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This sort of engine is a vast new vista of computing possibilities- apart from games and films, the opportunities for such 3D environments in many businesses is

This sort of engine is a vast new vista of computing possibilities- apart from games and films, the opportunities for such 3D environments in many businesses is large (maybe huge!) So as someone who has never touched game dev, what is the learning curve like - exponential? What is "basic competence" once past "hello world"? Thanks :-)

oneoff786 5y ago
A lot of it is learning the engine api and how different parts interact. The basic competence level requires a pretty large body of knowledge. Can you, for example, Extend a character class, give it a skeleton, an animation blueprint with some animation states that read the character state, hook it up to player inputs, make it do some sounds, and add a bit of flair to some actions it can take? Can you build a basic ai behavior tree? Run some line traces to interact with colliders so your guy can interact with an object? Shoot a gun and spawn some bullets that can damage another unit? Etc.
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  You absolutely need those basic skills to be in a position to produce anything on Unreal Engine but its the sheer amount of work that comes after to produce anything of value is where the challenge is in my opinion. It almost certainly involves a dedicated asset generation capacity to generate enough novelty and/or a polished, smooth mechanic that can handle all the edge cases thrown at it. And there's a reason why the UE tools out of the box are so limited and frustrating to use to the point that its impossible to work on anything without opening up your wallet to purchase productivity tools sold on its marketplace and still struggle with the workload. Especially when it requires you to become proficient at C++ because blueprint's value drops outside animation rigging and VFX, both of which Unity's 3rd party marketplace tools have filled rendering UE's initial user friendliness nil. You are stuck with an enterprise tool marketed and suited for large studios but you thought you could make indie games faster than Unity.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    My project is about 5% c++ base classes and GAS setup and 95% blueprint. I have no clue what you’re talking about with productivity tools but that sounds like nonsense. Unity doesn’t even have working networked multiplayer built into it last I checked. Unity requires asset generation as well. Because… how could it not? That’s not something an engine can do short of being a 3D model engine on the editor side for no reason when blender is already great. As someone who blindly learned c++ and c# for Unity and Unreal I would say they’re barely a lift compared to learning the engine api of either approach. You keep making strange arguments in other comments about how Unity is more friendly to tiny studios for financial alignment reasons which is very odd to me. Unreal is a royalty on revenue. Unity is a cost per seat. The latter is obviously more costly to small studios with no initial revenue. Unreal is fine.
    - jay_kyburz 5y ago
      Unity is free until you ship.
    - tomatowurst 5y ago
      so what is the game you shipped with it?
ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
I jumped into game development earlier this year because I too feel that there are plenty of business use cases for a game engine to power business intelligence applications; especially in VR/AR. It was not only my first time doing 3D, but also my first time using a real IDE. Results have varied. The first thing I'll tell you is that the tooling for building enterprise apps is woefully inadequate out of the box. The things that come easiest to you, specifically CRUD app building, are much more difficult in a game engine. There are no native UI elements, no theming in the way we've come to expect, and the workflows are all completely different. I was used to building database connected backends, and switching to a state machine model really threw me for a loop. If you have experience building native apps, you're probably going to have a much better time than I did. As far as learning the interface, that's not so bad. Follow some of the tutorials and you'll be able to get up and running in no time. The rabbit hole for me was understanding WHY things were doing what they were doing, as opposed to figuring out how to do it. Except in those times which I COULDN'T do something natively that I was expecting to be able to do...which happens a lot. My recommendation is to set up the game engine of your choice, learn how to build to multiple targets, and then craft something you've already done elsewhere to see how you like it. Once you get that going, you should have a cursory understanding that will allow you to flex some creative muscle. Good luck!
tomatowurst 5y ago
It depends on what your core mechanics of the games are and the myriad of edge cases that arise as a result of those decisions. It can very well become exponential and it is a big reason why indie games are simple, anything more complicated to emulate a studio production, would quickly balloon into incredible amount of work and the biggest risk is not knowing if it will mount to anything. I learned the hard way and realized just how hard game development is and how much we take for granted the human cost. You really really must love games to be involved with them. You cannot do it based on ROI calculations it really requires passion and patience.

oneoff786 5y ago

A lot of it is learning the engine api and how different parts interact. The basic competence level requires a pretty large body of knowledge. Can you, for example, Extend a character class, give it a skeleton, an animation blueprint with some animation states that read the character state, hook it up to player inputs, make it do some sounds, and add a bit of flair to some actions it can take? Can you build a basic ai behavior tree? Run some line traces to interact with colliders so your guy can interact with an object? Shoot a gun and spawn some bullets that can damage another unit? Etc.

tomatowurst 5y ago
You absolutely need those basic skills to be in a position to produce anything on Unreal Engine but its the sheer amount of work that comes after to produce anything of value is where the challenge is in my opinion. It almost certainly involves a dedicated asset generation capacity to generate enough novelty and/or a polished, smooth mechanic that can handle all the edge cases thrown at it. And there's a reason why the UE tools out of the box are so limited and frustrating to use to the point that its impossible to work on anything without opening up your wallet to purchase productivity tools sold on its marketplace and still struggle with the workload. Especially when it requires you to become proficient at C++ because blueprint's value drops outside animation rigging and VFX, both of which Unity's 3rd party marketplace tools have filled rendering UE's initial user friendliness nil. You are stuck with an enterprise tool marketed and suited for large studios but you thought you could make indie games faster than Unity.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  My project is about 5% c++ base classes and GAS setup and 95% blueprint. I have no clue what you’re talking about with productivity tools but that sounds like nonsense. Unity doesn’t even have working networked multiplayer built into it last I checked. Unity requires asset generation as well. Because… how could it not? That’s not something an engine can do short of being a 3D model engine on the editor side for no reason when blender is already great. As someone who blindly learned c++ and c# for Unity and Unreal I would say they’re barely a lift compared to learning the engine api of either approach. You keep making strange arguments in other comments about how Unity is more friendly to tiny studios for financial alignment reasons which is very odd to me. Unreal is a royalty on revenue. Unity is a cost per seat. The latter is obviously more costly to small studios with no initial revenue. Unreal is fine.
  - jay_kyburz 5y ago
    Unity is free until you ship.
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    so what is the game you shipped with it?

ChikkaChiChi 5y ago

I jumped into game development earlier this year because I too feel that there are plenty of business use cases for a game engine to power business intelligence applications; especially in VR/AR. It was not only my first time doing 3D, but also my first time using a real IDE. Results have varied. The first thing I'll tell you is that the tooling for building enterprise apps is woefully inadequate out of the box. The things that come easiest to you, specifically CRUD app building, are much more difficult in a game engine. There are no native UI elements, no theming in the way we've come to expect, and the workflows are all completely different. I was used to building database connected backends, and switching to a state machine model really threw me for a loop. If you have experience building native apps, you're probably going to have a much better time than I did. As far as learning the interface, that's not so bad. Follow some of the tutorials and you'll be able to get up and running in no time. The rabbit hole for me was understanding WHY things were doing what they were doing, as opposed to figuring out how to do it. Except in those times which I COULDN'T do something natively that I was expecting to be able to do...which happens a lot. My recommendation is to set up the game engine of your choice, learn how to build to multiple targets, and then craft something you've already done elsewhere to see how you like it. Once you get that going, you should have a cursory understanding that will allow you to flex some creative muscle. Good luck!

tomatowurst 5y ago

It depends on what your core mechanics of the games are and the myriad of edge cases that arise as a result of those decisions. It can very well become exponential and it is a big reason why indie games are simple, anything more complicated to emulate a studio production, would quickly balloon into incredible amount of work and the biggest risk is not knowing if it will mount to anything. I learned the hard way and realized just how hard game development is and how much we take for granted the human cost. You really really must love games to be involved with them. You cannot do it based on ROI calculations it really requires passion and patience.