Unreal vs Unity

"AntDX3162" wrote:

"cybereality" wrote:
Unreal does have the upper-hand with graphics, at least by default. A talented team with good artists can make something great with nearly any engine. And I've seen some nice stuff with Unity as well. In any case, if you're an indie developer you shouldn't worry about that last 10% of graphics fidelity when there are much more important things like fun gameplay, original concepts, good art direction, etc.

but which would be the easiest platform to pump out programs or are they equal?

Unity will definitely be the winner here, while UE has made massive progress in this regard, it's not up to par with Unity yet.

"AntDX3162" wrote:
but which would be the easiest platform to pump out programs or are they equal?

I find Unity to be easier to work with by a good margin.

I cannot say which is easier as I have not really used Unity. But, I do know that in Portland, Oregon we have a HUGE Unity Meetup. I went to one of the meetups and there were over 100 people there. A supportive real-world community can be a plus. I wish Unreal Engine had a similar community in my area.

On the other hand, Epic (Unreal Engine) does amazing with their online community engagement. I find that their efforts work very well for our team. They have weekly Twitch broadcasts where they teach people how to use new features of the product. They put on monthly Jams to challenge and educate. They have amazing training materials to get you familiar with how to use the tools.

If you are interested in Unreal Engine 4 and have the time to go through the training videos on YouTube, you can gain proficiency fairly quickly.

EDIT: I also like how Unreal Engine has these amazing point releases:
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unrea ... 9-released
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unrea ... 8-released
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unrea ... 7-released
https://www.unrealengine.com/blog/unrea ... 6-released

As a UE4 user, I must say that Unreal is the only way to go this days. It is absolutely big step forward from any other engine. I totally understand the others claiming that unity is better, but in my opinion this are the words of people used to the one system, afraid of changes.

After the switching you see how Unreal is flexible, how comfortable it is and effective. In next years gap between unreal and others will only grow.

Doing things in UE4 is so simple thanks to the blueprint system. You don't have to know any language to program, you just need basics of the basics and you still can do something very complicated and impressive in much shorter time. I did so many things in BPs and I still didn't found any reason to go back to c++. Even plugins have BP implementations out of the box. To do simple character moving around the map with many random and scripted behaviours, blended animations with added 1D and 3D offsets with environment reactions its a matter of minutes (of course if you have ready assets). I don't think that it is possible in any other language.

Above of that you have grate tools inside of the engine. Everything done nicely and feels more like playing in the game than doing one :)

About performance- yes it needs more horse power than unity... when you don't know how to use it. On first look it seems that it is like that because UE is using more light and material processing on default setting (even temporal AA is in a default setting). You can turn off bells and whistles in few seconds and you will have the same (or even better) performance as unity but you will have also same "last gen" quality...

About VR integrity. Right now UE is supporting Oculus, Steam Vr, Gear Vr, Google cardbox, OSVR (with external plugin), Leap Motion. From 4.9 version they added support for VR controllers. And it is all working without any magic, start any project, run it with oculus connected and it will start in VR. It is that simple.

And the shipping- you can very easily compile same project to windows, ios, andorid, ps4, xbox and others I don't remember right now :). Just mark the switch before you build.

There are more VR demos in unity? Maybe yes but the bests are done in unreal - look on kite and lighting productions, check the latest Showdown VR.

ahh and I almost forgot that UE4 is totally free, you will not see any "only in pro version" labels (75$ per month or 1500$ once)... :P

Blueprint is like the UE4 team heard the term spaghetti code and thought "that's only figurative, we can make it literal!".
:D :D

I actually liked Blueprint a lot when I first started using UE4, but I started to doubt doing a project at any large scale using it. Not because it lacked features, the features were there. It was just the debugging tools were poor or non-existent. They have a cool visual flow animation, but even doing basic stuff like inspecting scoped variables at a breakpoint barely worked at all. This is a huge issue. Without good debugging you are basically forced to go at it in the dark, old-school, writing print statements to the console like the stone age. Maybe I am missing something obvious, but this was a show stopper for me.

Cyber, does this not cover your needs?
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/IN ... index.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF-e3-HAwyE



EDIT: The video ~should~ avoid simply subtracting 1 as there could be zero of class... but the debugging video shows breaking, stepping, inspecting values, etc.

Oh, speaking of Blueprints... did you watch this Twitch stream?
http://www.twitch.tv/unrealengine/v/11899014

At about 1:10:00, they are talking about automatic c++ creation form Blueprints. Essentially, allowing Blueprints to give c++ level performance. Cool stuff.

so for DX12 which would be the better option as I think saying Unity is easier to build upon with DX11 and why?

"andrewtek" wrote:
Cyber, does this not cover your needs?.

Yeah, I've seen that and it looks decent enough, but it wasn't my experience using it. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I had a lot of issues just trying to watch a value (most of the time it wouldn't show up at all). In any case, even if it did work as advertised, it doesn't look as robust as an IDE like Visual Studio.