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So You've Decided to Move from Unity to Unreal Engine
- hnthrowaway0315 3y agoI'm curiously to see whether a big player switches side. Likely not as all big players were probably consulted.
- mediaman 3y agoI get the impression that Unity did not do a lot of homework before rolling this out. Several aspects of the policy they’ve waffled on, and when asked about who would pay the fee for GamePass games, they said the distributor would, but it appears the distributors were not consulted on this. Not to say they didn’t consult with the major Unity players, but it seems plausible that they didn’t based on the carelessness of the rest of the rollout.
- Ekaros 3y agoBig big players probably don't care the Pro and Enterprise tier isn't too horrid. Or they have negotiate their own deals. For them 0.01 per install is probably magnitudes less than they pay on advertising per player.
- ffhhttt 3y ago> re the Pro and Enterprise tier isn't too horrid. Technically you couldn’t even use Personal or Plus if you made over 200k a year. It doesn’t really make much sense to stay on the personal tier now anyway, as long as you manage to make at least over $10k per developer in a year.
- zengid 3y agowow, great resource even if you just like to know more about both.
- jimmaswell 3y ago> Read the documentation on the Gameplay Framework. All of it! Is it just me or is this an unviable learning strategy? My approach for learning anything has always been to follow small tutorials, build an intuition, and only consult docs when I need some specifics.
- Maschinesky 3y agoI read the kubernetes API and I did not regret it. Nonetheless for just getting to your goal and not becoming really good in something this is not necessary or can be done later
- freedomben 3y agoEverybody is different. It's certainly unviable for some people. For me, the ideal thing is a book, and great docs can feel like this. Something well thought out, comprehensive, deep, and importantly error checked/reviewed. The downside is books are increasingly rare and get outdated really quickly.
- janosdebugs 3y agoAs someone who recently learned UE: yes, this is completely unviable. The UE API docs are almost useless. Use Rider and its code navigation instead, you'll get much better results. The docs about the concepts are better, those are worth reading.
- adamkittelson 3y agoI think it's just different learning styles. My preference for learning e.g. a new programming language has always been to read a book cover to cover as the first step (if it's a language established enough to have a book anyway). Note that it's not important that I actually understand everything on this first pass. The cover to cover is mostly about getting the lay of the land so I know what exists, then, even years later when I have a problem that could be solved by using some bit of the language that I read about but didn't really understand but vaguely recall is a thing it springs to mind and I can do my deep dive on that aspect then.
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- Pxtl 3y agoI can't help but be reminded of the people who jumped from Twitter to Threads. Ultimately, the recent wave of enshittifications of major products - Unity, Twitter and Reddit off the top of my head - It's a hard reminder that lock-in and governance matters. Software is a long investment, so it's time to start thinking very hard about how the software you use is run, and how much control you have if it all goes sideways. I realize that OSS options like Godot aren't really comparable, but since Unreal's main competitor is Unity, it feels likely that Unreal could do something similar since they don't have a competitor keeping the pressure on about price anymore.
- stuckinhell 3y agoGame development is a very different space due to the extreme amount of middleware used and the fact porting between engines has been done since the 90's.
- ainiriand 3y agoDo not fool yourself here, Unreal's main competitor was never Unity, it was the different myriad of proprietary engines that exist in powerful studios, there is were the millions are. Unity could never get into that piece of business and Unreal Engine is barely scratching it.
- Pxtl 3y agoYes, but Unity targeted the Indie market with "free for small unsuccessful projects and we take a small cut of sales if it takes off" first and then Unreal jumped into that market. While Unreal entered that market from the opposite direction (offering a proper, supported high-end gaming engine to replace in-house engines of AAA gaming companies) they both converged into the same market when it came to selling to small players.
- ainiriand 3y agoThat is also true. Not sure how much revenue any of that can generate, though.
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- pjmlp 3y agoGet ready to throw away everything that was written in C# to start with.
- starburst 3y agoTechnically there is UnrealCLR, so if you made a game with mostly Unity-agnostics code it's possible to keep a bunch of it. One of my game is multiplayer, the whole gameplay code is completely Unity-agnostics to run server-side without any Unity code.
- pjmlp 3y agoWhich is a proof of concept and doesn't do mobiles, game consoles and VR/AR headsets, mostly useless.
- starburst 3y agoVery true, for now, but the amount of tools / libraries / projects that will spawn / funded / contributions to move projects out of Unity is gonna make that more realistic eventually.
- pjmlp 3y agoI seriously doubt it, as it requires embracing the game development culture that most FOSS folks are against to, and most commercial engines rather stay with compiled languages instead of having a R&D department in compilers.
- zerr 3y agoOr move to Godot/C#.
- pjmlp 3y agoDoesn't do game consoles.
- somenameforme 3y agoA course that finally made Unreal "click" for me, after years of toying with it, was Tom Looman's 'Professional Game Development in C++ and Unreal Engine' course. The source for what you build (with the chapters available in the git history) is here. [1] It was based on a class he taught and so also includes homework, which I found infinitely more valuable than just following along in a 'Here's how to [x].' type lesson. [1] - https://github.com/tomlooman/ActionRoguelike https://github.com/tomlooman/ActionRoguelike
- compacct27 3y agoI agree, that course was fantastic. Unreal C++ was way less intimidating after.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ryanwaggoner 3y agoI have no personal interest in this topic, but I like this site and the way the FAQs are organized. I'd love to have this for more topics.
- xkcd-sucks 3y agoIs anyone aware of unofficial (and maybe illegal in some jurisdictions) releases of Unreal toolchain that strips off the Epic Launcher and can be downloaded without making an account?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- spywaregorilla 3y agoYou can just grab the repo off of github to use it without the epic launcher but you do at the minimum need an epic account to get access. I'm not sure why you would want it to be unofficial or be so stubborn against making an account of any sort.
- MikusR 3y agohttps://godotengine.org/ https://godotengine.org/
- spywaregorilla 3y ago> I heard Blueprint sucks! > Blueprint actually rules. Look, I get it - why would a visual scripting thing be good? They're all shit! I agree. > Blueprint is the only one that's any good. It's amazing. It will also help you learn the engine. Everything you do there will be applicable to C++. No matter who you are, you should start in Blueprint. It's 100% true that you can build an entire game in Blueprint. Yeah, with multiplayer. Yeah, performantly. Yeah, maintainably. It's not just for rapid prototyping. > Be a snob about Blueprint at your peril. I've helped a lot of people get good at Unreal and get hired for it, and Blueprint-related recalcitrance is the number one way people screw themselves - without realising, they sentence themselves to months of wasted time and frustration only to mould themselves into the type of Unreal user who sabotages any team they're on. Swallow your pride and look at some nodes. Best advice in this page. Blueprints are excellent. They make the engine API extremely discoverable. You naturally gain a deep understanding of the classes and components and how they interact. They are performant. They can do 95% of what you want. The C++ engine API is fine but it doesn't lend itself to learning the engine. I don't recommend using it unless you identify a specific need.
- LanceH 3y agoI had this same scepticism but kept seeing tutorials doing real with with it until I was convinced.
- aschearer 3y agoHow do people using Blueprints deal with: - Find and replace a variable - Change a variables type - Merging changes from multiple commits - Refactoring - Finding all references I'm a fan of visual coding and use it extensively in YWDHT but have found the above challenging. I'm curious how Blueprints solves these issues, especially for larger teams.
- russdpale 3y agoA colleague and myself were just discussing similar issues with SSIS packages compared to just running the queries in a stored procedure on the server.
- gigatexal 3y agoBut Unreal is doing the same nickel-and-diming though no?
- dave_sullivan 3y ago5% after your first million in game sales and only in quarters when you sell at least $50k of product?
- gigatexal 3y agoYeah that seems far more reasonable never mind.
- ffhhttt 3y agoBecause it’s predictable and and you can trust Epic to not start pulling the rug from under you. Even with the new pricing model Unity should still stay way cheaper for anyone who make more than $2-3 per user.
- samspenc 3y agoAlso, as other comments have pointed out, Epic makes most of its money from Fortnite, their revenue from UE licensing fees are tiny in comparison.
- starburst 3y agoThey didn't retroactively changed the TOS of their engine so that a game you made years ago means you now potentially receive monthly invoices from Unity (and what about ridiculous new fees they will think in the coming years). If Unity would've said that now any games built using whatever the most recent version of their engine is subject to a new TOS that means a fees per installs it wouldn't have nearly generated the amount of backlash it has received (no one is going to use Unity for a future project regardless of the fact that the fees per install is for the most majority a much better deal than 5% revenue).
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- amiga386 3y agoThis may well be marketing, but it's good marketing. It leads with being open and honest that not everything is great with Unreal or Epic either. That's much more convincing than something which claims to be sunshine and rainbows.
- Nexxxeh 3y agoDid Unity have the same reputation for shader cache compilation stutter on PC as UE4 games do?
- sovietmudkipz 3y agoTell me more. I’ve recently (past two weeks) gotten more into shaders and I’d like to hear more about this story. What was the shader cache compilation stutter?
- Nexxxeh 3y agoWith consoles, you have exact(ly enough) known hardware and software so you can precompile the shaders so they're ready to rock. Some high profile UE4 games released on PC at launch either didn't precompile shaders, or didn't do it well enough, and there was frametime inconsistency when that shader was first encountered as it was compiled. It caused very disruptive stuttering. Stray and The Callisto Protocol were the two that I think of most. TCP was virtually unplayable. Stray at launch was... less than ideal... for a lot of people. Not all of it is necessarily directly from UE shader compilition on the fly, nor where the root blame lies. But it certainly got a reputation. I'm not a game dev, so it's probably a little light for you so I suspect this is a bit too basic for you but [DF](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr7RGkFuPdQ&t=112s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr7RGkFuPdQ&t=112s) did the best quick look which may give a direction to look further.
- jaimehrubiks 3y ago> It's free until you make a million bucks USD, and only after that is it 5% gross, and only in quarters where you made more than $10,000 USD. So most folks never end up paying anything. There are no subscription fees or anything. To clarify, if you make a million bucks, and then one dollar, you only owe them five cents. It sounds very fair to me, what are the general thoughts here?
- owenpalmer 3y agoI'm surprised they can sustain such low pricing
- Ekaros 3y agoJust remember how many AAA or big name titles use Unreal as engine. Those can sell millions of copies at 60 per copy. And even if they have much better rate it is still probably half a million to millions a game.
- danudey 3y agoEpic made more than $5bn in profit from 2018 to 2019, according to documentation from Epic's court case with Apple, and $5.1bn in revenue in 2020. https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-9-billion-epic-games-apple-antitrust-case https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/3/22417447/fortnite-revenue-... With numbers like that, collecting a half-million dollars from even ten blockbuster games per year is probably not even worth the time and energy it would take; that would be 0.1% of their revenue, which, relatively speaking, is basically nothing. That whole business wouldn't even show up on the balance sheet.
- enragedcacti 3y ago> collecting a half-million dollars from even ten blockbuster games per year I don't think that's in the right ballpark. PUBG has generated about $15 billion in revenue over 6 years or $125 million per year in revenue for Epic. Jedi: Fallen Order sold 10 million copies at full price in its first four months, netting Epic ~$20 million. Even an indie game like Stray netted Epic ~$2 million in one month of Steam sales. https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/PUBG https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/PUBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Jedi:_Fallen_Order#Sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Jedi:_Fallen_Order#S... https://www.gamesensor.info/news/stray https://www.gamesensor.info/news/stray * assuming all these devs have the standard 5% deal and chopping 30% off for marketplace fees where only sales*price data was available
- WhiteOwlEd 3y agoData scientist here who spent a couple of years working with Unreal (to produce high end data visualizations). Here are my thoughts > Blueprints suck! Not really. Think of Blueprints like python. Its good for routing and keeping track of things at a high level. Think of C++ as handling things at a lower level. > I heard you need to start with blueprints. Not really. After going through the basic tutorial that Unreal Sensei has on YouTube (https://youtu.be/gQmiqmxJMtA?si=TqBiiIe12M5hiCda https://youtu.be/gQmiqmxJMtA?si=TqBiiIe12M5hiCda) , it is better to do a mix of blueprints and C++ if you have any programming background. > I don't know what to use for the IDE. I used Rider for Unreal Engine and it has good integration into Unreal Engine. > So when do you use C++? When I was doing data vis of census data, I needed a way to load in 10,000 data points into memory. The "out of the box" tools for Unreal didn't support this, so custom C++ was the way to go. > But really, if I just want to get started with Unreal and want official tutorials, where do I go? After going through Unreal Sensei, I looked at at https://dev.epicgames.com/community/unreal-engine/getting-started/games https://dev.epicgames.com/community/unreal-engine/getting-st..., there are a ton of tutorials there for game developers. Also, a year ago I put together an online course that looked at how to ramp up on Unreal Engine. The course ("Data Visualization in the Metaverse") is ideal if you already have a programming background. I put the course out on YouTube for free (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKH3Xg62luIgPaB4fiFuTQ9-q-sbw-kQj https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKH3Xg62luIgPaB4fiFuT...) and happy to answer any questions about it.
- azan_ 3y ago>Data scientist here who spent a couple of years working with Unreal (to produce high end data visualizations) That sounds amazing, could you share some of your visualizations?
- vintagedave 3y ago> I don't know what to use for the IDE. I used Rider for Unreal Engine and it has good integration into Unreal Engine. Don't forget Visual Assist! It's more flexible, is faster, uses less memory, works on uncompilable code, etc. (I work on it.)
- bastardoperator 3y agoOr you can wait for Source 2 which is rumored to be dropping on September 23rd with CS:2
- tapoxi 3y agoSource 2 has been out since 2015, with tooling, but so far I think the only third-party licensee is S&ndbox. It's not so much a modern game creation platform as it is a collection of Valve's internal tools. Also from a technology standpoint it is miles behind Unreal Engine.
- sosodev 3y agoIt seems a goal of S&box is to allow more developers to ship games that are built using Source 2. I'm curious if we'll see much of that in the future.
- babypuncher 3y agoI'm not convinced Valve is all that interested in pushing Source 2 as an alternative to Unreal or Unity, and their organizational structure would probably make them a pain to work with.
- ThatPlayer 3y agoI think they did when they first announced it, and that it was going to be free (like Unreal/Unity). But that was also in 2015 and we've seen no public release of Source 2 since.
- blinding-streak 3y agoUnity offices are closing due to death threats. Things going smoothly after their pricing change. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-14/video-game-company-unity-closes-offices-following-death-threat https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-14/video-gam...
- mrtksn 3y agoWhat up with the gaming community? I get the the players being carried away or be from a special demographics but aren't the game professionals aware that they are doing business? Underpaid developers, death treats after some pricing changes. Wow.
- musicale 3y agoThe developers are revolting.
- pixl97 3y agoRent goes up 200%: [we sleep] Unity changes pricing: [ we riot ]
- johnnyanmac 3y agolet's be real: there's good odds that the people doing this hail from countries where they feel they can be safe from legal avenues of (the US-headquarter) Unity. Also, these are children or the privileged who are complaining about video games on thee internet. They have no issues with rent.
- skeaker 3y ago"The gaming community" consists of an insanely large number of people. Some percentage of people on Earth are willing/crazy enough to use death threats to get their way. The gaming community is large enough that that percentage manifests itself in the form of death threats being used. The question isn't so much "what's up with the gaming community" as it is "what's up with this small percentage of humanity."
- caniszczyk 3y agoAlso check out https://o3d.foundation https://o3d.foundation and Godot as options... open source gaming engines should be at the heart of modern game development imho, just like Linux is the heart of many infrastructure things we do
- crustaceansoup 3y agoSome disagreements based on my experience working with UE for the past 11 odd years. Mind if this all sounds negative that I really like working in the engine and would recommend it for most game projects. I just think you should be aware of what you're getting into. > Unreal and Unity are not game engines in the same sense. This is mostly a true description, but > It's the same way with Unreal, except you're not getting "whatever Epic ended up with when making Gears of War" No, a lot of what you're getting is "whatever Epic ended up with when making UT, Gears of War, Paragon, and Fortnite". You can very much feel their previous games in it. This is good and bad; good in that the tools you need to ship a real game are all there and the engine is actually battle-tested; bad in that the tools you need to ship a game that doesn't fit that mold might not be and there could be a lot of stuff that will get in your way if you decide the Epic Way doesn't suit your project. UE4/5's adoption does help a lot, things were rougher earlier in UE4 and in the UE3 days. > Porting to consoles isn't an outsource job here. Nah, we needed help to ship Chivalry 2 on console and WinGDK. Many smaller teams do outsource or contract for assistance. It was months of multiple programmers and tech artists, it really wasn't one person x one week. > Upgrading to the latest version is not a big deal. If you're a tiny, Blueprint-only indie / side project I guess this is probably true. It takes us weeks though. > Unreal introduces new systems carefully. We and other teams I've talked to had a policy of waiting for the first hotfix revision of a major UE4 update before attempting an upgrade, though. > I heard Blueprint sucks! See my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512356 > I heard Unreal is geared towards first person shooters and it's a struggle to make something in my genre! As above I don't totally buy the rebuttal. If you're doing something way out of left field you can do it in UE, you might have to bypass a lot of Epic's way of doing things though. > What if I don't want fancy graphical bells and whistles? What if I'm not making something in a realistic style? I've not worked on VR or mobile but I've heard that Unity scales down better. Some of UE5's nice stuff (nanite, lumen) also doesn't scale down well.
- TacoRabbit 3y agoIt's also worth noting that if you're concerned about Epic Changing the Deal and doing a rugpull like Unity, they've said you can simply not accept the changes and continue operating under your existing terms you agreed to: "If we make changes to this Agreement, you are not required to accept the amended Agreement, and this Agreement will continue to govern your use of any Licensed Technology you already have access to." You potentially lose access to epic services of various sorts, but it's a far cry from the Unity situation. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/eula/unreal (Section 7)
- interestica 3y agoI think Unity had that same provision? Until they changed it: "Unity silently removed their Github repo to track license changes, then updated their license to remove the clause that lets you use the TOS from the version you shipped with, then insists games already shipped need to pay the new fees." https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_silently_removed_their_github_repo_to_track/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/16hnibp/unity_sile...
- jarsin 3y agoThat is until round 2 of Epic vs Apple. Where Apple officially kicks the Unreal Runtime off it's store this time. [1] Amazes me the short memory of the dev community. So many studios and publishers could not take the risk of Unreal being kicked off and had to switch to Unity. Unity is still cheaper for vast majority of cases too. [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/17/apple-terminate-epic-developer-accounts-august-28/#:~:text=It%20told%20Epic%20that%20by,claimed%20violated%20any%20Apple%20policy https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/17/apple-terminate-epic-de...
- hypeatei 3y agoUnity never seemed like a good engine. It's CPU bound which is extremely aggravating for a GAME engine. A popular game made with Unity, called Rust, always gets a lot of shit from players because GPUs don't do anything except give a couple FPS. I'd be glad to see Unity die with these pricing changes.
- bluescrn 3y agoC# support is/was its killer feature. Game dev without the pain of C++, and without being limited to non-standard scripting languages (or worse, visual scripting spaghetti) With Unity, you can use C# for everything, from the simplest 'spin this object around' script to customised rendering pipelines and complex in-editor tools. Performance was clearly good enough for the engine to become wildly successful, particularly amongst indie/mobile developers making smaller games, and experienced users learn to avoid the main performance pitfalls.
- andersa 3y agoUnreal is similar. All of the gameplay code runs on a single thread. The game framework tricks you into building slow OOP stuff by default with far too much pointer chasing. You can easily make an Unreal project that performs worse than the equivalent Unity project. In fact, many do! It takes effort to release a well performing game using either engine if you have a non-trivial amount of "stuff" going on. Luckily Unreal comes with fairly advanced profiling tools so you can find where the problems are.
- kibwen 3y agoQuoting a post from the lead dev of Rust-the-game entitled "Unity can get fucked": https://garry.net/posts/unity-can-get-fucked https://garry.net/posts/unity-can-get-fucked "Let me be clear.. the cost isn't a big issue to us. If everything worked out, the tracking was flawless and it was 10p per sale, no biggy really. If that's what it costs, then that's what it costs. But that's not why we're furious. It hurts because we didn't agree to this. We used the engine because you pay up front and then ship your product. We weren't told this was going to happen. We weren't warned. We weren't consulted. We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity's engine. We've paid them every year. And now they changed the rules. [...] Let's not make the same mistake again, Rust 2 definitely won't be a Unity game."
- boppo1 3y agoFor any Unreal experts: I'm an aspiring graphics/engine programmer. I don't really care about making games, I'm more excited about improving the tools available. My feet are wet enough with C++ that I think it would be good to start digging around in/ modifying/ contributing (likely merely attempting 'small' stuff like bugfixes) to the Unreal codebase. I've been doing so lately with Blender's codebase lately with some success, so large software isn't totally new to me. Blender is mostly C though, hence my interest in seeing how things are done in Unreal. Any tips/ resources/ advice/ quirks I should know that you can share would be greatly appreciated!
- johnnyanmac 3y agoIf you were working in Blender, Godot may hit up your alley a bit more as an open source community driven engine. But wrt UE, it depends on if by "contributing" you mean "making plugins" or "contributing to the codebase at large". From the sound of things you want to do the latter. Unreal is "viewable source" but you first need to sign up with an Epic Games account: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github From there, there are instructions on how to contribute (the contribution documentation is actually on a public page: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/contributing-to-the-unreal-engine/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/contributing-to-the-...) There is probably some official Unreal Engine community as well (probably on the UE forums), so that can be a place to ask for any specific pieces where devs need help. Best of luck.
- boppo1 3y ago> depends on if by "contributing" you mean "making plugins" or "contributing to the codebase at large". From the sound of things you want to do the latter. Yep, I just want to cut my teeth on bugfixes for now, maybe a plugin down the road. I'm running into some trouble finding much in the way of a bug tracker. The official issues page: https://issues.unrealengine.com/ https://issues.unrealengine.com/ only lists the last 5 bugs. I'd love it if I could browse them all, & perhaps filter by module. Unfortunately I'm not sure that listing exists publically.
- koromak 3y agofor really small teams, does godot make more sense? I've always heard Unreal is too much to chew on
- johnnyanmac 3y agofor 2D or simple 3D games, sure. Godot should be able to do enough to enable a small team to launch a game. You just have to keep in mind that console support won't be as robust and smooth as UE.