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In my opinion, UE being "too heavyweight" is more perception than reality. I didn't find it more difficult to learn than Unity. Sure, unimaginable power is ther

by psyc 4y ago

In my opinion, UE being "too heavyweight" is more perception than reality. I didn't find it more difficult to learn than Unity. Sure, unimaginable power is there, but you don't have to use it, and some of it has very little mental overhead (almost 'for free'). I used Unity daily for 4 years, both at work (at Hololens and Oculus) and for a few personal projects and indie games, one of which was much more complex than anything I ever did at work. When I first started, I remember this feeling of being unchained and my productivity as a game developer going through the roof. (For the prior 15 years I'd been building directly on top of DirectX.) When I switched to UE5, I had that same feeling again. Of being let loose or given superpowers. I would not go back for anything. Among many other factors, access to the source code is game-changing and should not by any means be underestimated.

nazgulsenpai 4y ago
Not OP but in my experience, heavyweight is in reference to the sheer size, feature set and the resultant system requirements of the engine, not that it's more or less difficult to learn.
WillPostForFood 4y ago
Among many other factors, access to the source code is game-changing and should not by any means be underestimated. It is great of you know c++, but if you aren’t, Unreal neither offers a scripting language, nor does access to the source code offer any benefit. I’m hopefully waiting the scripting language they announced last year. (Verse?)
- gpm 4y ago
  Blueprints are a pretty fully featured scripting language, they just happen to not be text based.
- towaway15463 4y ago
  Why not just learn c++? There are probably millions of tutorials in general and probably thousands specific to UE.
- unoti 4y ago
  Unreal's Blueprints handle what you need for a scripting language and then some. If you spend a few months learning C++ so that this is no longer an obstacle, then start using Unreal to do a project, you'll discover that it'll be a very long time before you actually need to use your C++ skills. It's true C++ is easier to express certain things in a smaller amount of screen real estate. But Blueprints are pretty darn amazing. They have subclasses, inheritance, composition, interfaces, public and private variables, functions, enums, events, user-defined structs, network replication, server-only functions, broadcast functions, user interface interaction. You might say to yourself "Yes, but I have a table of 5000 datapoints in Excel I need to work with"; you can put those into a datatable and work with them just fine from Blueprints. You can use the tools to visually edit curves of data, for example for tweaking the effectiveness of some gameplay system like armor or experience or energy consumption. You can write GPU shaders in Blueprints, too, astonishingly easily.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- psyc 4y ago
  If you’re capable of developing a game at all, I wager you’re capable of learning enough C++. But Blueprints are the first-class citizens these days. The most advanced visual programming solution I’ve ever seen, and a joy to use.
jan_Inkepa 4y ago
Ah, I meant the basic engine is heavy - simple games take longer to load, your game is likely to be an order of magnitude larger in file size because of the luxuriant affordances of the graphic pipeline. I'm pretty sure if you compare average game size on disk between the two engines there'd be a big difference (even taking team size and development time into account). Also the unreal editor is more likely to set my fan spinning in a distressing manner - I appreciate how light unity's editor by comparison in terms of not using many system resources - easy to run on my laptop. (I worked with UE engine professionally back in the old times, but have never released any personal projects with it, despite having played around with every year or so). About the engine features, yeah unity has as many ridiculous corners as unreal nowadays - I miss some of the simpler pipelines (the old animation one is better for simple 3D stuff for instance vs the giant state machine...) Agreed that source code access is great. Unity's tech support used to be pathologically unresponsive. Having source access would've saved me a lot of stress and tears :/ (Thankfully the last time I was working on a unity project they were helpful about reporting status of bug fixes and the like, and actually getting things fixed. So props to unity for fixing that).

by psyc 4y ago

nazgulsenpai 4y ago

Not OP but in my experience, heavyweight is in reference to the sheer size, feature set and the resultant system requirements of the engine, not that it's more or less difficult to learn.

WillPostForFood 4y ago

Among many other factors, access to the source code is game-changing and should not by any means be underestimated. It is great of you know c++, but if you aren’t, Unreal neither offers a scripting language, nor does access to the source code offer any benefit. I’m hopefully waiting the scripting language they announced last year. (Verse?)

gpm 4y ago
Blueprints are a pretty fully featured scripting language, they just happen to not be text based.
towaway15463 4y ago
Why not just learn c++? There are probably millions of tutorials in general and probably thousands specific to UE.
unoti 4y ago
Unreal's Blueprints handle what you need for a scripting language and then some. If you spend a few months learning C++ so that this is no longer an obstacle, then start using Unreal to do a project, you'll discover that it'll be a very long time before you actually need to use your C++ skills. It's true C++ is easier to express certain things in a smaller amount of screen real estate. But Blueprints are pretty darn amazing. They have subclasses, inheritance, composition, interfaces, public and private variables, functions, enums, events, user-defined structs, network replication, server-only functions, broadcast functions, user interface interaction. You might say to yourself "Yes, but I have a table of 5000 datapoints in Excel I need to work with"; you can put those into a datatable and work with them just fine from Blueprints. You can use the tools to visually edit curves of data, for example for tweaking the effectiveness of some gameplay system like armor or experience or energy consumption. You can write GPU shaders in Blueprints, too, astonishingly easily.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
psyc 4y ago
If you’re capable of developing a game at all, I wager you’re capable of learning enough C++. But Blueprints are the first-class citizens these days. The most advanced visual programming solution I’ve ever seen, and a joy to use.

jan_Inkepa 4y ago

Ah, I meant the basic engine is heavy - simple games take longer to load, your game is likely to be an order of magnitude larger in file size because of the luxuriant affordances of the graphic pipeline. I'm pretty sure if you compare average game size on disk between the two engines there'd be a big difference (even taking team size and development time into account). Also the unreal editor is more likely to set my fan spinning in a distressing manner - I appreciate how light unity's editor by comparison in terms of not using many system resources - easy to run on my laptop. (I worked with UE engine professionally back in the old times, but have never released any personal projects with it, despite having played around with every year or so). About the engine features, yeah unity has as many ridiculous corners as unreal nowadays - I miss some of the simpler pipelines (the old animation one is better for simple 3D stuff for instance vs the giant state machine...) Agreed that source code access is great. Unity's tech support used to be pathologically unresponsive. Having source access would've saved me a lot of stress and tears :/ (Thankfully the last time I was working on a unity project they were helpful about reporting status of bug fixes and the like, and actually getting things fixed. So props to unity for fixing that).