Tried UE4, I'm Back

Just for those considering the two engines. I have to say that UE4 might be a great platform for games if they re of the FPS shooter type but having tried both now I find the following things I like about unity.

1) Royalty Free Pricing. They want me to buy their tool set if I am successful? No problem. Fair deal. UE4 wants a piece of everything I put my hard work into? Problem. They say "we can negotiate" but once you have 2 million capital investment in developing your product you are stuck without taking a huge budget hit.

2) Community there is pretty bad. Questions go unanswered for weeks about simple things. Check threads and most critically the replies on them. Not good.

3) Programming ease. I am a super Java Geek and C# is quite close. I gave up C++ 20 years ago when, coincidentally, I decided ripping my nails out with pliers was uncomfortable.

4) Capabilities. If you want to do an FPS, they have a good toolset. Any other game type seems to make them go "huh? what's an ... Sim --- u --- lay -- tion?" In seriousness unity has more built in or add on capabilities. I don't want to re-nvent wheels, I want to build a product.

Now there are some things i think Unity really needs to work on.

1) Crispness of graphics and rendering. UE4 has them beat here. However, that may be a matter of not getting showcased enough in the gaming world. I think If I finish the product with unity I will leave the splash screen on a bit (or at least a logo) More advertising = better improvements in the tool set.

2) Advertising and partnering with big companies. I think if Unity would partner on some big AAA titles the engine might come out of "thats just a hobby or mobile engine" status in perception. Also I think they need some better showcases where serious money is put in the budget to art improvements.

3) Input controls. Just partner with the guy that wrote Rewired and drop your antiquated input system and get it over with.

Anyway just my opinions. Others are welcome. Especially areas of critical but fair feedback for Unity Developers.

 

It wouldn't surprise me if a number of UE4 developers were on these forums rather than the official. Like ShadowK.

 

I also went to Unreal Engine when it went free, but after having difficulties learning it, I came back to Unity3D and continued enjoying it.

 

I make voxel engines. Unreal Engine isn't built for voxel engines. Unity it is for me .

 

I also tried it when it was free but two things made me come back 1) C++ and 2) Unity price change.

For me ease of use = productivity = time = money.

However, i do agree that Unity should try to showcase more with AAA in some way of another as well of creating a more sexy animated splash screen.

 

You can actually code in C# in UE4
http://www.davevoyles.com/use-c-script-unreal-engine-4-now-courtesy-xamarin/

Surprise-surprise!

 

It's a dead project though. Trying to download it redirects to this announcement.

http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/mono-ue/2015-May/000324.html

 

Oh... didn't know that :O

 

Yep. I didn't know either until I checked just now. I had wondered why I wasn't hearing anything recently about it.

 

I guess I will have to learn C++

When UE4 went free I downloaded it and tried it, but it was too hard.

But I am planning to come back to it in the nearest future

 

unity is awesome for a one man team of for someone that can prototype something alone, much more versatile.
OTOH, unity still need basic features improvement.

 

I wish there was an engine which had graphics and features like UE4's, but ease of use like Unity's.

 

if i had to choose graphics beauty, i'd choose cryengine, then add the unity component system an c#

but i 'd just be happy with a working terrain+vegetation system

 

I like this thread because it makes me feel like I made the right call to go with unity.

 

I tried CryEngine, it's vegetation system is very robust, graphics are top notch. But it's design pattern makes me feel it's a First Person Shooter Maker :/

Correct me if I am wrong on that because I made nothing with CE

 

yes it is, all the Framework is made for a FPS, altough they added more templates i think... and you really need good skills in c++ .
i am currently animating for unity and must say it is awesomely user friendly, CE is NOT when it comes to animations.

 

The whole FPS thing makes me kind of think you used it for a whole 5 minutes, most showcase games aren't anything like an FPS.. Been using it nearly a year now and I can guarantee you're very wrong on that part (Even though the "game framework" makes it look that way)..

Although got to admit on the community thing, there was a thread about "open source" and I mentioned it's great to have but many using Unity have released successful games without it. Well that went down like a led balloon and got a little hostile?? Which seems to be a bit of a re-occurring theme.

Unity need to bring their long in the tooth engine up to date or Epic need to make theirs easier to use. But either way you can make good games in both so have at it.

 

My hope is that it will be easier to give Unity a boost in the graphics department than to make UE4 easy to use.

 

Hiring Sébastien Lagarde is probably one of the steps that Unity took towards this goal.

 

Unity price change? I don't know of any price changes since the free options for the mobile extensions appeared, and that was a long time ago.

I'm working on a mobile 2D game, so my move has been to Cocos2D rather than UE4. I much prefer Unity, but Cocos2D has advantages in terms of build size, performance and price. App Thinning in Unity 5 should help with the first issue. Hopefully Unity 5 performance will be sorted at some point. Making the mobile extensions to Unity Pro free would probably be enough to tip the balance for me to return.

 

Did you miss Unity 5 Personal Edition (the one that has all the PRO features for free)? You can say it's a price change.

 

To be honest the main thing I require from Unity is performance on console hardware, and bags of it. I need that to be top bollocks, then AAA magic will come.

 

Is it problematic to work using Unity for consoles?

 

Not at all. But consoles are fixed hardware, and to make the most of this you really need to push right up to the limit. And if you optimise here, you also optimise for desktop anyway - but with "good practises" ie no waste and no compromise on visual quality. So it's a good position from which to optimise the whole engine.

A desktop baseline so to speak, but without the horrible workarounds mobile demands.

 

That is a feature change, not a price change. It is still the same price for Unity Pro, and there is still a free version.

 

What I need from Unity and mobile HW is complete and fast Direct X 12 / Vulkan compliance.

 

Y'know for all the flack I give Unity on Graphics, me and @hippocoder was discussing this. Blacksmith demo for example to me looks better than some AAA games (like dark souls etc.) Not to say it can't be vastly improved, if going for a bigger game the question is how will it look in two or three years? So go above and beyond, then it's up to us to decide how we scale it down for our lowest common denominator.

In terms of stuff wanted, they really need to get through the basics like dynamic navmesh, a proper AI system (like a BT State Tree), Material Editor, decent looking particles system, Apex support and a cinematic system. Which are common use scenario's which have no excuses not to be implemented, the rest is being worked on.

Finally the Enlighten implementation needs a lot of work still, you can't say FrostBite doesn't make effective use of it. BF4 for example looks amazing.

After that were cooking on gas and the engine would be near enough perfect for the UE4 crowd, I wouldn't say no to them opening up more systems of course.

 

I think Unity's in a situation where I would expect it to be visually competitive by Unity 6 if I'm honest. It does need a considerable amount of engineering before it's really something you sit down with and stop complaining about.

They did change a huge amount with 5, and they're still coping with that.

 

Yeah, the Blacksmith is excellent although my HW can't do it I truly think that in 2 to 3 years I will be targeting Direct X 12 / Vulkan as my minimum and that's kind of exciting when it's original art and original game play we need to be concentrating on and not the intricacies of multi-platform support and the various bugs and limitations of all those platforms.

By the way, that kind of support in mobile makes them effectively mobile consoles you can hook up to any television to. And with a Bluetooth controller? Flash SSD storage is not going to grow larger or cost more either. Windows 10 Universal style convergence in gaming.

 

@ShadowK There was a talk that is on the Enlighten twitter feed by the Unity team, they are making some good progress that is suppose to land in 5.3 for speedups and quality, and it things like more dynamic interaction will follow.

 

I heard, also they are looking into cluster (network) rendering which will be awesome.. Even if you have a spare desktop / laptop with a rubbish GPU just to process it will be an awesome thing to have.

@hippocoder

It's a matter of timing really, if they blast this bit out before everyone moves on again, they are on a winner ..

 

@ShadowK Lets hope they can keep up the legacy trimming like they outlined in the blog(such as legacy deferred perhaps)

 

Yippy Skippy

We just so needed yet another post comparing the 2.

 

These types of topics are useful to people deciding between the two. I don't think there's any reason to try to shut them out, personally.

 

On top of that it's a good idea to keep your ears to the ground.. Every three to six months I spend a bit of time re-evaluating Unity / CE / Paradox / Unreal (Version upgrades) and Engine frameworks. There's usually a lot I learn out of it, like different coding methodology, new engine tech and / or a different way of thinking about a problem.

I do it with General tools as well like Quixel / Substance designer to improve workflows. It's daft to keep your eyes shut in this industry never knowing what's available to you.

 

i second that, threads about new engine/Tools updates are important, that's what made me leave CE and give another try to unity (and to be honest it was also CE going steam)

 

Wonder if Unity will have its own Infiltrator, Elemental, Samaritan, Kite.
No one ever thought they would be releasing the Infiltrator demo.

 

I tend to glance over release notes to determine if anything is worth checking out or not. Then I grab the release and give it a whirl. The latest UE4 release changed how it handled redrawing the UI in the editor and my frame rates with an empty scene went from 20 to 60. I was happy.

 

C++ isn't what bothers me. Learning the engine specifics is the daunting task that keeps me with unity. I could go with blueprint, especially with the announcement for blueprint => native (not that the performance different bothered me anyway)... but still, everything is handled so differently. Unity is definitely the easier of the two to pick up and make something unique.

@Frpmta I was excited for samaritan because I live in America. I need a digital outlet for all of the police brutality in the news. It's a game about some indestructible badass vigilante saving people from a police state. Definitely more fun to play and passable through censors than my idea for being a sniper who looks around for people being abused by authorities.

 

And it is better for Unity if discussed here in a Unity friendly environment. There was a period where lots of threads I was interested in here were getting shut down. That was part of the reason I moved to Cocos2D. I still look in here occasionally, and a bit more often at the moment as a new university year is starting, and that still includes teaching Unity for now.

 

Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't realize this. I'll add an update to the blog post!

 

I've downloaded the UE4 engine previously, but it remains unused on my desktop. I'm a hobbyist. My time is limited. And my enjoyment if what I'm doing is my primary metric for success.

So I'm stuck in a bit if a sunk cost loop. I know what I'm doing in unity already. So I enjoy it more. I then get better at the engine. In a cycle.

It's going to take a massive catalyst to force me out of this rut and onto a new path. Fool that I am.

 

Don't underestimate the challenge in keeping out bloat in a 10 year old project. It's very difficult for any project given that much time and features added to avoid becoming less performant and slower to add new features. So far, Unity has done a great job and hopefully they can keep that trend going. From what I can tell Unity also tends to deprecate less in their API than Epic does in theirs which makes this even harder.

All projects do eventually get to the point where you have to start over with a fresh foundation but I hope we still have many years left before that happens.

 

The main thing performance wise I think Unity kinda sucks at right now is performance for larger scale games. Basically what @hippocoder said.

Epic Games has that down pat from what I understand. However they (Epic) do not have performance down to lower end devices such as Tablets, Smart phones, etc. However they are getting there quite quickly.

I am not going to praise Epic or Unity tech here as recent "Stable" builds for both engines have been rather unstable on both sides of the fence.

 

Sounds like a small chance for some new unheard of engine to rise to the top!

 

I have been looking at various engines and the one that strikes me the most to do that is Atomic Game Engine. Here is why - Official C# and JS support, Open source, Fast in terms of performance, Pretty much bug free, and a great turnaround for features, and a great community.

I really think that smaller engines with smaller development teams are the future. Kinda how unity tech used to be. But that is a rant for another time.

- HeadClot

PS. I am not promoting any engine just stating my opinion.

 

I'll have to check it out at some point, but at a glance the licensing seems to be similar to Unity's though with additional tiers and the caveat that those making more than $5,000,000 will need to negotiate a custom license. Additionally it doesn't have Linux deployment or an editor at this point.

 

Seems many years behind Unity, although the source code is a nice touch. Plus Paradox engine is free, seems more advanced in some areas... Vid at the bottom .. P.S they should really get rid of that "dragon demo" esshh.!

What I want to do over the next 5 years is, get a game out and take one of these "open source" engines like Paradox and turn it into a fully fledged next gen engine.. It's much easier when all the leg work is done for you ..

Source 2 (whenever that get's released) might turn me off that idea..? Not sure we'll see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=97&v=-RbIALRmhs0

 

It has an editor - I am using it right now as for Linux support check their github they have been active in getting their Linux Support up to date.

Also to be fair the days of making 5 million or more on a single game are gone. I would highly recommend getting in on this engine while you can 95 dollars with life time updates is dirt cheap. Still not free but hey devs got to eat somehow.

I would have to agree with @ShadowK - Paradox offers some nice stuff. However they have not yet laid out the "Licensing terms" for Version 2 which concerns me. Same goes for Source 2. Valve did say they want to make it available for "Content Creators". At least that is what I heard. Not trying to take a dump on other engines just that is what I heard.

PS - I am talking to a programmer right now to see if we can get more up to date rendering (PBR) in Atomic. The main dev is working on C# and other goodies.

 

Right, I saw mention of that but I don't consider it official until they have the download up on their site. Until then it may not be stable or necessarily that usable (like in the case with Unity's experimental support).