5 ms·

Can someone that has experience with Unreal Engine give some sort of approximation of what is required to sort of achieve minimum competency as a developer in i

Can someone that has experience with Unreal Engine give some sort of approximation of what is required to sort of achieve minimum competency as a developer in it? Like, with web stuff, you can get up and running fairly quickly and slowly scaffold your way to more intricate projects... can the same be done with something like this or is the initial learning curve a bit steeper?

snarfy 5y ago
There is a learning curve but it's not too bad. It took me about 6 months to go from zero experience to winning prizes in their 'make something unreal' contest for unreal engine 3. If you have any development experience it should go pretty fast.
lazypenguin 5y ago
Yes, unreal is quite easy to get started in. You start with a scaffolding immediately when you start a new project. It literally has template options for different game types. It’s very friendly to artists as nearly all the art tools are gui driven. Blueprints are okay, I didn’t love them for all things but for a lot of things it was okay. Code is harder, you have to read their implementations of things if you want to do anything sufficiently complex. There’s not a lot of comprehensive technical material for the internals. Using unreal engine as a programmer feels like the using “enterprise” software in terms of scale and bloat except that it was built by seriously competent engineers.
- realusername 5y ago
  That's kind of the issue I have with those engines as a programmer not coming from games. Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games?
  - ThalesX 5y ago
    > Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games? There's so many starter kits out there, for Unity at least, even for older platforms such as Ogre3D and SDL, that I think the highest barrier of entry for any programmer is the fun idea.
  - Ardon 5y ago
    There are engines across the spectrum, but you might like Godot. I find it does enough for you that you can jump right in to programming your actual game, while giving you access to the nitty gritty if you want it.
- joshcryer 5y ago
  One of the things I saw when playing with it is that they emphasize searching and intellisense reliant style programming with autocomplete, ie, make a guess and let intellisense tell you the object/type/whatever you're playing with. So you don't technically have to read their implementations, if you know how to leverage intellisense properly. In fact Microsoft specifically sped up intellisense with Unreal Engine (but the changes affect all intellisense users): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/18x-faster-intellisense-for-unreal-engine-projects-in-visual-studio-2022/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/18x-faster-intellisen...
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    Blueprints are very good in this regard. It makes the engine api super discoverable.
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  easy to get in but way tougher to finish a product. You are literally stuck to using forums and dealing with out of date and incomplete C++ documentation which is a non-starter for anybody without gaming dev experience. You really can't rely on blueprints alone, and it feels way more work than it should be for simple things you could just write in C# in Unity. Unity isn't exactly perfect either, there's just confusion about which version to start out on but the one that has the most amount of tutorials and userbase seems to be the answer. Absolutely correct that UE C++ is daunting. You just have way too much responsibility and you absolutely need experience with C++. It also takes more developers who are harder to find compared to Unity devs. Unreal Engine really isn't it for indie or small studios. It just takes so much longer to make something on it, and you almost certainly end up working with C++ to fix performance issues, debugging, etc. For large studios especially film studios using it to create 3D environments? It's perfect and those are UE's target market since they are guaranteed to have revenue income that can pay UE since it works on percentage of revenue generated and small studios, indie devs, the risk is far greater. This symmetric financial incentives mean the indie, small studios are always sidelined as they don't pay the bills. That's where Unity really shines.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    Yeah I would pretty much assert the opposite of everything stated here.
ChikkaChiChi 5y ago
Apologies, but I made a comment on u/lifeisstillgood that should help answer your question. If you need further elaboration please let me know.
lvl102 5y ago
It is a lot because the platform is now so expansive. I mainly use it for my AI/DL projects and it took me about 6 months to get up to speed. There are many Youtube tutorials. It helps if you know how to use Blender and other DCC tools such as Houdini.
- f0e4c2f7 5y ago
  I've found unreal to be expansive as well but I'm surprised to hear you're using it for AI. Simulations?
imnotlost 5y ago
Good tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanLaley https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanLaley
f0e4c2f7 5y ago
I saw the launch trailer back when early access came out last year. I had been playing VR pretty often but had never even considered anything in 3d dev because it seemed too hard. After seeing how far unreal had come and downloading it to test it out I finished up the consulting project I was on I started looking into making VR games. Initially I messed around with some other projects too but for maybe the last 5 or 6 months I've been working on pretty much just this. It was a lot to learn but once you understand the core concepts it does not seem that different to me that normal software development. I'm currently learning how to use c++ instead of blueprints. Each thing I learn makes the engine seem easier and like any other piece of software. There is some cruft but less than you might expect. I watched a bunch of courses and videos but looking back I think the best place to start would have been the docs. For unreal and blender. They took me a while to work through and I had to stop and Google terms constantly but they were really helpful for understanding some of the basic mental models and terminology in the space.
mbrodersen 5y ago
I would highly recommend starting with Unity instead. Unreal is more powerful but it also requires a much steeper learning curve. And 99.99% of games don’t have the budget to take advantage of the extra power.

snarfy 5y ago

There is a learning curve but it's not too bad. It took me about 6 months to go from zero experience to winning prizes in their 'make something unreal' contest for unreal engine 3. If you have any development experience it should go pretty fast.

lazypenguin 5y ago

Yes, unreal is quite easy to get started in. You start with a scaffolding immediately when you start a new project. It literally has template options for different game types. It’s very friendly to artists as nearly all the art tools are gui driven. Blueprints are okay, I didn’t love them for all things but for a lot of things it was okay. Code is harder, you have to read their implementations of things if you want to do anything sufficiently complex. There’s not a lot of comprehensive technical material for the internals. Using unreal engine as a programmer feels like the using “enterprise” software in terms of scale and bloat except that it was built by seriously competent engineers.

realusername 5y ago
That's kind of the issue I have with those engines as a programmer not coming from games. Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games?
- ThalesX 5y ago
  > Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games? There's so many starter kits out there, for Unity at least, even for older platforms such as Ogre3D and SDL, that I think the highest barrier of entry for any programmer is the fun idea.
- Ardon 5y ago
  There are engines across the spectrum, but you might like Godot. I find it does enough for you that you can jump right in to programming your actual game, while giving you access to the nitty gritty if you want it.
joshcryer 5y ago
One of the things I saw when playing with it is that they emphasize searching and intellisense reliant style programming with autocomplete, ie, make a guess and let intellisense tell you the object/type/whatever you're playing with. So you don't technically have to read their implementations, if you know how to leverage intellisense properly. In fact Microsoft specifically sped up intellisense with Unreal Engine (but the changes affect all intellisense users): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/18x-faster-intellisense-for-unreal-engine-projects-in-visual-studio-2022/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/18x-faster-intellisen...
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Blueprints are very good in this regard. It makes the engine api super discoverable.
tomatowurst 5y ago
easy to get in but way tougher to finish a product. You are literally stuck to using forums and dealing with out of date and incomplete C++ documentation which is a non-starter for anybody without gaming dev experience. You really can't rely on blueprints alone, and it feels way more work than it should be for simple things you could just write in C# in Unity. Unity isn't exactly perfect either, there's just confusion about which version to start out on but the one that has the most amount of tutorials and userbase seems to be the answer. Absolutely correct that UE C++ is daunting. You just have way too much responsibility and you absolutely need experience with C++. It also takes more developers who are harder to find compared to Unity devs. Unreal Engine really isn't it for indie or small studios. It just takes so much longer to make something on it, and you almost certainly end up working with C++ to fix performance issues, debugging, etc. For large studios especially film studios using it to create 3D environments? It's perfect and those are UE's target market since they are guaranteed to have revenue income that can pay UE since it works on percentage of revenue generated and small studios, indie devs, the risk is far greater. This symmetric financial incentives mean the indie, small studios are always sidelined as they don't pay the bills. That's where Unity really shines.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  Yeah I would pretty much assert the opposite of everything stated here.

ChikkaChiChi 5y ago

Apologies, but I made a comment on u/lifeisstillgood that should help answer your question. If you need further elaboration please let me know.

lvl102 5y ago

It is a lot because the platform is now so expansive. I mainly use it for my AI/DL projects and it took me about 6 months to get up to speed. There are many Youtube tutorials. It helps if you know how to use Blender and other DCC tools such as Houdini.

f0e4c2f7 5y ago
I've found unreal to be expansive as well but I'm surprised to hear you're using it for AI. Simulations?

imnotlost 5y ago

Good tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanLaley https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanLaley

f0e4c2f7 5y ago

I saw the launch trailer back when early access came out last year. I had been playing VR pretty often but had never even considered anything in 3d dev because it seemed too hard. After seeing how far unreal had come and downloading it to test it out I finished up the consulting project I was on I started looking into making VR games. Initially I messed around with some other projects too but for maybe the last 5 or 6 months I've been working on pretty much just this. It was a lot to learn but once you understand the core concepts it does not seem that different to me that normal software development. I'm currently learning how to use c++ instead of blueprints. Each thing I learn makes the engine seem easier and like any other piece of software. There is some cruft but less than you might expect. I watched a bunch of courses and videos but looking back I think the best place to start would have been the docs. For unreal and blender. They took me a while to work through and I had to stop and Google terms constantly but they were really helpful for understanding some of the basic mental models and terminology in the space.

mbrodersen 5y ago

I would highly recommend starting with Unity instead. Unreal is more powerful but it also requires a much steeper learning curve. And 99.99% of games don’t have the budget to take advantage of the extra power.