Unreal Engine 5 = Game Changer

It can. It would take two triangles total to render that.

Still not seeing a response regarding FSkeletalMeshLODModel and procedural generation of skinned mesh assets in unreal 4, by the way.

 

I thought about this too, but realized that it made sense, in an unfortunate way. Unreal has Fortnite and AAA companies to make money from, so indies don't have to pay. Unity doesn't have its own game, nor does it have AAA companies to pay for, so indies have to pay. The only alternative revenue stream I can think of is the Asset Store.

 

I'm not sure you'll get a reply about such advanced usage of UE4's internals around these parts. You are right that a lot of the UE4 internals aren't well documented (if at all). That's the other edge of the full-source-access blade: in many cases, the code is the only documentation.

But hey, at least you can look at it and figure out what it does with the inputs it's given, instead of randomly switching things around in hope it works (which has been my entire past week while dealing with a bug in Unity).

 

The reason why I'm asking that guy about this specific thing is because he claimed that Unreal documentation is superior to unity's, clean, thorough, and if I'm saying that there are troubles, then I must be certainly either incompetent or lying or both. FSkeletalMeshLODModel is something I dealt with before, largely through code dive, however it demonstrates shortcomings of documentation well.

Here are relevant posts:

Additionally they claimed that unreal works flawlessly with C++ and that using C++ with it is easy.

Which is also untrue, and known to anyone who worked with the engine.

Of course the poster in question will be unable to find the relevant information in the docs, because it isn't there, but will refuse to admit anything and will try to keep dodging this topic forever.

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In regards of amiga juggler:

In the past I tinkered with integrating raytraced primitives into unity and integrating them into forward rendering pipeline along with reacting to light and casting shadows:
https://neginfinity.bitbucket.io/2016/04/raytraced-primitives-in-unity3d-part-41-code-cleanup.html
https://neginfinity.bitbucket.io/2016/11/raytraced-primitives-in-unity3d-part-5-distance-fields.html
(I haven't updated my blog in ages, it seems. Maybe I should get a proper hosting)

The juggler can be implemented in the same way:

Spoiler

Boolean CSG body raytraced body based on distance field. Sphere with a torus and a cube subtracted from it.

 

The good old 1h per frame rendering, of course unity can't do that
/s

 

Yeah, I missed those. I work with UE4 too since 2014, the docs are indeed far from perfect even if they have improved since back then. All source is accessible but some parts are obviously more intended to be tinkered with than others. Most Unity packages are suffering from exactly the same problems, amusingly.

 

Note that Mike Acton, who Unity has now not only snatched but made head of the whole DOTS project architecture, has been advocating for DOD for many years, while working on games that were in fact in C++. C++ on its own very much doesn't make things cache friendly, DOTS is merely a DOD stack to make things cache friendly by default.

 

According to one website Unity's estimated revenue is $300mln and Epic is $3bln. There's no way Unity will catch up in AAA quality in next 10 years. That's why they should focus on ease of use, simplicity and stability. In other words - create something else instead of chasing Unreal. I feel like whole urp/hdrp/dots mess is not needed. Imagine how good classic Unity would be if all resources past 2 years would go to improving what's already there. I guess dots ideas could also be there like GameObjects as structs.

Oh btw dots multiplayer was moved to Q2 2021 from Q2 2020:

 

Like I said, this is the situation where I need to step on the rake myself. I need to hit this problem myself.

For example I used to know a guy who spent either 10 or 20 years of his life studying overtones and trying to promote alternate music theory based on them. He wasn't very successful with that....

 

Sure, that's understandable.

True, but in this case this someone was very successful as engine director at Insomniac, his talks were about squeezing as much performance as possible out of the hardware, something that his team was routinely doing.

 

If i am not mistakes this was per year (Annual ) !

 

That's understandable. I can see why Unity wouldn't offer the same revenue share as Epic, or try to out perform them in graphics or open world.

But even then, Unity can offer their customers a much better value for their money. There's absolutely no reason why the dark skin needs to be locked away in a paid subscription. Every other game engine, website, and application offers a free dark mode for its users (I know this isn't a big deal).

I still don't understand why users need to contact a sales person to get access to the engine source code. Almost every other relevant game engine offers their developers the source code for free (UE4, CryEngine, Lumberyard, Godot, Xenko/Stride, etc.).

I think Unity should also have a stable online solution for multiplayer games. UNet just isn't cutting it

And lastly, the most essential Unity features should be integrated into the game engine directly (and open sourced), and not be separate packages that get little to no support (ProGrids).

 

I might as well chime in.
I love Unity. I think it's a great engine especially adding things like Bolt and cool toosl like Game Creator etc....at this point however...Unreal is looking REALLY tempting.
As in after that reaveal I'm really tempted....I am sitting on their tutorial area...i'm lookign at the marketplace...i'm seeing how all the tools are integrated....and I', thinking ok It looks more complicated than Unity to get accustom to it...but once you are........everythign is there.
Giving away of assets from Marketplace each month.
The fact that they are saying up to $1Mill for revenue share is HUGE for an Indie developer.

Not havign to worry about Lod's or having to retopo models so much especially if one are workign on lower poly objects is an absolutely huge time saver.

I have around 20 contacts in game developing either indie or just teaching Unity that all have been thinking of perhaps trying Unreal - now it's done - all of them are going to put some time into giving Unreal a go. As far as just even a marketing success this one video was is really mind blowing.

Those that think this isn't a big deal is wrong in my humble opinion. Unreal just REALLY brought the A game. As a huge Unity supporter I am wondering how Unity is going to stop devs that will make make enough money for them to justify having to buy the commercial version, leaving for Unreal after they wrap up their project for anything other than 2D games. As mobile game devices gets more powerful my guess is they will also start using Unreal more not to mention VR.

I am basically sitting here like this right now:

Happy/Sad

 

This x1000.

 

I posted full details about it in the following thread:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/bug-4gb-limit-to-textures-in-standalone-build.441116/

The issue is how Unity generates files during the build process. For example, my 64bit Windows build had a sharedassets0.assets.resS file that was about 4.5GB in size. The 64bit build would mostly work, but the textures after the first 4.0GB in that sharedassets0.assets.resS file were not accessible and thus appeared broken when running the 64 bit build of the game.

Other people have run into this issue as well. It is not something specific to my project. Any resources that are referenced in a scene will end up written to an asset file during the build process. Each scene has its own file during the build process, and each of those files has a 4GB file size limit. This means each scene is limited to 4GB of total assets. You can go over that limit in the editor, but it will break the build.

The easiest way to understand it is to build your current project that you are familiar with, and then look at the size of each file in your build. Look for the sharedassets0.assets.resS file for example, and sharedassets1.assets.resS (and so on for each scene in the build). If any of those are larger than 4GB, then the build will not work properly.

This is a real blocking issue for a lot of developers. Like I mentioned earlier in this thread, it is only fixed in the beta version of Unity 2020.1. So far, none of the production ready versions of Unity contain this fix.

As long as you keep your scenes fairly small and simple, then you may never see the 4GB limit per scene. But this limit does completely prevent anybody from trying to replicate the UE5 demo in any production ready version of Unity that is currently available. The UE5 demo definitely has more than 4GB of assets in the scene.

 

Just to be clear, this is not about the resources folder at all. There was some confusion about that initially. I was never using the resources folder.

This issue is about assets referenced in a scene. That is something every scene uses, including all of the scenes in all of your projects. Any time you use a mesh, texture, material, script, audio, etc, then you are referencing various assets in your scene. Those things each contribute to the size of the files in your build. If you try to make a large scene in Unity with lots of highly detailed photorealistic 3D assets, then you will start to run into this 4GB per scene file size limit in the Unity builds.

It is a real problem. It affects you once you try to build large detailed scenes in Unity.

 

Every asset in your scene contributes to the file size in your build. Once your scenes get big and filled with detailed assets, you'll suddenly run into this bug. This is one of those blocking issues that game developers can run into late in the development cycle.

The worst part of this bug is that it is often confusing for developers when they into it. The Unity editor never explains the bug. At first, every developer simply assumes they did something wrong or their project got corrupted or something. Each developer wastes days to weeks trying to debug this blocking issue before they realize that this bug exists in every production ready version of Unity in every branch available.

When you run into this bug, the possible work arounds are refactoring to use either additive scene loading or asset bundles. Or wait until the beta version of 2020.1 is eventually production ready.

 

I agree that the Unity community should not fret about UE5. There are lots of fun games released every month with Unity and that will continue for many years no matter what Epic does. Unity is the best engine in a lot of ways. Unity truly empowers small indies teams and solos indies to build some really fun games.

But I do think the UE5 demo shows that Epic is going to be the market leader for large photorealistic 3D games. UE4 already had an edge in that market. UE5 is going to probably increase that lead a significant amount. Every AAA game developer that wants to build a large photorealistic 3D game for the PS5 should immediately consider UE5 over both Unity and possibly even their own in-house game engines.

 

Does it count as something else if you are acquiring random companies (15 companies in the last three years?) to keep your business afloat in the long term through external entities while the main product is on the path of self-destruction? I thought Riccitiello was quite clear about it.

 

I'm still kinda weirded out at how ProGrids has been in preview for 3 years when it's basically required for snapping ProBuilder surfaces. To make matters worse, it doesn't work with Configurable Play Mode.

 

And Unity has literally never existed in that market in the first place.

The biggest problem here for Unity is that it's going to likely take a huge bite out of their archviz share.

 

While that's definitely one way to look at it I wouldn't be surprised if the real goal were to be the company with the engine that requires the most minimal workflow necessary to create a game. You can only increase your workflow capacity to a point before you encounter diminishing returns and I wouldn't be surprised if most companies have hit that point.

Nanite is very good looking but the best part is not having to optimize your meshes while retaining quality.

 

unlikely epic specifically quoted nantite as a solution to CAD importing too, and lumen get them to have direct visualization. Unless you consider unity lightmapper as a solid alternative, and the 4gb limit as a great workflow to make realistic visualization. The irony is that the package for the character the heretic is by itself 1gb, can't have more than 4 character without environment at the same time (yeah the next update cycle would solve that hopefully).

The blender guru guy specifically mention this part as an attractive proposition to jump to real time, when he was streaming his reaction, this will attract a lot of artist that were put off by the workflow or real time of optimizing everything. That's a big crowd of people with high skills. AAA single person indie.

 

Single Developer using Unreal Engine 4. Coming to Xbox Series X. Looks pretty good to me.

 

I get the impression the archivz boat sailed long ago. UE4 is literally free for archviz and they have got the whole asset pipeline thing for architecture going for a while now. They even have drop-in things like archviz-oriented character controllers and product configurators now.

 

If you actually look at job listings, lots of archviz firms look for people specifically with Unity experience.

I think you misread my statement.

 

hippocoder, what is context of this ?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Unity

 

Hail Ceasar
If I recall correctly it was the mutiny of the people that he trusted.
Thus, us "revolting" against Unity I guess.

But I don't agree. The reason people are waving pitchforks is out of love for Unity...they want it to be good...
If Unity plays it right a painting better dipincting what will happen.....

 

Thanks. What doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger.

 

See the Unity logo on the one guys shirt...its basically about everybody beating up on Unity.

 

ALLONS ENFANTS DE LA PATRIE
LE JOUR DE GLOIRE EST ARRIVÉ

Spoiler: Eugène Delacroix

 

This should not be like the downfall of Julius Caesar, though.

Unity can continue to thrive by being the best at Unity's typical strengths.

Unity should not prematurely try to capture markets that Unity is currently not prepared to dominate. Software that has a 4GB asset limit per scene does not get to dominate the large world photorealistic 3D game market.

Unity should still fix issues like that, but game developers still managed to successfully ship thousands of games despite that bug. This is especially true on mobile, since very few mobile game would even need a lot of assets in a scene.

 

Some experts say after see the U5 demo that Unity is dead, I agree, possibly Unity only can survive as a 2D game engine.

 

You made me laugh but I'm curios what experts?

 

Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde

 

I agree. Please share with us who these experts are and a link to where they say this.

LOL, those are some of the older experts out there for sure!

 

This is getting off topic... I fear the discussion might get closed.

 

Hey, do you think they gonna release the Demo for the windows pc users ?

 

Where is the HAHA button?

 

Getting this back on topic...

I've been using Unity since 2009, so I have seen my share of subscription model changes, engine updates, market evolution etc. I've been in engine development from '98 to 2006 myself and even had access to the Unreal source code in 2002...

We've been using Unity in VR since 2013/2014 in automotive, product presentation and, in the recent years, in the medical domain. All in all, we've realized about 250 VR modules in 8 languages.

Our observations in terms of usability, stability and speed is that all 3 domains suffer from a severe regression. We have to optimize more and more to hit our target frame rate, all while trying to get all modules on a stable release (2018 LTS migrating some experienced from early 5.x versions). We see that some improvements and bugfixes are only available in more recent versions of Unity while the LTS version doesn't get the backports.

Our work with Unity accounts for about 25% of my company's income. Even though the Unity part is less than $200.000, we have to pay the pro version. We currently have 4 licenses and cannot scale up and down dependent on the actual need. Sometimes I would like to put an additional developer on a project for a couple of months, but I hesitate because it immediately forces me to a new 1 year subscription.

For me, as a customer, I currently foresee some difficulties if the current way if handling problems remains as is. Unity is not delivering the LTS quality that I, as a software developer for VR experiences on medical devices, need. Unfortunately, Unity is currently better performing on Android devices... So I have to stick with it... But for non-VR experiences and games, I'm definitely going to take a closer look at Unreal.

Unity had so much potential to do things right. But the good stuff doesn't get much love and instead, Unity prefers buying companies that only have a margin impact on most of it's user base.

In this thread I've read that Riccitiello said in an interview that game development and Indies will not be the main source of income anymore. I didn't read the interview itself, but if this is true, then the days of a reliable game engine might come to an end... Unity is current behaviour points into this direction...

 

The answer is yes, Unity 2020 cant compete with U5, lost in features and lost in license mode.

 

UE5 is set for late 2021. We don't know anything about Unity 2021 goals.

 

Is mid of the 2020 and Unity 2020 continues in beta.

 

So are you the one in the red, grey, or blue shirt?