Thoughts from the ground up: Unity, Unreal Engine, Unreal Tournament...

I like having options. I am confident about my programming skills and I am confident about the skills of my artist friend. I know they are not AAA quality, but I do believe they're better than Unity Free quality. Unity Free just doesn't cut it and Unity Pro is simply too expensive for me. So even if I disliked UE4, I'd still be pretty much forced down that path.

If Unity wants my business beyond simple 2D games, they will need to consider an additional payment plan that is easily affordable. I cannot afford either $75/mo or $1,500. I am primarily a hobbyist but I want to move towards indie.

Even if I could afford it, for less than $75/mo I can get UE4 plus Maya LT plus SpeedTree. Or for $1,500 I can get non-subscription copies of Maya LT and SpeedTree along with 12 months of UE4. Which I could easily stretch to three or four years simply by subscribing for a single month every three or four months.

This does not even take into consideration any additional platforms or upgrade costs.

 

Not me, anyone.. You pay for a product therefore don't you believe it's the product manufacturers duty to fix the issue?

I'm not saying source code is a bad thing here, I have my own reasons for it's use. I'm wondering exactly what a self-proclaimed beginner would do with it? Also it shouldn't be a major factor in engine choice.

Community and middleware support by active knowledgeable engineers is a good thing. I know many devs here getting frustrated by hitting snags when attempting to sort out rendering functionality amongst other things.

Cloth sim anyone ?

 

I'll keep pasting what I wrote earlier on this:

Points 1 and 2 are potentially major factors to me, especially point 1. Point 3 will come in due time as it would take good time to ingest Unity's method-in-their-madness, but it's better sooner than never. I didn't mean that my being a beginner to full solo-game-dev is being a beginner to coding itself. Reiterating here, point 1 matters to me because the less companies I have to place 100% of my trust into, the better it is for me, my users, and actually society as a whole in the long run. So, you might ask, then why am I even remotely considering Unity if the source isn't open. Because Unity is still appealing. That's why. I voice my concern now rather than never -- were I to just shut up and subscribe to UE4 -- for the possibility that Unity Tech. cares and possibly internally thinks to themselves, "look, some people want this, good thinking, we agree; in fact, we're going to open it up!" I have no axe to grind beyond solid intentions.

 

As a community of developers extremely varied in scale / experiences and game development. We all agree some things need to change, but a lot of what you suggest seems to be from a point of personal need. Not what's good for the community and Unity as a whole or even possible, I'm pretty sure Geomerics would be pretty annoyed if Unity gave their secrets away.

All I can say is best of luck, I doubt any of what you say will come to fruition and to me a lot of it doesn't make any practical real world sense. But one must try right!?

 

Cars, telephones, personal computers, unrestricted cryptography, and the internet didn't make "real world sense" to many people in those eras either. Hell, it still doesn't to some. Running software compiled from source makes as much real world sense to me as does knowing what ingredients come in packaged food, or as does locking doors to not become an easy victim, or as does expecting privacy in one's home, or as does being able to measure the content purity of gold and not take someone's word for it. Lack of source code, to me, is a real-world cause for concern. It's what greatly contributes to truly ignorant culture around the topic of computer security and growing surveillance, and the nightmare of problems that result from the disconnect. Culture is changing more to see the wisdom of knowing what's in it for computing, and that's a major sign of optimism. Source alone is far from perfect. There's still a great deal of trust placed in the chain -- compilation, lack of viruses, even the CPU -- but it's the only road worth traveling.

You're perfectly welcome to be concerned with just the end game products. I don't blame you. Aye, all we can do is try. And surely best of luck to you as well. Sincere regards!

 

Is this thread the same as the others regarding matching UE4's price point? Regarding the source angle, it's a nice-to-have but not a must for me, personally.

 

One last thing as I keep saying I'm all FOR source code, it's uses can be debated and how much benefit it is can vary. Whether it's possible or practical due to 3rd party licensing is another thing. Also I don't live with a tin foil hat on my head ..

 

No. From what I saw in a couple other threads, I had some very separate things I wanted to mention about my thoughts on Unity vs. Unreal, stated in the original post. For instance, I'd love if Unity were to double-down and expand on being as approachable to cross-platform simple GUI software (like Xamarin) as it is to gaming. Naturally, people focus on the pricing though.

Edit: actually, not sure, it's probably similar to others about the pricing thoughts.

 

If it's a bug in their engine that impacts your ability to ship and/or provide an optimal user experience then it's your problem too. It may morally be their responsibility, but standing on principle doesn't pay the bills.

 

It also doesn't get the bug fixed. I've seen it mentioned in a few other threads in the past that Unity still has some fairly old bugs that have managed to escape detection so far. It'll be interesting to see how UE4 fares with so many eyes looking at the source.

 

There's so much discussion about engines that I think it's a complete wonder that any actual coding gets done

 

Please search the other threads on this exact topic for a multitude of opinions and arguments.