just a few months out, and constantly improving.

Speaking of BF4, I think you agree that no Unity powered game will be at level of BF4 anytime soon, with or without Enlighten. On the other side, UE4 have to prove nothing, they already have super good games with what's in (only look at E3). Take a look at Lionshead: http://www.lionhead.com/blog/2014/april/17/dynamic-global-illumination-in-fable-legends/

So, to clarify, Enlighten will not solve everything. Is good that will be here. How will work and what's will be the implementation is still unknown for most of us.

Let's see when Unity5 will be out, and then compare again with what will have UE4 at that time. Don't you think? Why you don't compare Unity 4 with UE 4.3? Both available.. you got the point. We don't know how UE4 will look when Unity5 will be out.

 

I suspect they have a hidden ace about GI and they will show it at the right time
Their is already real issues with Lightmass in UE4 , nothing is perfect, so even bringing a new system it will take time to resolve all issues.
Speaking of BF4, I think you agree that no Unity powered game will be at level of BF4 anytime soon, with or without Enlighten
It exist some big world games in Unity with bigger scale than BattleField, could it be MMo , big world RPG or action games, they could take advantage of Enlighten
On the other side, UE4 have to prove nothing, they already have super good games with what's in (only look at E3)
UE4 is not the best, specially when you see what UbiSoft can do. Great games like said can use lot of middleware specialized in different areas to have the best results. Some like for Witcher 3 just modified Umbra 3 middleware for better performance and they created their own terrain system really advanced.
Let's see when Unity5 will be out, and then compare again with what will have UE4 at that time. Don't you think? Why you don't compare Unity 4 with UE 4.3? Both available.. you got the point.
If you are ok with Royalties and need last graphics, yep go for UE4. Otherwise Unity even 4.3 is amazing to produce really good stuff using plugins for shader and other stuff.
Just some of the last Unity exmaples project : a one man project using Playmaker entirely and Marmoset for advanced liightening :

So yes you can also make appealing visual games with Unity 4.3 actually.

 

What? Try to make sense will you. We're talking about facts, not what-ifs. Epic is moving away from middleware, Unity is moving toward middleware. It's a different philosophy for both companies, and this is reflected in pricing, value and what it means for the individual customer. Some will prefer one, and others the other. It isn't some kind of competition, but a choice. Seems you don't get that.

Let me see why.

1. because Unity 4 is 2 years old and UE4 has just been launched.
2. because UE4 isn't done yet, it's still classified as beta.
3. because UE releases a new engine almost every decade and Unity every 2-3 years.
4. because UE4 and Unity5 are targeting next gen.

Again you want to make everything a competition and don't understand that it's better to place facts on the table and allow the user to choose, based on facts. And obviously, I do use Unity 5. I can't and won't speak about it but for more information look at the Unity blog. Hint: it's awesome.

 

If you say so..

 

Teo go play on epic forums since that seems to be the place you want to be.
Stop making like you are showing ue4 as the golden child and unity the ugly step child. Plus understand where both companies stand. Seems you are all over the place making assumptions.
Use the tool for the job. Hopefully people can make up their own m8nds about what to use.

 

I agree with thxfoo, end of the day all engines have their pro's and cons.

@Teo

You really do seem to be rooting completely for UE4 here, so if it's such an obvious choice (well to you anyway). Why are you trying to convince others? I've used UE4 since mid last year, I know what it's about and what it does.

I've already made my mind up on the scenario, hell if Unity 5.0 can't live up to UE4 then I'll take the soggy workflow and buy Enlighten (use LPV / or even add our own GI solution). Because I've found Lightmass an inconsistent / buggy strange looking sub par lightmapping solution, I'm far more interested in them getting the LPV portion sorted out.

Enlighten not only performs very well, it looks good. Last time I used it, there were some kinks but that was a couple of years ago now. You say Enlighten won't solve anything, well what's the question in the first place? It will aid Unity drastically in terms of rendering power and even in it's more junior stages I much preferred it to Lightmass.

Still that doesn't cover all the other tools and options you get with UE4, also it doesn't cover the rapid rate at which UE4 grows. I'm not stupid, I do see the merit in UE4 but I still prefer Unity.. But preferences don't get games released to the standard you want.

As a complete rendering solution for outdoorsy RPG's, I much prefer CryEngine to the lot. But as a game development tool I wouldn't be inclined to use it.

 

For me, The Matinee, and the Material Visual Editor have been worth the price. 19usd
Create Cutscene in EU4 is very easy and very interactive as well as being fully integrated into the rest of the tool.
I bought an addon in the Unity Asset Store, cost me $ 80 and was unable to achieve a result similar to Matinee.

I think the Unity team has to start focusing a little more on these builtin tools. Add a cutscene editor would be a good start.

 

You are right there Apiweb. The material editor in ue4 is very nice.

 

Create Cutscene in EU4 is very easy and very interactive as well as being fully integrated into the rest of the tool. I bought an addon in the Unity Asset Store, cost me $ 80 and was unable to achieve a result similar to Matinee.
As it is done in car domain or anything, let's hope Unity to take a closer look at UE4 tools to get inspired and to make good ones or better ones

 

oh lawd that looks awesome...

 

oh lawd that looks awesome...
Yep respect for one man game. Yes Unity allow you to make freaking gorgeous games even without V5.
Another interesting point, as non programmer he used Playmaker for whole game; so UE4 is not the only one allowing you ot make a great game without programming.
Unity should seriously consider visual programming and incorporate Playmaker or some other similar tool (also shader editor or cinematic tool as said before). Because UE4 BluePrints is really easy and intuitive to use : www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojvuTz4KCfE#t=206
Why UT could not have such integrated and advanced Visual system in the future ?
Another point is the interface where UE4 interface is same for all people using it, and it really looks really better, why Unity should not propose dark interface to all users or propose buying it ?