21 ms·

An Unreal Decision

316 points by cledet 12y ago

klodolph 12y ago
I've been bitten before by some of the problems regarding Unity and collaboration with source control. Everyone wants to test out their changes on the same scene, but it just blows up when you go to merge... even if you use a dumb merge strategy like ours or theirs (as a Git user) it seems to break things. Unity seems really cool, but I'm never going to use it again for any project with more than one programmer.
- keerthiko 12y ago
  We build BitGym (www.bitgym.com) using Unity, and it has a lot of moving parts and 2-3 developers working on scene, code and assets, and we've made it work with git. It really comes down to developing and maintaining some best practices: - Always use prefabs wherever possible. But avoid nesting prefabs - Always save your prefabs, then save the scene before pushing. Thus the .prefab files are also updated through git: these are more robust and have higher priority than the scene. - Make sure source control uses meta files (unless you're using Unity's Asset Server) so that scene references are stored again in separate files updated through git. - Make sure individual developers have a lock on individual prefabs. Unlike scripts, Unity will bomb changes from one side of the merge on binary files, but this is expected when using git on binary files. Of course you can treat the scripts as any other code project, and they merge fine. It's still not ideal, and we occasionally wind up with merge issues or a day of having to carefully iron out scene conflicts when doing larger branch merges, but they haven't been so dreadful as to make us decide never to use it again because of the collaboration issues.
  - midnightclubbed 12y ago
    Yes to this! You can also use the additive scene loading to build pieces of your product independently of each other and pull them all together at runtime.
  - Stratoscope 12y ago
    That's very helpful, thanks! One question... > Make sure individual developers have a lock on individual prefabs. Can you elaborate on that? Git doesn't have file/directory locking unless you use something like gitolite, so what kind of locking do you mean? I found UnityLock in the asset store, which is supposed to let you lock assets against editing, but it doesn't seem to work in 4.5: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4851 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4851 The code seems straightforward enough, so I may see about getting it working if the author doesn't do it.
Tepix 12y ago
I recently started getting to know Unity3d and it was extremely easy and quick to learn. One annoying discovery was that their variant of JavaScript is not real JavaScript, it's "UnityScript". It took me quite some time to convert a simple script that I had written for node.js to UnityScript. I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift. For someone who is just doing a bit of indie development, that's too expensive. So I checked out UE4 also. You can subscribe for a month for $19 and then continue using the version that was the current version during your one month of subscription. If you need updates later on, subscribe for another month. UE4 is harder to learn but looks a lot better than Unity OOTB. Anyway, I hope Unity will be competitive again regarding pricing with the imminent announcement of their 5.0 release.
- daredevildave 12y ago
  If you're interested in writing games in Javascript, you might like to take a look at PlayCanvas [playcanvas.com] which has Unity/UE4-like tools for building WebGL/Javascript games.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Has WebGL solved the local storage limitation yet? I've been waiting for a few years for that. There's still no way to "install" a game into a browser, as far as I know, and redownloading 1GB+ of assets every time the game loads isn't an option.
    - easong 12y ago
      You could always package the game as a node-webkit app.
    - vertex-four 12y ago
      If, for whatever reason, you're hell-bent on producing a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL, you could always use something along the lines of node-webkit[0] and distribute it the usual way. Personally, I rather significantly doubt that people would play more AAA games if they could download them in their browser rather than Steam. [0] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
rodgerd 12y ago
> The other big obstacle was that the UDK tools which were Windows only. MartianCraft is a shop of (mostly) dyed-in-the-wool Mac folk who’d rather not spend their days using Windows. That really doesn't seem like a great way to run a railroad.
malkia 12y ago
Haven't used the tools much, but I'm subscribed, and simply in awe of Unreal's internal UI system (used for the Tools), and hope EPIC release it in some more independent form.
Coincoin 12y ago
As someone who tried to develop a Unity game on a big team, it was hell. The collaboration is horrible, there are conflicts all the time for no reason. Simply getting the source, running the game and updating would produce conflicts. We also had to buy the cache licenses to make it somewhat workable. But the worst was the support. It was worthless. Anytime we would open a ticket, they would simply google and return us links to forum threads that didn't address our issue. When we asked about missing important features or bug fixes, they told us to buy something on the asset store.
- oafitupa 12y ago
  Wow, that's horrible. So what do you recommend?
  - Coincoin 12y ago
    For a big team, either use Unreal or the in house engine. I heard good things about Havok's game engine too, and their support is the best I've ever seen.
- Stratoscope 12y ago
  I'm sure you know this, but for anyone who is new to Unity, one thing that helps a tiny bit is to open the Edit/Project Settings/Editor panel and change the Asset Serialization Mode to Force Text. Then your .unity scene files and such will be text files instead of binary. Whenever I start a new Unity project I flip this setting right away and save the empty project with text assets as the first commit. This won't solve the problem at all - the asset files are still fairly inscrutable and the slightest change in the editor can result in all kinds of seemingly unrelated changes - but at least you'll have text diffs instead of huge binary files in the repo.
- midnightclubbed 12y ago
  I'm not sure what you would classify as being a big team but you can definitely pay for dedicated support (and source code) should your organisation want to. Of course that comes at a cost significantly more than a couple of pro licenses.
mrfusion 12y ago
Side question. Where do single indie developers get the artwork for games?
- nacs 12y ago
  By hiring a graphics person or by creating it yourself. There are some free assets out there but they're mostly low-quality and the few production-quality ones are used in numerous low-quality games.
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    Why aren't more production quality ones free or available for sale? It seems like it might encourage more foss games?
    - dublinben 12y ago
      Programmers tend not to be artistic, and artists tend to not support ideals like free software/free culture.
      - err4nt 12y ago
        I think that's selling content creators a little short - I think a lot of visual asset creators would love to contribute but are neither reached out to, nor sought after. It can be intimidating telling a graphics guy: just clone the git repo, put your assets in a fresh branch and we'll merge when were ready. You may as well be speaking Swahili to the poor volunteer! Making publically accessible list of needed assets, and a straightforward submission process for getting assets from contributors to programmers for integration might be the missing piece of the puzzle.
        dublinben 12y ago
        You're absolutely right that projects need to do a better job of welcoming non-technical volunteers. If some programmers have trouble contributing, it's even worse for everyone else.
JabavuAdams 12y ago
I may eventually do the same for a project I'm working on, although for me the draw would be UE's battle-tested network prediction code. For visual programming in Unity, there's PlayMaker -- an add-on available from the asset store. It allows creation and graphical editing (and graphical runtime debugging) of FSMs (though not hierarchical FSMs). It's quite a good implementation of a FSM / event / action framework. It's basically superior to some tech I spent half of 2013 developing for an in-house proprietary engine. I agree on the collaboration problems. Even with purely text-based serialization, collaboration is one of Unity's weak points.
mahyarm 12y ago
Their entire attitude of accessible, changeable source, accepting patches and responsiveness is really refreshing. If you do windows or apple dev, the frustrations of having none of that available is a big productivity drain. The high amount of responsiveness part is even nicer, since that seems rarer in platforms such as unity or android.
keerthiko 12y ago
My teammate and I started moonlighting on the first game for our studio about 8 months ago, right before Epic announced the current $19.95/seat pricing model. We decided to go with Unity purely because I already owned a Pro license, that we could use to make final beta builds and be responsible for the advanced visual effects that needed Pro. Additionally I already had lots of experience with Unity, and nearly none with UE. We are only a two-person team, making a fairly limited-scope 3D puzzle racer game. Thus we didn't hit the major issues with collaboration bugs (we did a few times) or platform switching (we're focusing only on PC). We were able to build our MVP in less than 2 weeks of hacking, and it felt amazing. The asset store was also an amazing resource to circumvent the artist issues. However, it's been nearly a year since then, and polishing the game to the standards we'd like has been presenting larger and larger challenges -- performance, obscure shader behaviour, limited editor extensibility (it's good, but not quite good enough), and reading this post, it looks like at this stage of development Unreal would have served us much much better. If we can get our studio rolling and increase our team size to actually incorporate dedicated artists, we'll have to seriously consider switching to UE4 for our next game. Jeff's write-up sheds insight that few people can have, given not everyone has spent the time to get well-enough acquainted with both engines in the team setting to know their professional tradeoffs as well, and I appreciate it a lot.
- christoph 12y ago
  You highlight one of Unity's real strengths here that is often forgotten - the asset store. Want to drop in a nice city scene? Thats 10 bucks. Want realistic car physics? That's 10 bucks. A few nice NPC's with rigged faces? Thats 20 bucks. A pack of nice shaders? 10 bucks. I don't think Unity is targeting AAA developers at all. Its targeting small studios that want to get ideas built quickly. It's got great, simple Oculus integration as well. If you're planning on building something AAA (or close), you probably have modellers, artists and level designers and don't need the asset store. You probably need, or are already using Unreal.
  - ivanca 12y ago
    Absolutely false, using imported materials and creating your own is extremely easy to do in Unreal, and there are tons online of stores where you can buy 3D models, Unreal integrates pretty well with all kinds of 3D models (including riggs) specially those from Autodesk Maya. And over top of that there is an Asset Store for Unreal, is called the Marketplace and the EPIC team is filling it itself with tons of free high quality materials and models.
deleted 12y ago
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reitzensteinm 12y ago
I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points: 1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, being stop the world non generational. 2) A similar story of PhysX, though I can't pin down the exact date, 2010 at the latest 3) They added a new particle system with flashy features, but no scripting access. I don't even... 4) Unity 4 added next to nothing useful (DX11 naturally on Windows only, Mechanim which was broken etc), though it was necessary to purchase to keep getting bug fixes 5) No 64 bit editor is very painful (I have 32gb of ram laying around doing nothing) 6) The project is riddled with bugs, being added and removed each release, though probably much less than hacky in house solutions which are the norm in the game industry 7) Nasty serialization formats make programatically changing the hundreds of meta files in a project next to impossible However, I'm getting the impression that the new Unreal licensing scheme has been a real kick in the ass for UT, and they're taking the competition seriously. Nearly every major problem I've had with Unity seems to be being worked on now, for Unity 5, after a long period of atrophy. I fully expected Unity to die a slow death, and that it was just a question of when to switch to something else (there is not much high quality competition), but now I'm not so sure. If they pull off their roadmap, it'll finally be an engine I will be happy to use and recommend. Right now my feeling is: it does the job, mostly. Note that the experience making small puzzle games for iOS etc may be very different, I've done that kind of thing but not with Unity.
- binarycrusader 12y ago
  Or maybe these are all difficult things to solve and you're just now seeing large projects to address them finally reach completion? Sorry, but your "resting on its laurels" is clearly not true. If you had bothered to track the improvements made to Unity's rendering engine (or the addition of Unity 2D support) over the last two years (well before the Unreal engine subscription launch), you'd see they actually have been doing quite a bit. I do agree that the situation around Mono is pretty unfortunate, and that is clearly a business decision they've made. But they're also trying to find a way to mitigate that as should be clear from announcements made over the last year.
joeld42 12y ago
I'm writing my own engine. That's a terrible idea, I'd be much better off with either unity or unreal. But since game dev is more of a hobby for me, and writing the engine is the fun part, I'm ok with that. However, for smallish projects (smaller than Republic Sniper, I mean) sometimes it's the right choice. I see a lot of indies struggling with lugging around and maintaining a huge engine (unity, especially, but even cocos2d), and running up against the limitations like difficulty integrating with native sdk features, and their game's requirements are modest enough that they could probably code it from scratch in not too much time.
- erikb 12y ago
  Also hacking together a development environment through different open source projects and own code is not a bad idea. It's harder in the beginning but also gives you more control and more skill in the long run.
LeicaLatte 12y ago
Recently moved to UE4 too. Used to do Unity. I moved because I was originally a C++ developer. Had code lying around I could use easily.
- vyrotek 12y ago
  How was the move from C++ to C#? The last time I seriously touched C++ was 10+ years ago. I've been doing almost all C# (and a bit of Java) since. The only reason I feel like I'm sticking with Unity is because of how familiar I am with C#.
  - LeicaLatte 12y ago
    C# felt like it is tooled well for doing many things on game stacks. Would love to spend more time with it.
jokoon 12y ago
I remember being at a private game programming school, there was a school project to make a game with unity 2 or 3. An entire class was using it. Things were synced using subversion. I never really jumped in that. I did not continue at that school. I really think a video game is something that should be made with your custom tools. A good smith makes his own tools. Of course if you want to save time, you can use an expensive, well-made tool, but it will be at the expense of something else. I'll always remember at that school, quickly arguing with a guy, that in C++ a vector is just a linked list. Game programming is often highly technical, and often much more complex than what you're expecting it to be. That's why you should not neglect your tools and highly concentrate on making choices that fit your work.
- scott_karana 12y ago
  > A good smith makes his own tools The problem is, this can be taken to infinitely far ends. Editor annoys you? Modify it to your desires. Don't like the compiler? Write your own. Get sick of the programming language? Invent your own. Get annoyed with how the OS does something? Change it or invent your own. Bump up into x86's limitations? Start on custom FPGAs. Ten years later, you might still have 0% completion on your videogame, and indetermine completion on your ever-fractaling toolchain. (And this isn't just a thought exercise; I remember a HN submission earlier this year that was nigh-identical to what I describe) I would rephrase what you said as "A good smith knows his tools and their limitations, and knows when it's appropriate to make his own tools". Even when talking in analogy... a smith's apprentice would not presume to make his own tools before experiencing his master's, and even further I suspect most smiths did NOT make their own anvils, or mine their own steel... ;) There's also a healthy serving of "Worse is better" in this line of argument.
  - jokoon 12y ago
    Yes it's true, but I would not take the smith tools argument that far. You could say there's a spectrum of low level/high level tools you will either work with or build yourself. Most low level tools are now quite good enough. The more you go high level, the more will deal with specific cases that will restrain your ability to do thing the way you intended. Like the article said, Unity will fit for very small teams and very simple games, but it will be hard to do anything really complex. I think compilers, languages and engines are better suited for more use cases than an editor like unity is. It's a dilemma of flexibility versus speed and ease of development. ease of development/flexibility: ease<|--#-------------------------|>flexibility ease<|-----#----------------------|>flexibility ease<|----------#-----------------|>flexibility ease<|--------------#-------------|>flexibility ease<|------------------#---------|>flexibility ease<|----------------------#-----|>flexibility ease<|-------------------------#--|>flexibility
Fr0styMatt 12y ago
These are my gripes with Unity, in question format :) Would love to hear from anyone that has concrete answers for these: - How does UDK build apps for iOS natively on Windows without requiring a Mac? Are they doing some kind of insider thing that Unity can't replicate? - I see Unity as massively extensible and that's one thing I like about it. Comparisons are often made between vanilla Unity and UDK; what about Unity + PlayMaker + UFrame + Level Builder, etc. I don't see this ease of editor extensibility with UE4 (I'm sure it's there; but the Unity Asset Store just lets me cherry-pick one, click buy and then just have it to use immediately after download - I like that). - My biggest gripe with the editor is the font size. Will the new UI that's coming in 4.6 and/or 5.0 allow me to increase the font size used by the Unity editor to actually make it comfortably usable rather than fatiguing? FWIW I've preordered Unity 5 and I use UE4 at the moment as well. Nothing big completed in either engine (just some side work here and there) but no fanboy-ism for any particular one (though a bit of a fondness for Unity as I encountered it back in the old Mac days when Unity were called Over The Edge Entertainment; GooBall was pretty cool by the way).
- ido 12y ago
  I don't know how UDK does iOS but I'd like to mention that was also a big draw to adobe air for me - you can develop/compile/deploy to ios from windows (don't know how it does it either but apparently it's possible).
- atjoslin 12y ago
  Unreal iOS Building: They are probably building the .ipa on their server and then sending it back to you
georgeecollins 12y ago
I have been Producing a very large game project with Unity. We have a large team, at times 50+. Our graphics aren't as state of the art as they could be but the performance of the Unity engine does not seem bad. The cross platform compatibillity is very strong. The third party tools are very strong. It's worked out well. Unity seems like it was built with ease of of entry as a first consideration. As people do larger and more ambitious projects with it they are hitting some of the tradeoffs and limitations. I am sure UE4 is a good choice as well.
_random_ 12y ago
The problem is that Unity3d is being mis-marketed as a triple 'A' tool-set. It's not.

316 points by cledet 12y ago

I've been bitten before by some of the problems regarding Unity and collaboration with source control. Everyone wants to test out their changes on the same scene, but it just blows up when you go to merge... even if you use a dumb merge strategy like ours or theirs (as a Git user) it seems to break things. Unity seems really cool, but I'm never going to use it again for any project with more than one programmer.

keerthiko 12y ago
We build BitGym (www.bitgym.com) using Unity, and it has a lot of moving parts and 2-3 developers working on scene, code and assets, and we've made it work with git. It really comes down to developing and maintaining some best practices: - Always use prefabs wherever possible. But avoid nesting prefabs - Always save your prefabs, then save the scene before pushing. Thus the .prefab files are also updated through git: these are more robust and have higher priority than the scene. - Make sure source control uses meta files (unless you're using Unity's Asset Server) so that scene references are stored again in separate files updated through git. - Make sure individual developers have a lock on individual prefabs. Unlike scripts, Unity will bomb changes from one side of the merge on binary files, but this is expected when using git on binary files. Of course you can treat the scripts as any other code project, and they merge fine. It's still not ideal, and we occasionally wind up with merge issues or a day of having to carefully iron out scene conflicts when doing larger branch merges, but they haven't been so dreadful as to make us decide never to use it again because of the collaboration issues.
- midnightclubbed 12y ago
  Yes to this! You can also use the additive scene loading to build pieces of your product independently of each other and pull them all together at runtime.
- Stratoscope 12y ago
  That's very helpful, thanks! One question... > Make sure individual developers have a lock on individual prefabs. Can you elaborate on that? Git doesn't have file/directory locking unless you use something like gitolite, so what kind of locking do you mean? I found UnityLock in the asset store, which is supposed to let you lock assets against editing, but it doesn't seem to work in 4.5: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4851 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4851 The code seems straightforward enough, so I may see about getting it working if the author doesn't do it.

Tepix 12y ago

I recently started getting to know Unity3d and it was extremely easy and quick to learn. One annoying discovery was that their variant of JavaScript is not real JavaScript, it's "UnityScript". It took me quite some time to convert a simple script that I had written for node.js to UnityScript. I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift. For someone who is just doing a bit of indie development, that's too expensive. So I checked out UE4 also. You can subscribe for a month for $19 and then continue using the version that was the current version during your one month of subscription. If you need updates later on, subscribe for another month. UE4 is harder to learn but looks a lot better than Unity OOTB. Anyway, I hope Unity will be competitive again regarding pricing with the imminent announcement of their 5.0 release.

daredevildave 12y ago
If you're interested in writing games in Javascript, you might like to take a look at PlayCanvas [playcanvas.com] which has Unity/UE4-like tools for building WebGL/Javascript games.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Has WebGL solved the local storage limitation yet? I've been waiting for a few years for that. There's still no way to "install" a game into a browser, as far as I know, and redownloading 1GB+ of assets every time the game loads isn't an option.
  - easong 12y ago
    You could always package the game as a node-webkit app.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    If, for whatever reason, you're hell-bent on producing a AAA-quality game with javascript and WebGL, you could always use something along the lines of node-webkit[0] and distribute it the usual way. Personally, I rather significantly doubt that people would play more AAA games if they could download them in their browser rather than Steam. [0] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

rodgerd 12y ago

> The other big obstacle was that the UDK tools which were Windows only. MartianCraft is a shop of (mostly) dyed-in-the-wool Mac folk who’d rather not spend their days using Windows. That really doesn't seem like a great way to run a railroad.

malkia 12y ago

Haven't used the tools much, but I'm subscribed, and simply in awe of Unreal's internal UI system (used for the Tools), and hope EPIC release it in some more independent form.

Coincoin 12y ago

As someone who tried to develop a Unity game on a big team, it was hell. The collaboration is horrible, there are conflicts all the time for no reason. Simply getting the source, running the game and updating would produce conflicts. We also had to buy the cache licenses to make it somewhat workable. But the worst was the support. It was worthless. Anytime we would open a ticket, they would simply google and return us links to forum threads that didn't address our issue. When we asked about missing important features or bug fixes, they told us to buy something on the asset store.

oafitupa 12y ago
Wow, that's horrible. So what do you recommend?
- Coincoin 12y ago
  For a big team, either use Unreal or the in house engine. I heard good things about Havok's game engine too, and their support is the best I've ever seen.
Stratoscope 12y ago
I'm sure you know this, but for anyone who is new to Unity, one thing that helps a tiny bit is to open the Edit/Project Settings/Editor panel and change the Asset Serialization Mode to Force Text. Then your .unity scene files and such will be text files instead of binary. Whenever I start a new Unity project I flip this setting right away and save the empty project with text assets as the first commit. This won't solve the problem at all - the asset files are still fairly inscrutable and the slightest change in the editor can result in all kinds of seemingly unrelated changes - but at least you'll have text diffs instead of huge binary files in the repo.
midnightclubbed 12y ago
I'm not sure what you would classify as being a big team but you can definitely pay for dedicated support (and source code) should your organisation want to. Of course that comes at a cost significantly more than a couple of pro licenses.

mrfusion 12y ago

Side question. Where do single indie developers get the artwork for games?

nacs 12y ago
By hiring a graphics person or by creating it yourself. There are some free assets out there but they're mostly low-quality and the few production-quality ones are used in numerous low-quality games.
- mrfusion 12y ago
  Why aren't more production quality ones free or available for sale? It seems like it might encourage more foss games?
  - dublinben 12y ago
    Programmers tend not to be artistic, and artists tend to not support ideals like free software/free culture.
    - err4nt 12y ago
      I think that's selling content creators a little short - I think a lot of visual asset creators would love to contribute but are neither reached out to, nor sought after. It can be intimidating telling a graphics guy: just clone the git repo, put your assets in a fresh branch and we'll merge when were ready. You may as well be speaking Swahili to the poor volunteer! Making publically accessible list of needed assets, and a straightforward submission process for getting assets from contributors to programmers for integration might be the missing piece of the puzzle.
      - dublinben 12y ago
        You're absolutely right that projects need to do a better job of welcoming non-technical volunteers. If some programmers have trouble contributing, it's even worse for everyone else.

JabavuAdams 12y ago

I may eventually do the same for a project I'm working on, although for me the draw would be UE's battle-tested network prediction code. For visual programming in Unity, there's PlayMaker -- an add-on available from the asset store. It allows creation and graphical editing (and graphical runtime debugging) of FSMs (though not hierarchical FSMs). It's quite a good implementation of a FSM / event / action framework. It's basically superior to some tech I spent half of 2013 developing for an in-house proprietary engine. I agree on the collaboration problems. Even with purely text-based serialization, collaboration is one of Unity's weak points.

mahyarm 12y ago

Their entire attitude of accessible, changeable source, accepting patches and responsiveness is really refreshing. If you do windows or apple dev, the frustrations of having none of that available is a big productivity drain. The high amount of responsiveness part is even nicer, since that seems rarer in platforms such as unity or android.

keerthiko 12y ago

My teammate and I started moonlighting on the first game for our studio about 8 months ago, right before Epic announced the current $19.95/seat pricing model. We decided to go with Unity purely because I already owned a Pro license, that we could use to make final beta builds and be responsible for the advanced visual effects that needed Pro. Additionally I already had lots of experience with Unity, and nearly none with UE. We are only a two-person team, making a fairly limited-scope 3D puzzle racer game. Thus we didn't hit the major issues with collaboration bugs (we did a few times) or platform switching (we're focusing only on PC). We were able to build our MVP in less than 2 weeks of hacking, and it felt amazing. The asset store was also an amazing resource to circumvent the artist issues. However, it's been nearly a year since then, and polishing the game to the standards we'd like has been presenting larger and larger challenges -- performance, obscure shader behaviour, limited editor extensibility (it's good, but not quite good enough), and reading this post, it looks like at this stage of development Unreal would have served us much much better. If we can get our studio rolling and increase our team size to actually incorporate dedicated artists, we'll have to seriously consider switching to UE4 for our next game. Jeff's write-up sheds insight that few people can have, given not everyone has spent the time to get well-enough acquainted with both engines in the team setting to know their professional tradeoffs as well, and I appreciate it a lot.

christoph 12y ago
You highlight one of Unity's real strengths here that is often forgotten - the asset store. Want to drop in a nice city scene? Thats 10 bucks. Want realistic car physics? That's 10 bucks. A few nice NPC's with rigged faces? Thats 20 bucks. A pack of nice shaders? 10 bucks. I don't think Unity is targeting AAA developers at all. Its targeting small studios that want to get ideas built quickly. It's got great, simple Oculus integration as well. If you're planning on building something AAA (or close), you probably have modellers, artists and level designers and don't need the asset store. You probably need, or are already using Unreal.
- ivanca 12y ago
  Absolutely false, using imported materials and creating your own is extremely easy to do in Unreal, and there are tons online of stores where you can buy 3D models, Unreal integrates pretty well with all kinds of 3D models (including riggs) specially those from Autodesk Maya. And over top of that there is an Asset Store for Unreal, is called the Marketplace and the EPIC team is filling it itself with tons of free high quality materials and models.

deleted 12y ago

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reitzensteinm 12y ago

I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points: 1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, being stop the world non generational. 2) A similar story of PhysX, though I can't pin down the exact date, 2010 at the latest 3) They added a new particle system with flashy features, but no scripting access. I don't even... 4) Unity 4 added next to nothing useful (DX11 naturally on Windows only, Mechanim which was broken etc), though it was necessary to purchase to keep getting bug fixes 5) No 64 bit editor is very painful (I have 32gb of ram laying around doing nothing) 6) The project is riddled with bugs, being added and removed each release, though probably much less than hacky in house solutions which are the norm in the game industry 7) Nasty serialization formats make programatically changing the hundreds of meta files in a project next to impossible However, I'm getting the impression that the new Unreal licensing scheme has been a real kick in the ass for UT, and they're taking the competition seriously. Nearly every major problem I've had with Unity seems to be being worked on now, for Unity 5, after a long period of atrophy. I fully expected Unity to die a slow death, and that it was just a question of when to switch to something else (there is not much high quality competition), but now I'm not so sure. If they pull off their roadmap, it'll finally be an engine I will be happy to use and recommend. Right now my feeling is: it does the job, mostly. Note that the experience making small puzzle games for iOS etc may be very different, I've done that kind of thing but not with Unity.

binarycrusader 12y ago
Or maybe these are all difficult things to solve and you're just now seeing large projects to address them finally reach completion? Sorry, but your "resting on its laurels" is clearly not true. If you had bothered to track the improvements made to Unity's rendering engine (or the addition of Unity 2D support) over the last two years (well before the Unreal engine subscription launch), you'd see they actually have been doing quite a bit. I do agree that the situation around Mono is pretty unfortunate, and that is clearly a business decision they've made. But they're also trying to find a way to mitigate that as should be clear from announcements made over the last year.

joeld42 12y ago

I'm writing my own engine. That's a terrible idea, I'd be much better off with either unity or unreal. But since game dev is more of a hobby for me, and writing the engine is the fun part, I'm ok with that. However, for smallish projects (smaller than Republic Sniper, I mean) sometimes it's the right choice. I see a lot of indies struggling with lugging around and maintaining a huge engine (unity, especially, but even cocos2d), and running up against the limitations like difficulty integrating with native sdk features, and their game's requirements are modest enough that they could probably code it from scratch in not too much time.

erikb 12y ago
Also hacking together a development environment through different open source projects and own code is not a bad idea. It's harder in the beginning but also gives you more control and more skill in the long run.

LeicaLatte 12y ago

Recently moved to UE4 too. Used to do Unity. I moved because I was originally a C++ developer. Had code lying around I could use easily.

vyrotek 12y ago
How was the move from C++ to C#? The last time I seriously touched C++ was 10+ years ago. I've been doing almost all C# (and a bit of Java) since. The only reason I feel like I'm sticking with Unity is because of how familiar I am with C#.
- LeicaLatte 12y ago
  C# felt like it is tooled well for doing many things on game stacks. Would love to spend more time with it.

jokoon 12y ago

I remember being at a private game programming school, there was a school project to make a game with unity 2 or 3. An entire class was using it. Things were synced using subversion. I never really jumped in that. I did not continue at that school. I really think a video game is something that should be made with your custom tools. A good smith makes his own tools. Of course if you want to save time, you can use an expensive, well-made tool, but it will be at the expense of something else. I'll always remember at that school, quickly arguing with a guy, that in C++ a vector is just a linked list. Game programming is often highly technical, and often much more complex than what you're expecting it to be. That's why you should not neglect your tools and highly concentrate on making choices that fit your work.

scott_karana 12y ago
> A good smith makes his own tools The problem is, this can be taken to infinitely far ends. Editor annoys you? Modify it to your desires. Don't like the compiler? Write your own. Get sick of the programming language? Invent your own. Get annoyed with how the OS does something? Change it or invent your own. Bump up into x86's limitations? Start on custom FPGAs. Ten years later, you might still have 0% completion on your videogame, and indetermine completion on your ever-fractaling toolchain. (And this isn't just a thought exercise; I remember a HN submission earlier this year that was nigh-identical to what I describe) I would rephrase what you said as "A good smith knows his tools and their limitations, and knows when it's appropriate to make his own tools". Even when talking in analogy... a smith's apprentice would not presume to make his own tools before experiencing his master's, and even further I suspect most smiths did NOT make their own anvils, or mine their own steel... ;) There's also a healthy serving of "Worse is better" in this line of argument.
- jokoon 12y ago
  Yes it's true, but I would not take the smith tools argument that far. You could say there's a spectrum of low level/high level tools you will either work with or build yourself. Most low level tools are now quite good enough. The more you go high level, the more will deal with specific cases that will restrain your ability to do thing the way you intended. Like the article said, Unity will fit for very small teams and very simple games, but it will be hard to do anything really complex. I think compilers, languages and engines are better suited for more use cases than an editor like unity is. It's a dilemma of flexibility versus speed and ease of development. ease of development/flexibility: ease<|--#-------------------------|>flexibility ease<|-----#----------------------|>flexibility ease<|----------#-----------------|>flexibility ease<|--------------#-------------|>flexibility ease<|------------------#---------|>flexibility ease<|----------------------#-----|>flexibility ease<|-------------------------#--|>flexibility

Fr0styMatt 12y ago

These are my gripes with Unity, in question format :) Would love to hear from anyone that has concrete answers for these: - How does UDK build apps for iOS natively on Windows without requiring a Mac? Are they doing some kind of insider thing that Unity can't replicate? - I see Unity as massively extensible and that's one thing I like about it. Comparisons are often made between vanilla Unity and UDK; what about Unity + PlayMaker + UFrame + Level Builder, etc. I don't see this ease of editor extensibility with UE4 (I'm sure it's there; but the Unity Asset Store just lets me cherry-pick one, click buy and then just have it to use immediately after download - I like that). - My biggest gripe with the editor is the font size. Will the new UI that's coming in 4.6 and/or 5.0 allow me to increase the font size used by the Unity editor to actually make it comfortably usable rather than fatiguing? FWIW I've preordered Unity 5 and I use UE4 at the moment as well. Nothing big completed in either engine (just some side work here and there) but no fanboy-ism for any particular one (though a bit of a fondness for Unity as I encountered it back in the old Mac days when Unity were called Over The Edge Entertainment; GooBall was pretty cool by the way).

ido 12y ago
I don't know how UDK does iOS but I'd like to mention that was also a big draw to adobe air for me - you can develop/compile/deploy to ios from windows (don't know how it does it either but apparently it's possible).
atjoslin 12y ago
Unreal iOS Building: They are probably building the .ipa on their server and then sending it back to you

georgeecollins 12y ago

I have been Producing a very large game project with Unity. We have a large team, at times 50+. Our graphics aren't as state of the art as they could be but the performance of the Unity engine does not seem bad. The cross platform compatibillity is very strong. The third party tools are very strong. It's worked out well. Unity seems like it was built with ease of of entry as a first consideration. As people do larger and more ambitious projects with it they are hitting some of the tradeoffs and limitations. I am sure UE4 is a good choice as well.

_random_ 12y ago

The problem is that Unity3d is being mis-marketed as a triple 'A' tool-set. It's not.