7 ms·

Ehh. I really hope Unity raises tons of money , and inspires some decent competition here. Unity is the worst game engine, aside from all others. UE4 is a con

by _mkef 6y ago

Ehh. I really hope Unity raises tons of money , and inspires some decent competition here. Unity is the worst game engine, aside from all others. UE4 is a convoluted mess. I've tired several times , but even getting it setup with the C++ build chain is a pain. Godot ( which epic funded recently ) isn't done yet. I'm going to stick with Unity until someone else can build an easy to use game engine. Ultimately Unity does tons of very difficult things, like I wouldn't want to write build systems for a half dozen platforms solo. The asset store is easily Unity's greatest advantage. With about 1000$ and a month you can make a full playable games. I also owe Unity my career. I work far from game design , but Unity taught me how to program. In my dream Valve releases Source 2 , it's just as easy to use as Unity and then game developers have a real choice. Or I get a spare 600k to build something in UE4. I'm a fairly experienced programer and I still can't make heads or tails of it

BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Isn't UE4 free for all use cases under a million dollar of revenue ?
- _mkef 6y ago
  My joke was it takes a much larger team to get anything done in UE4 . I couldn't imagine solo dev on an Unreal Project .
  - tiborsaas 6y ago
    We tried it for a hackathon and after a day or so we got some stuff going. Of course it's a monster engine, but you can learn it as a side project, then after a month you can start building something. I don't see why a solo dev couldn't handle it.
    - _mkef 6y ago
      C++ is hard. The available learning resources for Unity are much better than they are for UE4. I want to add X to my game, I Google it and find ether an asset or open source project within minutes . For my current project I found a half dozen templates to start from. Everything in UDK was ether half done or abandoned. Of course both , or even rolling your own , are fine.
      - tiborsaas 6y ago
        True, we haven't touched C++, only the blueprint editor. It takes you far.
  - zemo 6y ago
    https://www.playomno.com/ https://www.playomno.com/ <-- very impressive solo dev project made in unreal.
goodcjw2 6y ago
Unfortunately , “ease of use” and “one tool fits all” are a pair of conflicting features. Unity really does a fantastic job in this regard. Ultimately, well resourced team may choose to develop their own engine for the flexibility.
jarsin 6y ago
I think unreal is easier to use than Unity because Unreal comes with batteries included. Unity you have to fill all the gaps with 3rd party asset store plugins and deal with all their weirdness etc. Unity's recent changes into everything is a package is a total mess and reminds me of how Rails became a mess after it tried to move everything out of core and into gems.
- TootsMagoon 6y ago
  ^^^This...Can't be understated what a mess Unity is right now. Meanwhile Epic with Unreal 5 is simplifying its pipeline and looks better and better.
- _mkef 6y ago
  I'd rather buy a 3rd party asset for the exact type of game I want to make. You still have to put in effort, but if you find the right assets it can really make things happen faster. The training material for Unity is above and beyond UE4. Any type of game you want to create already has a template on the Asset Store. UE's asset store is still packing .
- m0guz 6y ago
  I remember one Unity developer was talking about how Package Manager will enable them to deliver smaller install/download size on top of easy to update core functionality. This was like 2-3 years ago. Unity 2017 for Win64 download size is around 500MB today, Unity 2020 with Package Manager is 1.7GB
furyofantares 6y ago
I'm a highly experienced programmer and I can't get started with Unity. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now. But I just want to see some code and drive from code. The workflow of starting from objects and scenes in a GUI and attaching scripts is totally foreign to me. And then most of the tutorials seem to be videos, which I have no patience for, with text I can skip around and tailor my learning to my personal needs. And then I have no idea how to predict if any given video or documentation or sample project is out of date. It's extremely frustrating and makes me feel dumb and old.
- virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
  Have you done any game programming before? A heavy reliance on an interactive GUI is very common because there are many things for which you want visual interactivity, such as placing 3D objects in relation to each other. That kind of task is either difficult or impossible to do effectively purely in code.
  - furyofantares 6y ago
    I have. Placing objects in an editor is obviously essential, I agree. I just expect to find code at the bottom driving it, loading the map etc, and it doesn't seem like any example projects or learning documentation for Unity is geared that way. Basically I expect to follow code at the bottom until it loads some asset, which may create a bunch of objects, and register some scripts. Then I return to the code which can then get those objects if it wants.
    - zemo 6y ago
      sure but like, you don't have that expectation of a browser, right? Like to write a web page, you don't create an instance of an HTML parser and call a parse method on some text, and then walk the tree and tell it to draw each element, right? Same deal. Just think of the scene as being a DOM in three dimensions.
- squeaky-clean 6y ago
  I originally had this mindset. Still kind of do. But the way of managing things through gameobjects, serializable components, and the scene hierarchy UI is very beneficial when you have non-programmers working on your game with you. It's annoying when you're a solo dev who wants to handle everything in code, but they're definitely trying to optimize the workflow for a small diverse team rather than for a programmer or group of only programmers. > And then I have no idea how to predict if any given video or documentation or sample project is out of date. 100% agree with this. I wish I could just buy a comprehensive book on an older version of Unity and stay on that as long as I can. But I can't really find much for more advanced Unity that doesn't exist as a video or GDC talk. (though an exception would be the catlikecoding tutorials)

by _mkef 6y ago

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

Isn't UE4 free for all use cases under a million dollar of revenue ?

_mkef 6y ago
My joke was it takes a much larger team to get anything done in UE4 . I couldn't imagine solo dev on an Unreal Project .
- tiborsaas 6y ago
  We tried it for a hackathon and after a day or so we got some stuff going. Of course it's a monster engine, but you can learn it as a side project, then after a month you can start building something. I don't see why a solo dev couldn't handle it.
  - _mkef 6y ago
    C++ is hard. The available learning resources for Unity are much better than they are for UE4. I want to add X to my game, I Google it and find ether an asset or open source project within minutes . For my current project I found a half dozen templates to start from. Everything in UDK was ether half done or abandoned. Of course both , or even rolling your own , are fine.
    - tiborsaas 6y ago
      True, we haven't touched C++, only the blueprint editor. It takes you far.
- zemo 6y ago
  https://www.playomno.com/ https://www.playomno.com/ <-- very impressive solo dev project made in unreal.

goodcjw2 6y ago

Unfortunately , “ease of use” and “one tool fits all” are a pair of conflicting features. Unity really does a fantastic job in this regard. Ultimately, well resourced team may choose to develop their own engine for the flexibility.

jarsin 6y ago

I think unreal is easier to use than Unity because Unreal comes with batteries included. Unity you have to fill all the gaps with 3rd party asset store plugins and deal with all their weirdness etc. Unity's recent changes into everything is a package is a total mess and reminds me of how Rails became a mess after it tried to move everything out of core and into gems.

TootsMagoon 6y ago
^^^This...Can't be understated what a mess Unity is right now. Meanwhile Epic with Unreal 5 is simplifying its pipeline and looks better and better.
_mkef 6y ago
I'd rather buy a 3rd party asset for the exact type of game I want to make. You still have to put in effort, but if you find the right assets it can really make things happen faster. The training material for Unity is above and beyond UE4. Any type of game you want to create already has a template on the Asset Store. UE's asset store is still packing .
m0guz 6y ago
I remember one Unity developer was talking about how Package Manager will enable them to deliver smaller install/download size on top of easy to update core functionality. This was like 2-3 years ago. Unity 2017 for Win64 download size is around 500MB today, Unity 2020 with Package Manager is 1.7GB

furyofantares 6y ago

I'm a highly experienced programmer and I can't get started with Unity. Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon now. But I just want to see some code and drive from code. The workflow of starting from objects and scenes in a GUI and attaching scripts is totally foreign to me. And then most of the tutorials seem to be videos, which I have no patience for, with text I can skip around and tailor my learning to my personal needs. And then I have no idea how to predict if any given video or documentation or sample project is out of date. It's extremely frustrating and makes me feel dumb and old.

virgil_disgr4ce 6y ago
Have you done any game programming before? A heavy reliance on an interactive GUI is very common because there are many things for which you want visual interactivity, such as placing 3D objects in relation to each other. That kind of task is either difficult or impossible to do effectively purely in code.
- furyofantares 6y ago
  I have. Placing objects in an editor is obviously essential, I agree. I just expect to find code at the bottom driving it, loading the map etc, and it doesn't seem like any example projects or learning documentation for Unity is geared that way. Basically I expect to follow code at the bottom until it loads some asset, which may create a bunch of objects, and register some scripts. Then I return to the code which can then get those objects if it wants.
  - zemo 6y ago
    sure but like, you don't have that expectation of a browser, right? Like to write a web page, you don't create an instance of an HTML parser and call a parse method on some text, and then walk the tree and tell it to draw each element, right? Same deal. Just think of the scene as being a DOM in three dimensions.
squeaky-clean 6y ago
I originally had this mindset. Still kind of do. But the way of managing things through gameobjects, serializable components, and the scene hierarchy UI is very beneficial when you have non-programmers working on your game with you. It's annoying when you're a solo dev who wants to handle everything in code, but they're definitely trying to optimize the workflow for a small diverse team rather than for a programmer or group of only programmers. > And then I have no idea how to predict if any given video or documentation or sample project is out of date. 100% agree with this. I wish I could just buy a comprehensive book on an older version of Unity and stay on that as long as I can. But I can't really find much for more advanced Unity that doesn't exist as a video or GDC talk. (though an exception would be the catlikecoding tutorials)