Unreal Engine 4

I suppose we have been back and forth on this topic and I'm going to surmise and be honest, please note this is not to be misconstrued as an attack at Unity neither does it mean I'm not going to continue with Unity. In essence UE4 has done a lot right, which Unity should take notice of.

I would like to mention, it's great that Unity are listening.

Unity 5 vs. Unreal 4:

I'm going to leave Unity 4 Pro out of this, because as of the moment it doesn't really compete with UE4. Whether we are talking in terms of monetary value / feature sets or performance. Please anyone, feel free to disagree add your own 2c as I'm going by my perspective in regards to what we are doing as we all are.

Let's talk money

A hot debate no doubt and something that can really only be answered by Unity, you know what profit margins are available. Unity knows how they can restructure pricing formats, I'll keep this short and sweet there needs to be a way of cutting the cost of some feature packages to at least remain somewhat competitive. Even if it ends if with Unity Free / Unity Pro and Unity Extreme, Extreme being the full blown suite of all your latest and greatest + middleware like UE4 are doing. In UE4 it costs about the same as high spec BMW + royalties if anyone is asking.. So Unity definitely has a +1 up on UE4 for that..

Also a debatable point is upgrade costs, you should not hold back features due to upgrade costs. Even if you base upgrade costs on support!. If you ditch support for a cycle then it's a good enough reason to upgrade. It's up to the user whether or not he want's to upgrade..

Feature Sets

I should add a little chart in here, but anyway:

Pro's for Unity 5:

• PBR
• Enlighten
• Audio Mixer
• Level streaming? (Depending on what you're doing)
• 64-Bit Editor
• Reflection probes

UE4 has all the above besides audio mixer and enlighten in the $19.00 edition.

Bonus features in UE4:

• Cascade Visual Effects
• Material Editor
• Blueprint
• Matinee Cinematics
• Advanced Post and Anti Aliasing (TXAA)
• Better terrain system

So Unity isn't that far away, although many of the features in UE4 would be VERY handy. I'm not familiar with 2D but from what I've heard Unity is pretty good in that respect.

Bugs and feature releases

This area needs some attention, we are pro users and can afford the support monthly costs although as of the moment I haven't been inclined to pay out for it. No way should a GUI take that long, bug fixes should be sorted in the space of a month not a year I'm sure people on this forum can give you MANY examples of this. Try and become a little more pro-active in this area, I'm sure a big portion of Unity Pro users want quality over quantity.

Beta Access

I know a few developers working with pretty large publishing outlets, myself included that would rather have a beta than put up with constant issues due to Important, non graphical, nothing fancy engine operation features lacking like the 64-Bit editor as a prime example.

Some of us NEED that Beta access, it's a shame when we don't really want Beta it's more of a need.

Final Thoughts

I have a team of 15 now, 10 of them have been pulled onto a FPS project with Unreal 4. I'm with a skeleton team developing this game in Unity because of two reasons: My staff were constantly asking why we are using Unity (Reason is I did a concept by myself in Unity and loved the workflow). The other is our financiers will not sign off for any more licences, neither will they sign off for a support contract and give me the ultimatum that if the Demo isn't successful then I switch engines never to look back.

UDK released their 64-Bit editor in May 2010, not Unreal engine.. UDK! It's hard to expect the A, AA, or AAA sector to take Unity seriously when functionally is severely dated and often times half baked. Why have you been working on Enlighten when there's a ton of other things that needed to come before it?

The Indie market is 50/50, other sectors still don't seem too keen either. Expand Unity's horizons and money will come along with it.

I want to finish off on a lighter note, Unity's workflow is incredible. You guys do a great job at sensing what an Indie needs for rapid development. Just look at all these post's we obviously care enough to spend time posting about it. Indifference is the most worrying situation to be in..

 

I disagree with the first sentence, because of the second, and then disagree with the last bit too

When it comes down to it, games are software, and software revolves around programming - there is no getting around that. Unity's component based structure may take a little longer to get your head around, but once you do, the structure is internally consistent. Unreal's is not - some aspects of an object in a game are made of components, others based on inheritance.

Even if you know C++ well, there is a significant overhead to picking up Epic's usage of it in order to write gameplay code. Blueprints are great but they are not enough to write complex gameplay code - you *could*, but forcing yourself down that route will lead to as much time taken as if you just did the more complex behaviors in C++. It's not something that is limited to 'advanced development', and should not be dismissed as such

I used UE4 for about 1.5 months, and didn't get as far as I did within 2 weeks of picking up Unity. Picking up UE4 and getting stuff on screen and moving around might take no more than a few hours, but for me at least coding in UE4 or using BPs for gameplay *never* felt intuitive in the same way it did in Unity after far less time. In Unity, once you understand that all GameObjects consist of a series of components, and you understand how to access and manipulate those components, then you've got it all! Everything is then merely an extension of that same methodology. Not so in UE4, in order to get to the same place, you need to study the inheritance structure the base classes, and considering their documentation is not up to scratch, that's not a small task

I also disagree fundamentally that C# is equally hard to pickup as C++, and *especially* C# with Unity which is essentially a subset of the complexity that a standalone C# program has. There is so much more depth to the C++ language than C#, and to compound the issue, debugging the C++ code in UE4 is difficult due to error message being, generally, complete nonsense, and there are (currently) problems with Visual Studio's intellisense highlighting in the UE4 code meaning you cannot immediately identify whether the code you wrote is wrong, or whether the IDE is simply having a problem resolving some reference or scope issues which turn out to be non-issues when running the game. Those might seem like fairly small issues, but I assure you, it all adds up to making the learning curve substantially steeper than C# in Unity

Going back to your original sentence, just to clarify, I for one would not say that UE4 is 'hard' to learn, but only because I don't personally view learning things in that way as hard or easy... its just about the amount of time it will take to learn - but that's an issue of semantics. I'm sure that someone would say something that takes 6 months to learn is harder to learn than something that takes 1 month to learn, so if that's why people say it, then it is not a fallacy

 

We need more of this kind of posts, posts with real world experience.

 

Checkboxes.

This is why Sweeney said "We succeed when you succeed" and not "Prepurchase an upgrade from UDK to UE4 now, we'll deliver it in 6 months, then we'll talk to you again in 2 years". Business model matters.

UT gets nothing from delivering to existing Pro users. Their only real income comes from converting non-users and free-users into Pro users. After that, we are irrelevant (until the next looooong upgrade cycle ends). Even the subscription, which at first I thought would change something is instead rent-seeking: you pay every month, commit to keep paying for a year, and likely get absolutely no updates the whole time. This is incomparable to paying $19/mth to participate in an open development model.

UT aren't evil. They didn't fall into this business model entirely open-eyed. But it is where they have found themselves. There are plenty of solutions. Epic have even drawn up a blueprint for them.

 

That is your personal opinion and not a fact. There is almost nothing that you have to do in C++ that you cannot do in Blueprint besides the very arbitrary. Should you? That's a matter of personal opinion. The first stage of working with Blueprint is for rapid prototyping which later on one should refactor into C++ to trim down the complexity of the Blueprint graph. Blueprints are inherently slower in performance than straight code, but it's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Your points are one of personal taste, more of focus on the left brain vs the right brain and not the advice anyone should take before trying out the system on their own time.

One should test out as many systems at their disposal before making a proper a decision on what is best for them and their workflow.

Unity has many positives, but it has just as many negatives.

 

I know it's a long drawn out post, but did you miss the bit where I said you need to stop holding back functionality due to upgrade costs? I understand why they do it and I've never said Unity are evil. I think they need to re-think their business model as that won't fly anymore..

 

It's not so much a rethinking, it's more a committing to what they have previously said http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/03/08/short-cycle-development/ in that post it talks about releases every 2 months, I think even if we count with minor releases that may or may not add much, I don't believe they have really hit the 2 month release cycle they were going for.

Not that 2 month release cycle in these day an age is something that I would consider proper or smart honestly, everyone is connected online (not literally OFC) these days, there is no reason not to release patches every other day.
In this day and age where downloading and uploading a patch is basically one click away (if it isn't, you're giving space for human error), it is sad to see so many developers that still haven't embraced the power that comes with that, now this isn't a magic bullet OFC, you can also introduce problems, however those problems are so much easier to track when they are introduced the day after you pushed one or two patches, with one or two minor fixes, than in the day of a major release that has dozens of new features, and thousands of bug fixes. This before we even consider the enormous value that "instant" user feedback brings.

 

I think it can, but I'm not sure it's worth paying nearly 79 times as much for the initial keep-forever version.

It doesn't REALLY have Enlighten - if you want to say UE4 has Enlighten, you also need to adjust the cost to include whatever its licensing is.
But all the other extras are nice. It's a trade-off, really. I'm not sure I'd use most of the stuff UE4 has over Unity, and I'm quite happy with
what I can do with Unity anyway.

Hell, yes. Subscribers, which they implied they have a crapton of, should be funding a little extra development for them. So hire some dang developers to fix years old bugs!

The GUI is what's making several people I know of stay away, because they can't take UT seriously. Some bugs I expect to be fixed within a week too, like show-stoppers with deprecated/broken features (which they sometimes have managed).

Some other tools I use (in the same price range as Unity) have open betas. Just sign up and activate with an existing account, no vetting of users because they want quality feedback only. The sheer volume of users should sort out that anyway. If you bring in enough people who don't need to do anything special to have a look at a beta, I'm sure they would get a higher volume of valuable feedback anyway.

That's how many feel. It's a nice workflow. It would be a shame to have to drop it and relearn something after all this time invested because of bugs.

This is the other big joke about Unity. I've shed all my 32-bit software years ago (ALL of it!), and don't want to be held back by anything. 64-bit is about new instruction sets too, not just memory, although that happens to be a problem for some big projects too.

 

I don't understand why people are comparing UE4 with Unity5. Current state/value vs Future state/value. Is it based on the assumption that Unity will change drastically with those listed new features and Unreal won't move an inch ahead?

Yes, we have an idea of Unity's upgrade process - that they tend to ignore bugs and postpone bugfixes and stuff in exchange for new shiny features and other upgrade-encouraging tactics,... But we can't really predict how different Unreal 4 will be in 6-12 months (whenever U5 is released).

Disclaimer: I'm not here to hate Unity or promote Unreal. Stuck with and liking Unity for the moment.

 

Unity 5 is close enough that it's relevant, and I guess it's unavoidable to include promised features against UE4 when both have an actual non-beta release half a year away. I also think it's been useful to make these comparisons in public - it got many UT employees to reply, didn't it? They're all very well aware of people's opinions now. Hopefully some form of change comes about as a result. Even if it only makes them release nightly builds to Pro users and expose the REAL issue tracker, that would be an improvement.

 

Whether it's committing or re-thinking, something has to change. Yes, spot on a patch release would be excellent..

 

Sure, those are fair points. I did point out that you can, of course, do it all in Blueprints, as I did. I tried both ways for enough time that I feel like my opinion could be of benefit to this discussion - if I didn't then I wouldn't have said anything.

When reading this thread, there is far too much speculation and very little actual personal experience - that is mine, and the same goes for another programmer I was working with. We both tried out replicating gameplay functionality using both cpp BP methods, switching round so we both got a chance to try both sides out and see what worked best, and did so for a longer period of time than the engine has been in public release so far.

We did not find any simple way to refactor BP code into C++ code (perhaps that has changed in this latest release). There is no guaranteed 1 to 1 relationship between BP nodes and C++ methods and functionality, we found it difficult to attempt to use the same method for solving a problem in one as in the other. This lead to a situation where, we were able to pull off similar functionality in around the same speed when using either - only of course, when BP's grow to a very large size they become difficult to follow and a lot of time is spent rearranging nodes.
So, adding time to refactoring BP functionality into C++ adds to the total implementation time, which is one of the reasons I say that forcing yourself down that route will take just as long in the end.

My take on that is, BPs are meant for simpler functionality game specific code - core gameplay is better suited to C++, as well as the fact you point out that C++ executes faster. I am in no way suggesting no one should try it. I am merely adding my experience to the discussion, as it could be useful information.

I also think that, while of *course* Unity has it's downsides, in my opinion this is not one of them.

 

I fully agree. 64-bit editor, level streaming (which is actually a fix of async load stutter) are essential. I would far prefer to use beta quality software, than to crash every 30 minutes due to out of memory errors.

Couldn't agree more that the upgrade model needs to go.

 

This is so completely off-base, it barely deserves any response...

Pro users are actually pretty critical to them. I obviously can't speak for them, but if you just sit down and do the math.. Pro users ARE subscribers, but at a discount and for the long term which are free from any restrictions to their license use (expect for maybe gambling or other contract obscurities) with an added benefit of zero royalties. That is pretty damn awesome... it can't possibly be that difficult to understand.

Pull your big boy pants up for a minute... Epic was pretty hostile in general towards independents 'till about a week ago.. I guess we're all suppose to forget about that now that they're targeting us with results produced from AAA teams that had multi-million dollar budgets and saying "hey, you too can do this now for only $20 a month!"... highly doubtful.

 

I think in the end visual programming is still programming, so for the most part it will run into the same problems that programming has, with the difference that normal programming languages have evolved over decades (and in all walks of life) to more easily allow for vast and varied projects, static, abstract, sealed, override, partial, constructors, readonly, public, private, structs, inheritance, protected, internal, generics and so on. This are all things that while not necessary (arguably), where invented overtime to facilitate software development, and the many challenges that come with it.
So I think it's safe to say that while BP may very well be capable of doing what c++ is capable of, it isn't just a preference thing, much in the same way using c++ instead of c# or f# isn't just preference things, there are very real advantages to each one.

Not being the friendliest is not the same as being hostile, they had UDK, which from a license standpoint wasn't awful IMO, you had to pay 99$ to publish, and you paid 25% royalties (after of what you earned, not of price of sale), and only after you did 50000$ in revenue, obviously it pales in comparison to UE 4 (even just from a license standpoint), but is hardly being hostile to indies, especially when allegedly they were willing to sell you a normal license after you had release the game (as in you bought the license and you didn't pay more royalties). In fact for a lot of people starting from a license standpoint UDK was more friendly than unity pro. OFC if you already had a successful company, and are working on a game that is guaranteed to make nice sales (like say if you're blizzard doing heartstone), obviously unity pro is a far better deal (even versus the UE 4 license), but for most people starting, UDK was not hostile towards indies.

If you want to talk about hostile you have crytek, now that is something that I would consider hostile, you had to prove yourself to them by using their tools, that you were worthy of a license, if they didn't like what you were doing they wouldn't give you a royalty based license (you could always buy a normal one I guess), and they were also hostile in their forums. Which I bet is mostly the reason why the 9.99$ of crytek saw a lot of who cares from people, since their track record with indies isn't all that amazing (they had promised a royalty based license for all indies years ago when they release the SDK).

 

Yeah something like Level streaming and 64-bit editor should belong in 4.x

 

Thanks for your post, I fully admit I am still in the very early learning stages of UE4, but my argument was from a beginners point of view. I came in with an open mind, watched all the video tutorials, poked around their forums and online docs a bit, then started playing with the demos, and then created my own project. I think this is a fairly normal approach to learning a new engine.

Throughout that process it felt very friendly, and I still have not run into significant roadblocks but as I delve into more complex topics I can see them rearing up as I would expect(getting more into c++). At this point i have to ask myself, would a beginner say screw it and pickup Unity and do all those same steps again or would they keep going with UE4? I'm not afraid of c++, in fact I would like to learn it since it is one of those languages I skipped, but I may not be typical in that regards.

What I am finding however as I delve deeper is mostly encouraging however. I did not expect UE4 networking to be good for anything I wanted to do, instead I am finding it offers the features of uLink + more(area of interest culling, level streaming) which is a $500+ package per project in Unity.

Anyways my point in short was I feel UE4 has a great beginner intro, not how hard it is to use once you get beyond that. As a total beginner you can easily import some meshes, add some interaction to them via Blueprint, and script your basic level gameplay. For learning coding they give you some very readable and great examples like the tower defense game(honestly you could just tweak this game and end up with a nice looking TD).

 

Epic Games was never hostile to independents. As a matter of fact they actually flew out a lot of modders/indies out for training back in the Unreal Tournament days. They regularly had 'make something unreal' contests. also they helped publish indie game (Tactical Ops). I used to be very active in their community myself however my team made free mods right before UDK.

Look at that kickstarter, City of Titans. Epic helped them secure a UE4 license and everything quite a bit before ue4 was public

 

Their make something unreal is pretty awesome as well, spawned off some nice games.

 

It's good that you are not afraid of C++. There seems to be a bit of a disdain for learning the language among some of the members here, but they soon forget that almost every professional engine today (including the one they are using Unity) was built in C++. I started out with C and Assembly back in the late 80's where the hardware we had paled in comparison to what you could could achieve if you were lucky enough to work on an NES title. I think some people old enough here might remember how much of a struggle PC games were in the beginning.

There is a difference the size of a canyon between learning C++ and designing an engine from the ground up that would compete with UE4. The keys to the kingdom have been given to you with UE4 and the C++ you will have to master will be the Unreal way of going about things. As you grow with the language you may decide to edit core parts of the engine, but you will never be starting from anything even remotely approaching a blank slate. You have years and years of research and millions of dollars worth of proprietary technology at your fingertips for the price of a Friday night pizza dinner. How can one even fathom the same can be said with Unity being a closed system?

From what I can see, from some members, primary distinctions are being made out of comfort/crutch reasoning rather than facts - C++ is harder to learn than C# etc.

That attitude will doom you in this industry as a developer. Broaden your horizons, attempt to tackle the world's most important language in CG (for the foreseeable future) and even if your business ideas do not pan out - you made yourself a much more expensive commodity than your C# peers come hiring time.

 

Awesome, sounds like they have improved a great deal in that respect then. I never felt like I got beyond the beginner stage, even after a month and a half which is part of my criticism in a way, as it was only about a week or so when starting out with Unity that I stopped needing to follow tutorials examples.

I stand by what I said but I'm glad you've found it to be more friendly. To clarify my position, I'm only considering it on terms of completing a releasable game, so the beginning of course factors into it but also taking into account the long term, and how that matches up in comparison to Unity. I'd be interested to know how your experience holds up after a month or two, and how that then compares to the position you were in after the same amount of time in Unity

 

fixed.

because in today's market, being an 'expensive' commodity is not a good plan for job security.

 

That is even putting it mildly they S*** all over a lot of little guys/gals hopes and dreams when they never lived up to their promises on an answer regarding an actual structure for independent licensing. They regularly treat community members in a humiliating and condescending fashion as if they are Gods walking among men. A lot of good people with very interesting ideas wasted a substantial amount of time with CrySDK.

That is just for the free SDK. I won't even bother posting what I know firsthand from companies that have actually licensed the tech as it would break trust, but it would make you gag.

Besides I firmly believe it will be a cold day in hell before they release the source of the engine with terms that compete with what Epic is offering. Even if they did I would never trust that they wouldn't immediately change the deal whenever they felt like it.

Oddly enough if Unity doesn't open up source and neither does Crytek - they will be competing against each other a lot more so than UT vs Epic or Epic vs Crytek.

Interesting times ahead.

 

Yes, I mentioned release cycles, but you're partly missing the point. The problem with pursuing checkboxed functionality rather than solid, bug-fixed functionality is that while it attracts users, it doesn't keep them. I gladly chose Unity because of the features it had. Only after a couple of years of development (and an upgrade cycle) have I discovered that many of those checkboxed features are buggy. But I have already paid. Twice. I have no source code, so I am entirely dependent on UT for bug fixes. Unity makes nothing from my sales though, so it makes no difference to them if I have to remove Cloth physics from my game and it looks a little crappier (or whatever some other bug might affect someone's released game). They care about us morally of course - as I said they aren't evil - just that their priorities are skewed by their business model towards adding ever more bells and whistles that sound good on paper but need not deliver on the details.

 

I wonder if this Unreal Engine pricing will trickle down into other game engines such as

Game Maker Studio $799 srsly?!!
and
Adventure Game Studio

which are also highly expensive for what they do!

Adobe Flash used to be very expensive too. But who uses that anymore? That's sooooo 2010. (Their subscription model is now about $75 a month)

 

The price of GM Studio at the high end is obscene and that is unfortunate because it is a good way to get beginners with no real tech experience into a much more relaxed environment for making games.

I bought my little nephew a license for GM Studio Professional and am interested to see where he goes with it. He is learning from tutorial videos on YouTube at a pretty rapid fire pace for being only 7 years old. In regards to their pricing don't forget though if you pay the full $799 you get access to their, "super spectacularly mind blowing speed increases" YoYo Compiler...!

 

ok, I can understand this to a degree... but I disagree that it doesn't keep them. The sole purpose of adding the features and ease to develop is just for that very purpose... make it ease saves time. Sure there's down sides, like having to wait for them to correct a problem... but if you are that good at development, there's nothing holding you back from wrapping your solutions is there?

 

This is what Unity needs to improve on, not shiny new features. I still have bugs for over two years reported with no reply.

 

Adventure Game Studio is free and you can get the source code for free.

 

Ummm... Adventure Game Studio is *free* (and Open Source; Artistic Licence v2). As for GM:S... well, I'm looking at a free compatible alternative right now, ENIGMA. http://enigma-dev.org/ - pretty rough and ready right now, but usable for 2D games.

 

Yeah it will be interesting to see, I plan on giving it a serious go and actually release a short game, but until they implement a fully baked UI that is difficult.

When I started Unity a few years back it was basically a choice between UDK and Unity. I downloaded UDK, tried it for a couple days and tossed it. I tried Unity and loved it.

I'm having that same experience at the moment except loving UE4. I tossed together a couple unique materials that I've been fantasizing about in day 2 of UE. I wouldn't even know how to go about doing it in Unity. Part of that was the nice tutorial set they have on their material editor to teach me about node based shader editing and the other part being the editor itself.

 

Yeah why even license a game engine! just write it yourself!

If Unity is going to add features and advertise them they need to work. It's that simple.

 

Playmaker is designed around FSM paradigm (state patterns). What if you want to do behavior trees with? You can't. Design an entire game around one state pattern is bad design. Your entire game (unless is a very simple game) is a collection of multiple design patterns (observer, singleton, state, etc). Each one tailored for one specific system. Playmaker is good for AI related stuff, other than that is not quite efficient. In that regard uScript is better than Playmaker and gives you more power and freedom.
Blueprints gives you more freedom (you can create BTs, FSMs, etc), you are not locked to one design pattern as Playmaker.

 

Yeah Crytek always struck me as being afraid that indies would make their engine look bad or perhaps they didnt want a bunch of indies bugging them 24/7. Maybe they are going to change that now which is great but I am not interested *personally*

 

it is, i have to admit as well. i'll be using it a lot i think.

 

btw, i asked Chris King (IDV/speedtree) a question to his comment on the UE4 forums about the speedtree lic for UE4..

I asked:

his reply:

will there be something similar for UT5? anyone know?

 

Yeah it's just individuals don't really care much about that - they want to be able to make a game code-free and currently, Playmaker is faster to make a game in code-free.

If we're talking about team based dev and multiple uses, you've got your programmer, you've got your designers, and bp is mostly going to be used for designers in a team environment.

Sometimes having too much power makes it slower to get on with the basics like making a game. How long has Forgotten Memories been in development? do you suppose it would be quicker in UE4 to make it?

One thing Unity has totally nailed is that balance between power and ease of development. More power is sometimes asked for though, sure. But I haven't seen a case where UE4 is more powerful and faster to do. In fact I haven't got a clue how to make a mesh in it or properly customise the editor and I was doing both these things in Unity within 5 minutes of deciding to do so for the first time. That speaks volumes to me for productivity.

Seems to me that there's mostly a vocal minority shouting loudly about UE4 having made nothing in it yet, and I'm still waiting to see if these same people are aware of that beyond playing with a polished demo.

 

I think forum posters are always comprised of the vocal minority, on both sides. Anyways, at this point there doesn't seem to be a lot of discussion of features or pricing and I agree it is down to picking what to work on for the next month and less time f5'ing the forums. The initial thrill of the announcement has worn off and time will tell.

 

You know, there is material enough for the parties involved to lock all threads and move on. Go ahead, Mighty Thor-Hippo, make our day!

 

As a Pro user with some successful games I disagree. The 5% royalty rate for UE would come out to a lot more for me to pay than the price for Unity Pro. It's the one thing that prevents me from looking seriously at UE right now. As a single developer I make just enough from my released games to live comfortably, but not enough to want to pay the significantly higher cost for licensing that the 5% would add for me.

If Epic offers a non-royalty up front cost for a reasonable amount then I might bite, but they don't list prices for that on their site so I don't know.

 

I kinda agree with this.

I think at this point UT should just focus on getting 5.0 out the door but after that there needs to be a re-focusing or re-thinking of what needs to be done.

What I'd like to see is they take a period of time (say 6 months) and just focus solely on bug fixing and polishing with no additional features being added. The only thing they would need to add if they go the faster patching method is a patching system to the editor. Regular patching (weekly) would a terrible idea if we continually need to download the whole editor.

It's too late at this point to open up the source with all the middleware thats currently in the engine unless Unity can work out some sort of deal but I don't think the other companies would go for that.

The two other things I'd like to see are something like the Infiltrator Tech Demo produced in Unity 5. I think that could go along to showing people that Unity is capable of producing AAA stuff. There's a disdain among people when they see a game is made with Unity and that could change peoples opinions. Its typically associated with mobile titles, webplayer or poor games lacking options. Partially because the good stuff doesn't really state they are using it like Eve: Valkyrie, Hearthstone or similar.

The other being figuring out what the hell to do with the mono situation. Either somehow resolving a deal although that seems way to far gone at this point or a deal would probably have been struck by now or figuring out an alternate solution.

May seem like I'm ragging on Unity but I'm really not. I want to be see both UE4 and Unity succeed and be competitive. Competition is only good for people using the engine/s.

I wonder if some folks problem is that they just don't want to use it for scripting game logic.

I had said in another thread that I hated C++ but that seemed a little strong and having played about with it for the past 2 days it isn't so bad. I reckon I might have just been the time I initially picked it up and will probably continue using it now on the side. At the same time though I still don't want to use it for game logic and I'm not interested in visual scripting either. It would be great for low level stuff within UE4 say I'm doing a voxel engine, gravity interaction or whatever but I'd like to see C# or Python etc when just doing scripting.

 

Sorry, but I think you took a worse turn after becoming a moderator. Your post is total nonsense. You are saying people haven't done anything, so they don't know how hard it is to use Unreal, and yet, when people debunk your reasons, you just dodge and point to something else? Or worse, become even more nonsensical?

If you like Unity, that is fine. I like Unity as well. I wouldn't be here if I didn't. That doesn't prevent me from evaluating other engines and recognizing which parts are better. In a giant thread about a new engine, I think, if you are incapable of giving a fair comparison, you shouldn't try to assert your opinion as facts.

Sorry if this seems harsh, but seriously, reading the last few pages was difficult.

 

Why do you think they gave him mod powers... I would be wary, might get banned ;9.

 

I think you win a prize for being the first to throw the moderator card, but you've happily glossed over all the posts where I'm criticising Unity - after being a moderator.

That aside, I thought UE4 was more suited to larger teams before. And now I think UE4 is more suited to larger teams after. Nothing has changed. In fact the more I dig, the more I know that we're not big enough for UE4 yet. If you cast around you'll see that I've said when UE4 makes sense for us I'll happily hire a C++ programmer for it. It simply doesn't make sense, because it *is* harder and takes *longer* to do the same job in UE4 than UT. This is from someone who has had an evaluation since last year but wasn't able to talk about it.

So, how do you make a mesh and modify the editor? Let me know when it's found out. Yes it's a challenge.

Give it a rest, it's wearing thin. I'm awesome at removing spammers though. My view of mod status is that it's reppin' for the people, not reppin' for UT. If you don't want me moaning at them about GC every other day and pushing for Physx 3.3 and pushing for Enlighten (see my post history) that's fine by me.

 

Despite the fact that he's right (on some points) I do agree with you. Unless you are targeting larger complex games, Unity is more than enough to get the job faster*.
PS: By faster I don't necessary mean easier! ^^

 

I've edited because I totally bollocked up the comparison, so feel free to re-quote. But anyway, I'm not inexperienced or anything, but I feel jobs get done much faster in Unity, sorry if this annoys people but that's my 100% honest opinion having used both. But I do not think Unity would offer the same gain to a larger team, in fact it would just be the same.

I feel the UE4 workflows suit a staff member per area, allowing much more effective team based workflows but at cost of obviously, having a decent team. In Unity, there's room for improvement in many areas for larger-team based workflows, not least a 64 bit editor but I'm waiting to see what U5 brings before commenting on that.

I think what people are focussed on heavily is the visuals, and UE4 looks gorgeous. But I'm focussed on how much work I've got to do at the end of the day.

 

Hippocoder is a respected community member and now Moderator. Please refrain from attacking him simply because he is a Moderator. He is doing his job just fine. He still has the same right as everybody else to express his personal opinion.

 

You make a strong emphasis on work load and how long it takes to produce something...

However, some things take longer to accomplish in Unity vs UE4.
Other things take longer to accomplish in UE4 vs Unity.
Some things JUST SIMPLY WORK in UE4 without any effort on your part (mostly graphical candy).

I'm not sure what kind of projects you're working on, but they'd have to be pretty simple if they're not utilizing any of the advanced tools in UE4 that make it faster for certain things (most of which naturally work out of the box)

 

Well yeah, if you want out the box gorgeous everything for the types of games I do then CE is the best engine. Look at the ocean / post fx and shaders for geez sake, it's beautiful and yet I wouldn't touch it with your extendedly long barge pole ..

 

I'm pretty sure UE4 is WORLDS easier to understand and use than CE3 lol...The first time I opened up the CE3 editor I remember thinking "Wow this looks pretty..." and after that faded the thought was replaced with "Now wtf do I do?"

UE4 actually feels very familiar coming from Unity. There are some differences of course and it'll definitely take some work to familiarize myself with certain things.

CE3 doesn't even look better tbh...it just depends on the artist. Unity would look almost just as good if you took the time to implement all of the same graphical features.