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I make games for a living and for a hobby and the switch to Unity in both contexts has been painful for all the reasons you mention. A foreign and often confusi

I make games for a living and for a hobby and the switch to Unity in both contexts has been painful for all the reasons you mention. A foreign and often confusing UI, arcane and undocumented interfaces (at least UE4 has source), and tutorials that assume you don't know how to read. The last point has been especially frustrating because what takes 45 minutes to learn from a video tutorial I could accomplish through reading in five. All that said, after getting over the learning curve and embracing the technology somewhat (even Blueprint/Playmaker over code sometimes!), I've found that the power available to me is well, well worth the cost.

christoph 11y ago
Fully agree. Once you get in to the mindset, blueprints really aren't that tricky. They aren't the best way to tackle all problems, but they certainly make doing a lot of things very easy once you accept how they function, their limitations, the workarounds and commit some time to learning/practicing working with them. There's certainly an overhead in discovering how different elements of the engine talk to each other and behave together. Really it's no different to any other programming language. On a multi-monitor set up, the real time debugging is pretty sweet for seeing what's going on and where it's going wrong.
- fsloth 11y ago
  Sorry, are you advocating UE or Unity? (I presume it is the former).
  - christoph 11y ago
    Actually neither specifically. I prefer UE4 - it seems to have a better technological core and I prefer their approach to many different elements in the engine. Unity is great as well, don't get me wrong, they've had a lot of money for licences/upgrades out of us over the years. I personally struggle to see how they will keep up with UE4 long-term unless they address some of their built-up historic technical debt quickly. I think even though they are both to some extent 'free', competition is still healthy and should be actively encouraged.
    - greggman 11y ago
      I feel the technical debt is in UE's court. They're an engine designed for 100+ person teams where they assume you're a AAA developer and have lots of programmers to support your artists/designers. Unity is an app for making games. The difference in approach leads to vastly different experiences. It will be far easier to make Unity pretty than for Unreal to start being good at editing, good for small teams, good mobile, .. basically good at the things Unity currently does better than Unreal
egypturnash 11y ago
> tutorials that assume you don't know how to read. The last point has been especially frustrating because what takes 45 minutes to learn from a video tutorial I could accomplish through reading in five. This is far from unique to video game tools, sadly. There's this growing perception that people greatly prefer video tutorials. Which makes people who would rather read and think a little bit go crazy. Every time there's a new release of Illustrator (my main tool), I end up pulling out my hair trying to find text descriptions of the new features rather than slow video overviews. And then there's Astute Graphics, who makes great AI plugins that they ONLY documented as videos for a while. Now they grudgingly have blog posts that sort of tell you how they work. Sort of.

christoph 11y ago

Fully agree. Once you get in to the mindset, blueprints really aren't that tricky. They aren't the best way to tackle all problems, but they certainly make doing a lot of things very easy once you accept how they function, their limitations, the workarounds and commit some time to learning/practicing working with them. There's certainly an overhead in discovering how different elements of the engine talk to each other and behave together. Really it's no different to any other programming language. On a multi-monitor set up, the real time debugging is pretty sweet for seeing what's going on and where it's going wrong.

fsloth 11y ago
Sorry, are you advocating UE or Unity? (I presume it is the former).
- christoph 11y ago
  Actually neither specifically. I prefer UE4 - it seems to have a better technological core and I prefer their approach to many different elements in the engine. Unity is great as well, don't get me wrong, they've had a lot of money for licences/upgrades out of us over the years. I personally struggle to see how they will keep up with UE4 long-term unless they address some of their built-up historic technical debt quickly. I think even though they are both to some extent 'free', competition is still healthy and should be actively encouraged.
  - greggman 11y ago
    I feel the technical debt is in UE's court. They're an engine designed for 100+ person teams where they assume you're a AAA developer and have lots of programmers to support your artists/designers. Unity is an app for making games. The difference in approach leads to vastly different experiences. It will be far easier to make Unity pretty than for Unreal to start being good at editing, good for small teams, good mobile, .. basically good at the things Unity currently does better than Unreal

egypturnash 11y ago

> tutorials that assume you don't know how to read. The last point has been especially frustrating because what takes 45 minutes to learn from a video tutorial I could accomplish through reading in five. This is far from unique to video game tools, sadly. There's this growing perception that people greatly prefer video tutorials. Which makes people who would rather read and think a little bit go crazy. Every time there's a new release of Illustrator (my main tool), I end up pulling out my hair trying to find text descriptions of the new features rather than slow video overviews. And then there's Astute Graphics, who makes great AI plugins that they ONLY documented as videos for a while. Now they grudgingly have blog posts that sort of tell you how they work. Sort of.