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As a Unity user emphatically sharing these frustrations, I'd be really curious to hear from long-time Unreal devs whether the grass really is greener on the oth

As a Unity user emphatically sharing these frustrations, I'd be really curious to hear from long-time Unreal devs whether the grass really is greener on the other side. How's Unreal's - API stability? - Editor stability? (I have some old experiences of it being quite crashy too, and you know, C++ ...) - Backwards compatibility and upgradeability?

rr_aa 6y ago
For having used both Unity and Unreal, Unreal does crash often. Unreal can also become very frustrating very fast if you are going for anything different than a standard fps or third person game, and I percieve it as being extremely bloated compared to Unity. The force of Unity lies it its modularity and flexibility, in my opinion.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  I hear that sometimes but what stops people from using unreal with just actors and custom components and pretending it’s unity with c++? Lack of documentation? Does the engine actually get in the way?
gfxgirl 6y ago
I am also curious to know. I have no Unreal experience but some Unity experience. Have only made a few hackathon level games and plugins. Unity seems amazing to me. It's like a game engine editor creation system. Every game needs custom tools and they are relatively trivial to create in Unity from small, just create a struct and get a UI in the inspector, to add a few lines of code and get a custom control for your data, to entire plugins with multi-window UIs etc. And, at least for my use cases I can do this live. I don't need to exit the editor, recompile the editor itself, and then re-run which seems to be the Unreal way? Unreal devs tell me they don't need any tools. They just use what's built in. That makes no sense to me. Every game I've ever worked on (15 shipping AAA games over 30 years) required custom tools unless you wanted to subject your designers to lots of rote data input. I'm sure there are some subset of games where you just fill out a world with 3d objects and use the built in systems as is but that seems like a very limiting subset. What is that experience like in Unreal? I know at least one indie dev what was on Unity, switched to Unreal for one project, and is now switching back to Unity. I know another that was on Unity and switched to Unreal. They haven't shipped yet so not sure what their experience is. Both are small teams, 5 to 10 people. Neither has shipped a hit title.
- Impossible 6y ago
  I think when people say they use what's built in, they mean they don't have to purchase anything from an asset store, and possibly mean they don't have to use any external free or open source libraries. Writting tools specific to your game probably counts as using what is built in.
cowboysauce 6y ago
I've used both Unity and Unreal in a professional capacity. The best way to describe Unreal is that is has a specific way that things should be done and once you stray from that, it gets painful. But a lot of the time, you don't know what that way is. Unreal is extremely powerful, but horribly documented. You know the blueprint editor? The same APIs are available for your own use if you want to make a similar graph editor, but you're on your own. You're best bet is generally to look at the editor source or a plugin that uses the APIs that you're interested in. That really applies to most of the API. If you want to use it, the documentation is generally of little to no help. Blueprints can easily call C++ functions, but the opposite is extremely painful to the point that you shouldn't do it if you have any other options. But it's incredibly annoying to see that there's a blueprint function that does exactly what you're looking for when you're working with C++. If you're lucky, the BP function will actually be implemented in C++ and you can figure out the actual class name and call it directly. If not, then you'll either have to rewrite that functionality in C++ or attempt the aforementioned horror of trying to call into a blueprint from C++. Blueprints are powerful, but they quickly become convoluted when doing non-trival things. If I have a blueprint function with more than ten nodes, I'm itching to rewrite it in C++. Doing things like loops and complex flow control is just so much easier and compact in C++. Need to set a couple of variables? Enjoy having that take up half of your screen. Did I mention the lack of documentation? It took me an embarrassingly long time to write some code to figure if a targeting reticule widget is over a specific point in the world. The relevant functions were vague on exactly which coordinate space they use. It took a while to figure out that when one function projects a world location onto the screen, it actually means the viewport. While the widget absolute positions are actually relative to the overall window/screen, which matters in the editor because the viewport doesn't take up the screen and there's UI scaling on top of that. Unity's documentation is great compared to Unreal. It also has the benefit that searching for most things will generally bring up a relevant forum post somewhere. There's also only one way to do things in Unity. You don't have to deal with trying to find out something for C++, only to have all your results be about blueprints.
caribousoup 6y ago
Unity editor is more stable. Unity editor is more performant. UE4 is easier to work with in the long run. I find that Unity is just missing stuff, or has half-baked solutions that change. UE4 already has this stuff included as core product. Unity is more approachable, has better docs, but slowly falls apart. UE4 is less approachable, has worse docs, but becomes better to work with over time. But, it all depends on your use case, and what you need out of which tool. I have worked in Unity 4/5, UE4, Source, and Source 2 as of recently with the HL:Alyx tools. Unrelated side not: Source 2 tools are pretty slick! But they don't have general licensing yet... if they announce that, my next project might be in Source 2 instead of UE4. Something about that Quake/HL legacy code that is always more comfortable than Unreal.

rr_aa 6y ago

For having used both Unity and Unreal, Unreal does crash often. Unreal can also become very frustrating very fast if you are going for anything different than a standard fps or third person game, and I percieve it as being extremely bloated compared to Unity. The force of Unity lies it its modularity and flexibility, in my opinion.

gentleman11 6y ago
I hear that sometimes but what stops people from using unreal with just actors and custom components and pretending it’s unity with c++? Lack of documentation? Does the engine actually get in the way?

gfxgirl 6y ago

I am also curious to know. I have no Unreal experience but some Unity experience. Have only made a few hackathon level games and plugins. Unity seems amazing to me. It's like a game engine editor creation system. Every game needs custom tools and they are relatively trivial to create in Unity from small, just create a struct and get a UI in the inspector, to add a few lines of code and get a custom control for your data, to entire plugins with multi-window UIs etc. And, at least for my use cases I can do this live. I don't need to exit the editor, recompile the editor itself, and then re-run which seems to be the Unreal way? Unreal devs tell me they don't need any tools. They just use what's built in. That makes no sense to me. Every game I've ever worked on (15 shipping AAA games over 30 years) required custom tools unless you wanted to subject your designers to lots of rote data input. I'm sure there are some subset of games where you just fill out a world with 3d objects and use the built in systems as is but that seems like a very limiting subset. What is that experience like in Unreal? I know at least one indie dev what was on Unity, switched to Unreal for one project, and is now switching back to Unity. I know another that was on Unity and switched to Unreal. They haven't shipped yet so not sure what their experience is. Both are small teams, 5 to 10 people. Neither has shipped a hit title.

Impossible 6y ago
I think when people say they use what's built in, they mean they don't have to purchase anything from an asset store, and possibly mean they don't have to use any external free or open source libraries. Writting tools specific to your game probably counts as using what is built in.

cowboysauce 6y ago

I've used both Unity and Unreal in a professional capacity. The best way to describe Unreal is that is has a specific way that things should be done and once you stray from that, it gets painful. But a lot of the time, you don't know what that way is. Unreal is extremely powerful, but horribly documented. You know the blueprint editor? The same APIs are available for your own use if you want to make a similar graph editor, but you're on your own. You're best bet is generally to look at the editor source or a plugin that uses the APIs that you're interested in. That really applies to most of the API. If you want to use it, the documentation is generally of little to no help. Blueprints can easily call C++ functions, but the opposite is extremely painful to the point that you shouldn't do it if you have any other options. But it's incredibly annoying to see that there's a blueprint function that does exactly what you're looking for when you're working with C++. If you're lucky, the BP function will actually be implemented in C++ and you can figure out the actual class name and call it directly. If not, then you'll either have to rewrite that functionality in C++ or attempt the aforementioned horror of trying to call into a blueprint from C++. Blueprints are powerful, but they quickly become convoluted when doing non-trival things. If I have a blueprint function with more than ten nodes, I'm itching to rewrite it in C++. Doing things like loops and complex flow control is just so much easier and compact in C++. Need to set a couple of variables? Enjoy having that take up half of your screen. Did I mention the lack of documentation? It took me an embarrassingly long time to write some code to figure if a targeting reticule widget is over a specific point in the world. The relevant functions were vague on exactly which coordinate space they use. It took a while to figure out that when one function projects a world location onto the screen, it actually means the viewport. While the widget absolute positions are actually relative to the overall window/screen, which matters in the editor because the viewport doesn't take up the screen and there's UI scaling on top of that. Unity's documentation is great compared to Unreal. It also has the benefit that searching for most things will generally bring up a relevant forum post somewhere. There's also only one way to do things in Unity. You don't have to deal with trying to find out something for C++, only to have all your results be about blueprints.

caribousoup 6y ago

Unity editor is more stable. Unity editor is more performant. UE4 is easier to work with in the long run. I find that Unity is just missing stuff, or has half-baked solutions that change. UE4 already has this stuff included as core product. Unity is more approachable, has better docs, but slowly falls apart. UE4 is less approachable, has worse docs, but becomes better to work with over time. But, it all depends on your use case, and what you need out of which tool. I have worked in Unity 4/5, UE4, Source, and Source 2 as of recently with the HL:Alyx tools. Unrelated side not: Source 2 tools are pretty slick! But they don't have general licensing yet... if they announce that, my next project might be in Source 2 instead of UE4. Something about that Quake/HL legacy code that is always more comfortable than Unreal.