In my opinion, it depends on what you (mostly) want to do, and what kind of a person you are: If you want to do "a shooter", or "an action game", or just in general a game that neatly fits into any of the classic genres, you should choose Unreal. Also, if you know nothing about programming (and don't really want to learn too much about its technical side), you should choose Unreal. If, however, your game idea(s) are more experimental, not really fitting into any classic genres, and/or if you know/enjoy programming, or if you want to learn programming in-depth, writing actual code, then you should choose Unity. Why: Unreal is, I like to call it, a golden cage. The whole engine is designed with lots of built-in defaults that make assumptions about what kind of a game you're making. If you really ARE making that kind of a game, those defaults will be a blessing for you, because without having to put too much effort into it, stuff will just work, and it will work out in your favor. There's always The Unreal Way of doing things for everything, which lets you not have to think too much about the technical side of things (unless you want to), and you'll be able to just follow The Way, and things will work out nicely. Also blueprints are very friendly to non-programmers. However, as soon as your game idea doesn't fit any of the classic genres, as soon as you need or want to do something your way, instead of The Unreal Way, all the assumptions and defaults that the engine has, and The Unreal Way imposes on you, will fight you every frikkin step of the way, and even the simplest thing will turn into royal pain where before you can even start doing the thing, you'll have to spend twice as long removing all those defaults, fighting your way out of that golden cage. Also, its documentation is shit, and its community is royally unhelpful (and on this, a professional Unreal Engine dev of 15 years wholly agrees with me), but on the other hand, most of the stuff in the engine is more or less included in the visual UI, and can be set up by clicking menus and stuff. What you need to click is sometimes hidden in very obscure menus and dialogs, but in theory, if you spend poking around the UI for long enough, you will find it. The documentation, and even answers from community, however very often boil down to "It's easy, you just click this button". However, nobody will actually tell you where that button is, and you often find, after literally HOURS of looking, that it's in some tab of some popup window that you open from a submenu of a dropdown button labeled by three dots in a specific line in a side bar of a specific component properties.
Unity takes the opposite approach - it's an empty universe. The upside is, there isn't really any The Unity Way of doing things - however you want to do a thing, you can, in 98% of cases. The downside is - most of everything you want to have in your game, you will have to make from scratch (or pull in from some library/asset, and those are of... wildly varying quality, often very clunky and obnoxious). Another downside is that if you don't think about stuff like your project structure, and how the game will work on a technical level, your code will very soon become a horrible, clunky, buggy, janky, slow, inefficient mess. On the other hand, the documentation is AMAZING, Unity is one of the only dev tools where if I want a question answered, my first, and in most cases last stop, is the actual official documentation. On top of that, community, even though often slightly lacking in knowledge and skill, is extremely friendly and helpful. And ON TOP OF THAT, the programming API is, to a very large degree, self-documenting. I've learned approximately as much about Unity by just poking in the code editor and reading the intellisense suggestions and toying around trial-and-error style, as I've learned from tutorials and docs. It's intuitive (at least to me), clear, and usually simple, straightforward. Therefore, in unity, whatever crazy unusual gameplay idea(s) you have, you can just open a new project, and start implementing them right away, and gradually fill that empty universe with them, which is (to me) much more satisfying than having to fight the unreal's populated default environment. For example, making something like Pedestrian in Unreal would be a royal pain in the ass, in my opinion. That's the type of thing Unity is better for, due to how unusual the mechanics are, so starting from an empty universe is the better approach. HOWEVER, it also means, that: In unreal, you can get a pretty good result without really knowing what you're doing, and just letting the engine handhold you through the process. In unity, this isn't possible for real projects - in unity, if you don't really know what you're doing, it shows, IN A BIG WAY. This is where the "unity jank" stereotype comes from. In unity, if you want to achieve a good result, you actually have to learn the technical ins and outs of the engine, as well as be at least an average programmer, you will need to take time to make sure your code is actually good, you will have to take time and energy to set up things correctly (and to even learn and understand HOW to set them up correctly), you will have to take time and energy to design your own structure for the project, for the code, for how everything interacts and fits together... otherwise you'll end up crushed under a flaming pile of shit kind of mess.
i don't agree with you ... shooter or action game isn't limited to unreal only. if you do the exact same scene in unreal and unity, you will notice unity run 2-3x more faster and require way less a powerful video card. the main problem with unreal is the lack of asset. you have no choice to use the build in api for everything and that's one of the reason why i switched to unity 3 years ago. but you are right, it's nice when unreal tune up everything but again this can be a good and bad thing because for simple project this is very nice but for big project and long time support this is very bad because you have no choice to edit unreal source and if you edit unreal source you will have to stick with that version forever. in unity, you can upgrade the version and download a backyard compatible api like hdrp 10 so your project don't break and you have access to new feature.
@@martindubois9279 I don't agree as well with him. He does a very bad illustration of the two engines that i doubt if he has any experience in any of them. The speed as you mentioned is obvious to anyone. But that shouldn't hinder people from using Unity for many good games. The OP mentions that Unity is better for programmers just because Unreal has Blueprints. He obviously doesn't know that Blueprints are just a scripting language that are supposed to be used for less "intensive functionalities" and others. For more "serious" features c++ is the solution. That is, i hope he is talking about blueprints and isn't proposing that programming in c# is more difficult than c++. That would be really throwing all the work done in creating c# a higher level programming language, which is 15 years younger than c++, into the sewer. Worse if one realize what type of "programs" the two are respectively commonly used to creating. I don't think that the often mentioned idea that Unreal is strongly aimed at a certain type of games is in any doubt. Note that this is not a real obstacle against doing any other kind of game with it. In that same idea, one could say the same thing about Unity. Although it isn't felt as strongly. Don't believe it. One just has to try to use other engine to see how obvious it is. I will note that i also disagree with some points you made. You mention the need to edit the source code for Bigger projects. Although it will depend on the the projects itself. I do agree that it will probably be necessary. Is it a pain? Yep. That is why version control of the editions is important. So there will not be any "sticking to a version forever". But that only applies to big projects. If an indie team feels the need to edit the Unreal source then it is a sign that they have done some weird decisions about their projects. This or maybe what they need is a custom engine where not even Unity will help them. Unreal could be generally classified as better for bigger projects than Unity. While Unity is better for smaller projects. The API of the two are not even comparable. Of course although the difference in the APIs is true, this kind of categorisation is to say the least very crude and should not really be accepted so easily. The two have their own particularities and one should avoid to much random qualifications. But if one needs a quick shortcut (shortcuts are not always trusty), an easier way to understand more about the two engines, is to compare the games that have been done (and are being done at this moment) with them. That should give a better idea if a certain engine is appropriate for our own project or not. As for Bigger projects. Unity has been growing more and more and is getting really competitive, but it is still not comparable to Unreal. The history and resources of the two companies are not on the same page. I think it is a disfavour that people make by easily comparing the two engine that are so different in so many aspects. In the end one should realize that more than the engine one choose, it really depend on the team, their budget and time, their previous knowledge, ... and not forgetting their project needs.
That right there is the reason my indie shop switched from Unity to Unreal at the end of September. Unity can go eat a giant bag of *[insert plural expletive here]*.
Great Video. I have also switched from Unity to Unreal, and as a Software Engineer I despised the idea of using Blueprints instead of C++. After I gave it some time it really became second nature and my preferred way of writing code. I never thought this would be possible, and it is so much faster than writing and compiling C++ code. Best of luck to you guys :)
Umm, not agreed. I do lots of web programming andI have very little C++ experience.. So I have to use it blueprint. Sure blueprint system has own merits. However reading and decoding others blueprints are painful, even reading my old code is painful and finding blueprint solutions from the web are painful. Maybe it's because I'm an old web programmer. But from my point of view, the thing that limits me the most in the unreal engine is the blueprint system. Between C++ and blueprint. It would be great if it was a lightweight programming language like C# or Google go or Javascript. Otherthan that it was great.
@@delifisektuxedo if you add plenty of comments for each section of blueprint code to describe what it's doing then it's a lot easier to decipher when you come back to it
@SkookumArts - one year into the switch to Unreal (after 10 years in Unity) and in light of Unity's new drama, imagine we're all curious to hear your takes on everything.
awesome video. I think my biggest gotcha in the last 7 years in UE is understanding how the editor handles migration of assets from one project to another and how it deals with references. I wish I would have learned to right click - "fix up redirectors" on content browser folders sooner, I usually do it on the root to make sure they're all handled. I have a project with 70GB of assets in it and it's been my master project for what I'm working on. It was really difficult to migrate what I need to focus on to a blank project before I understood what was going on with references under the hood but I finally got the hang of it and have been able to optimize into a new master version of the project without all the unused assets.
Perspective of AAA UE programmer rather having a solo project in Godot: I won't list UE upsides here, but the biggest downsides are: - Source control. Blueprints are binary asset, so you move a node and your source control only sees changed binary asset. It's like that for many things. - Blueprints. They are fine for artists and simple setup (this switch links to that door) but anything more still needs programmer mindset and at that point, they are just slowing you down. Add to it the previous point and yeah, they are bad. - Size. That engine is big in every sense of the word. Download is big, startup is long, building from source takes hours. Changing your cpp and restarting engine to restart the game takes minutes. Branching takes ages, switching and rebuilding branch takes ages... - Bonus point: Complexity. If you are one person in an army of people and do only animations for example, UE will have a slew of tools just for you. If you are trying to make a game "solo", you'll need to understand many workflows like that. You cannot "ignore" the complexity of something even when you don't really need it.
Yep, as someone who can code I find the Blueprint system really rather annoying. I was much happier in Unity just defaulting to C# scripts. It was quick, i understood what was going on, I felt as if I knew what I needed to do. It was fine. You write C# code and attach it to whatever you like. I feel as if Unity added visual scripting just because Unreal had it. That doesn't mean it was necessary for Unity to do, and I certainly never used it. In Unreal the Blueprint system turns into a pan of spaghetti in no time. It's not that intuitive, the Graph ends up cluttered, and you really have to know what nodes you need. I often found that "Context sensitive" was just wrong and was hiding things I actually did need, but wouldn't have realised I did, because I assumed the edtor knew what to do. And there are multiple things with the same name and different types, you won't realise you've picked the wrong one until it won't compile or the lines won't connect. They are, as you say, also binary assets, so you can't just easily dump them to use in other projects. Converting blueprints into C++ is also a crap shoot and doesn't work too well. Also the UE Blueprints are kind of interpreted and don't seem to compile down to neat C++ so there is a performance hit. Part of me wonders if I'd rather write the C++ myself, but it seems to be a non-standard implementation and I'm not enough of a C++ expert to get the most performance out of it.
Unreal Con: Documentation is all over the place or not at all. Look for something about 5.1? Nope, nothing, you find deprecated 4.x stuff ,they change or removed some command and there's no way of knowing how to do the same exact thing now. Find some API documentation, no example how to use it. Spent hours trying to automate changing the skeletal mesh of assets today, no luck at all. Yeah I really want to click in a field to filter, then select the skeleton, then click okay 200 times, thanks Epic, you're a real mother and that's only half a word. The other con is the TERRIBLE GUI of the launcher, hello, I don't need 256x256 pixel icons for the 500 assets I downloaded to test, found out they are junk or the 85 gigabyte city demo that gave my computer graphics card a brain hemorage and I'll never use. At least a decade of complaints on their forums about that, and they never listened. "Oh we make billions of dollars from Fortnite, big F you developers, eat a bag of raw sausages!"
IMO the biggest advantage to Unreal is also its biggest drawback, and that's the fact that the engine already has so much functionality built into it. One the one hand, it means you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something simple like make a character jump or crouch. On the other hand, it means if you want to implement jumping or crouching in a different way from how the engine does it, you'd better be prepared to bash your head against a brick wall for a few days while you struggle to figure out what obscure aspect of the built-in functionality isn't playing nice with your modifications. I've been in and out of game dev in some capacity for a decade now and have completed projects in both engines, and at the end of the day I've settled on Unreal as my engine of choice. All the features it comes with are just too useful to pass up, but goddamn I do sometimes envy how lightweight and unbloated Unity seems by comparison.
That’s one of the things I dislike the most about Unreal, especially as someone with a heavy background in Unity. I was working on a project where I had a custom way for handling character movement and rotation but it just wasn’t rotating. Turns out it had something to do with the player controller’s “control rotation”, which had to be disabled in the character class’s settings panel. Spent a good couple of days chasing my tail and trying to figure out where my code was wrong only to discover my code was fine all along, it was just Unreal imposing its rules again…
what are you talking about?? its mostly built in, or you can add it very easy with in under 5 mins..... Use the engine longer than a few days next time..
One thing that I've been noticing that more experienced C++ developers I talked to didn't mind as much: The state of the API documentation in Unreal. In Unity, for all the common API methods you get a longer description and even usage examples, and you can filter the method documentation per Unity version. Unreal also has a per version method page, but their documentation for it (C++ especially but also Blueprints) often doesn't tell you more than if you just looked at the method name and parameters yourself. It is pretty hard for beginners to get into. This has caused me to frequently check other resources to understand how certain blueprint methods or C++ methods work and how to use them (for example "Mathew Wadstein" on RUclips has a great video on explaining invidivual Blueprint nodes and how to apply them)
Ive been working on Unity for about 5 yrs now and about 2 yrs ago I started using Unreal. While my day job is still with Unity and mobiled, for my personal projects I am by now using only Unreal. Sometimes I'm still shocked of how many features there are in the engine for which you needed plugins from asset store in Unity. There is quite steep learning curve and a lot to get a hold of but after that it became at least for me very intuitive. My last selling point was when Unreal 5 also adapted and ecs system, that's what I was lacking and also allowed for properties for animation logic to be accessed from side threads and not from the main gameplay thread which was a huge bottle neck. Yes, in comparison to C# especially when writing gameplay code Cpp can feel nightmarish but it is just a question of time and getting used to it. But it's a price of a faster code given that blueprints have a similar performance to C# and can also be compiled natively which I guess compares to Unity il2cpp compilation process. BP graphs does not beed to be horrifically complex if you break them into functions and macros and remember to replace performance critical chunks with functions and methods written in cpp. Good luck guys! Looking forward to your shared experiences with the new workflow!
@@Spark5050 it's not open source. It's source available. Open source would indicate that you could literally take the source code and sell Unreal Engine for yourself or use it's source code and not pay any money after 1mil, but you cannot. There are specific licenses that are open source and allow you to use the code as you see fit completely for free without any repercussions or catch. Please see: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software And: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software To learn the difference
I have been dabbling in Real Time filmmaking and I actually went opposite and went from Unreal to Unity. The HDRP is amazing and I just prefer working in Unity, it's faster and like you said waaay more responsive. Unreal was crashing constantly. That was my experience. With Unitys aquisition of WETA FX tools and their Enemies tech demo they will have some really cool next gen stuff coming in the future
HDRP is a buggy mess.....period... I been using both engines professional for decades and Unity does NOT make games, and they don't have a clue, with having 3 rendering pipelines, HDRP in a real game is slow and buggy as hell...
@@recondeveloper2023 Wow, you've been using both engines for decades and manage to talk so much rubbish in just one sentence. For example, what the hell is a REAL game? 🤦🤦♂ I don't even want to start with the concept of the 3 (or 2) render pipelines. Any idiot can read that in just a few sentences in any book.
As a hobbyist, I started with Unity a few years ago because Unreal didn't run well on Linux, looked complicated, and I couldn't stand the big icon buttons (UE 4). After the recent Unity drama, switched to Unreal, and when trying to do similar things, found myself always thinking, 'oh, so that's what that feature / tool / process is supposed to do'. Somehow Unreal is just much clearer, just looks so much better with little effort
Good bulletpoints. Good analysis. I usually focus more on the "preference analysis" approach (as you can see from my other comment), but your breakdown from the... let's call it more objective angle is good.
I have found myself slowly slipping away to Unreal as well, I've discovered it to be much faster to iterate on with specific styles of games. If you're working on anything first or third person, targeting a PC or console market. It will do almost everything you ask of it. However when you start to drift away from conventional game design I have it found it harder to work with. Also a few other things from the video I had thoughts on: - Love Unitys store, lots of regular sales and assets are such a wide range! - Unreal, unless it is free that month or forever. Lots of things will be very pricey since Epic curates a lot more on their store and you will find less of a range to select from and less of a budget to spend because things are $$$ - Unreals source is available to look at, but technically isn't 'open source'. It's a bit of a weird area you have to be careful on. - Unreal being slow, I found CPU it be a bigger bottleneck since it still does a lot of processing there. Also just working in engine with lower settings does help speed things up. If you are not specifically working on visuals at the time, turn your settings down as low as you can. - No other engine in the world can compete with Unity forums - At the end of the day you could argue endlessly between Unity, Unreal, Godot, Flax, GameMaker etc Understanding what you want to make first, how you plan to make it and what tools / pipeline would benefit you the most really is the deciding factor. If you hate compile times don't use unreal, if you want visual scripting don't use godot... I think you have made the right decision with changing to unreal though, once you start to understand the quirks of the engine and really lean into it's strengths, you'll find yourself spending less time on learning the engine and more time focusing on development.
Unreal is not open source as you said but his source code is available to be modified and you can contribute to their development, saying that unreal can be used for free based on the their EULA and after you pass the profits limits you have to play royalties to epic or you can also pay for support/licensing of the product so you dont have to pat royalties based on the profits
- Unreal's Marketplace has regular sales and a wide range of assets too. - Not true, Unreal's marketplace is very reasonably priced and you know you're getting good quality for the asset, Unity's asset store is a major gamble on if the product will even work. And their return policy is broken, I tried returning an asset on Unity store for a legit reason and got told no. - They clearly state that the source code has the same rules as the standard compiled version. - I agree Unreal is a bit slow - Unreal's forums and reddit page are far more helpful than Unity's, everyone on the Unity forums is so damn arrogant and unwilling to answer the actual question, instead giving stupid half responses or completely dodging the question and placing accusations for not knowing certain things. - I spent 2 years working in Unity, then had to work in Unreal for a new job and was converted over straight away, so many simple things are handled for you by UE so you can actually focus on making a game. The only thing I'd say Unreal Engine struggles with is 2D games
My biggest issue is C++. I just don't like it, and I don't care to use it. I love the direction things are headed with DOTS, which can, in a number of ways, help make up that performance difference. The other major thing for me is extensibility of the editor itself. I spend most of my time making editor tools, because I just enjoy it.
I still hold out hope that DOTS will greatly improve, but it's important to note that DOTS has been in development for around 5 years and has never been fully completed. Even now, they've completely overhauled the API and stated that version 1.0 will come with the 2022 LTS version of Unity. I fear that when the 2022 LTS version of Unity is released in March or April, they will only release a few features. And if the important features, such as "Spikeless Streaming and Large-scale Rendering," do make it into this version, they will probably be heavily cut or still completely flawed.
While C++ isn't that much harder, specially Unreal's C++, is definitely a lot slower to code in than C#. It is also my biggest gripe with Unreal, and blueprints aren't an alternative...
Here are my pros/cons about Unreal Engine. I recently switched to Unreal (about 1 month ago). I really liked it and my new favorite game engine (have used Unity almost 5+ years now). Pros: - Blueprint is well integrated and not just an afterthought. You will work seamlessly with it. My initial thought was I was only too work with C++ and never with Visual Scripting. After a week, Blueprint doesn't seem that bad. However, switch to C++ after three weeks, since I love programming. Still uses Blueprint to hand in hand with C++. Like a matching couple. It's a perfect solution for game development. - Most tools are well-intergrated to each other - C++ is not hard, really hard when you get the hang of it. Helps when you know about C#. But can be frustrated when C++ doesn't have all features or weird syntax compare to C#. - Most of the negative stuff I have about Unreal is just "pet peeves" overall I'm happy with my decision. Great engine! Unreal is really focused at making video games and offers great tools. - SoundCue/MetaSounds are really cool tools for making sound interactions. - It supports Network right out of the box. - A lot of handing components/tools. Like ProjectileMovementComponent, CharacterMovementComponent, MovementComponent, RotatingMovementComponent. It took less than 5 minutes to create a spinning coin that moves up and down. - It has an amazing asset called ALS (Advanced Locomotion System), that is free to use. And it has Project Acoustics by Microsoft, really awesome tool for audio development (Ray tracing for audio system, also free). Unreal is also working on making motion matching. Mid: - Unreal's Architecture - I couldn't decide either is a pro/con, is both. You will learn that some specifics class is supposed to do one thing and class inheritance is important as well naming conversions and terms. For an example, you need to learn what: Pawn, Controller, Character, Game Instance, Game State, Actor, etc. You might think well that's complicated, but once you learn all about it. It kinda makes sense. Recommend watching Alex Forsythe's video on "Blueprints vs. C++: How They Fit Together and Why You Should Use Both". Cons: - Poor Documentation. Unreal lacks API docs compare to Unity. Also, just examples and guide on their site is not best either. - Poor integration with Visual Studio. You create scripts inside Unreal, not Visual Studio. And intellisense is not very respondent with C++ code. Also, removing/renaming scripts in Unreal is a pain in the ass. - You can't use "scene-view" and "game-view" at the same time. When you start the game, only one can be chosen. Unless you pause the game and exit "game-view" into "scene-view". - Unreal is using "cm" instead of "m" as Unit. You cannot change it. However, in "inspector" or "details panel" as they called. You can mark variables with unit attribute, which can be easily converted on the UI side (Read more on benui - UPROPERRTY Units). - Unreal doesn't have a drag and drop reference system like Unity has. It was so nice with Unity, just to drag and drop Components/GameObjects inside the Inspector. - Unreal lacks supports for different file formats (like .mp3, .DAE). - World Partition has some limitations. I could only create 10^2 km map without glitching out. I think they are implemented in double precision, which should increase size limitations. - Nanite don't work (right now) with foliage. They are introducing in Unreal 5.1, I think (You can read their roadmap). - Marketplace is really high cost for some asset. Also, a lot less assets compare to Unity. And also horrible UI design for Marketplace. - I couldn't find any information about Machine Learning, when it comes down to AI. Where Unity already have some Machine Learning package to work with
Idk if I'd really concider the marketplace costs a con. Since unreal doesn't decide those, it the users. And you can use unity asset store products in unreal, quality/transfer difficulty/licence will vary.
The buggy and unfinished features also apply to UE... I've experienced it myself and often hear from piers that there are a lot of bugs (in the new World Partition, One-file-per-actor or other tools) and unfinished features (like the procedural foliage tool) within unreal. So be prepared to fiddle around a lot and not be sure if a system is just buggy. lacking features or if you just made a mistake using it. Also, while blueprints are easy to use and pick up, using C++ is way slower and complex in unreal than C# is in Unity. Expect a 3-4 times increase in time it takes to develop a feature. This is especially true when compiling the engine, as you might want to do. Compiling the engine takes ages and requires you to really know what you are doing. Also, unreal is best when making "typical" unreal games, like FPS, third person stuff games. A lot of their tooling has been build around it. If you are making something super custom (like your "playing captured animations backwards" mechanic) really prototype things out and see if unreal can handle that. Implementing those kinds of features yourself is especially difficult in UE, because of the huge amount of complex systems they have. Some smaller points: UE deprecates a lot of API stuff from minor version to version. Expect breaking code when switching versions. Also try to get access to the internal Unreal Developer Forums. There you can actually get answers to your questions, and many epic employees try to help out there. Anyway, I wish you good luck on your endeavor :)
Thanks for the in depth answer! Much appreciated. I thought as much with the buggy features, it seems like you can't avoid it when it comes to complex software. Yeah I've been experiencing the slow turn around with C++ compiling :) Exactly, that's something I've also noticed. Unreal has a lot of built-in assumptions that you'll be making a first/third person game. That's perfectly fine for this new game though. The playback mechanic will definitely need to be a custom implementation. I initially attempted to use Unity's built-in timeline tool and what we need is way to complex for it, so I'm assuming unreal will be the same. I'll have to keep an eye on the api then. Great tip about the forum! Didn't know that was a thing, I'll look into it. Thanks again for the advice :)
The big difference here is that Unity's business model incentivizes building flashy features to lure in new customers, whereas Epic's business model (royalty-based) incentivizes helping your licensees succeed in building a successful game/franchise.
@@jorhoto7064 not true. I have personally worked with epic to track down & resolve issues in their network replay system as a solo dev. people report issues to epic all the time and get them resolved. moreover, community members also contribute source code into the engine on a regular basis. look at the release notes (not the news article, the release notes) of any UE4/UE5 release and see the list of community members that contributed. epic has a documented track record of working with small studios & solo developers when it comes to engine features.
cons : 1-too much to learn 2-c++ knowledge combined with blueprint (it will take time and effort to learn) 3-project building problems (its slow and it can show errors after waiting for too long) 4-hard to fix glitches 5-exporting 3d models with texture (it requires some work 6-giving up
I think unreal is going to be every experienced choice eventually, but not the choice for beginners just because unity holds your hands while unreal yeet you to the documents and wish you well
That is nonsense, you need to learn patience and learn to read, every single person out there, that actually takes the time to learn any engine will learn it... Using assets in Unity , is not learning an engine.....
Biggest cons I know when being a beginner (me doing unreal sincer 2013 UE2.5): Blueprints is probably the most beginner friendly way to program. However it is not as efficient/fast as C++. Usually that does not matter, but it could. C++ however is a lot harder to learn/understand/master than C# for example. However you can do anything with both Bluepritn AND C++. You can even make your own blueprints using C++. And C++ is probably the fastest out there besides assembly. The UI might look like there is sooo much and you're getting overwhelmed BUT after a few days its not like that at all, and you will see it is alll you need and actually kinda simple.
The biggest issue I’ve had with Unreal so far is that Engine sometimes crushes with really obscure errors. Today, I’ve spent the whole day fixing an error that crashed the engine when the editor boots up, effectively preventing me from accessing my project. It’s also harder to find people who have had the same problem as it has a much smaller community compared to unity.
My main reason to choose UE was - blueprints, I'm not a programmer so this is the easiest way to start coding gameplay, of course you must know basic principles and etc, but its much easier to start than C#. I really like how many great tools UE has built-in and you don't need to have a ton of marketplace stuff to make you own game.
your problem is that you really think coding is the hardest part. those are just lines of code you need to memerize. you can learn that easly. but try to model on blender and i mean like entire levels where you need to model every little object and trust me. you will want to slit your wrists. unlike with coding. there isnt any real guide for modeling. its all trial and error. and its a nightmare. especielly with terrible blender
@@DracoMeteor91 Creating a mid-level 3D model is much easier than writing a mid-level code. And with the growth of the size of the game, the complexity of modeling does not grow, only the amount of work increases, but this cannot be said about programming. The blender is not bad at all, at least for modeling, it's better to sculpt in Zbrush, and do animation in Maya, textures in Substance painter.
@@pamparam3495 you dont get the point. you can learn coding. all the information is on the net. you need just to look for it. you cant learn modeling. not for uniqe models. because you cant copy someone else work in your game. and modeling is a pain in the butt its easy at all. its only easy when you make a terrible indie game. not if you want to make an actual good game
@@DracoMeteor91 it's not true. You can learn modelling as any other skill. And you can copy methods, technics, art style - anything. I'm gamedesigner and do both programming and modelling, the second one is much easier.
@@DracoMeteor91 You have no idea on what you're talking about. Blender isn't exactly easy to use. You need to learn how to use it (plenty of YT vids on it). But it's just fine as a 3d modeling, rendering and animation software. It gets better every version (most of the time lol). You can't compare coding withh asset creation. 2 different worlds. If asset creation isn't your thing, or if you just suck at it, that's fine; but don't knock the software you clearly don't know how to use.
The first thing I would personally look at is version control and backup system. I have not really had too many issues in UE5, however, I have had a couple, it may have been my fault but I would have preferred to roll back my changes than diagnose it. UE5 is still new so there will be some issues. I also would look at trying to be careful about just throwing in nanite objects everywhere because you can, assets such as trees and bushes really have issues with it and it all still comes at a penalty in resource usage. For speeding up blueprint compiling look into Blueprint Nativization as that Project Setting may help. If you really get into it, building pipelines for Asset validation and builds automation could really save significant time.
my pain points using ue5: - retargeting skeletal meshes is still really painful (needs manual fiddling to make it work, hard to map animations from one skeleton to another) - the concept of animation graph and the connection to your regular player controller blueprints / C++ is somewhat complex to grasp when you are getting started - collision channels (physics, nonphysics, or both, overlap and hit responses) should be well understood to avoid debugging collisions later - you need decent hardware to run it (minimum specs: 32GB, RTX 2060, i9 10900k, or 5800X CPU at least in my opinion) - plugin system can be a mess (compatibility issues, outdated plugins need to be recompiled and sometimes the source has to be fixed to make it work with a new engine version until plugin developers update the plugin to latest) - understanding and setting up lighting can be hard ( I can recommend William Faucher's youtube channel for correct understanding and setup of lights, he's an excellent tutor and a great guy, too) Thank you for your video, enjoy the ride! Regards, RAGD
My 20 yr old old quad core with a 950, 32gb, runs Unreal just fine...." has to be fixed to make it work with a new engine version until plugin developers update the plugin to latest)" That is the same in every engine on the market, you have to wait for developers to update... Dude how many games have you made or plug ins?? you understand its better to wait for the update until you make changes to plug ins, so it don't break shit every 2 seconds and add more work?? Seriously...
Using UE since 1 year (I have a background in cinematography and advertisement). Never used Unity so take my words with a grain of salt. So far it's a love-hate relationship with UE. My crash dump is several hundred megabytes big. Auto-saves never work. I can brew some coffee or do my weekly chores when booting up a project for the first time. It's such a heavy piece of software that I had to upgrade to a 3090ti to get my s**t done on time. The folder structure is super weird and clunky. Sometimes you don't even know if UE is bugging out or you did something to startle it. That all sucks so so much! And then ... then it surprises you with the most jaw dropping and awe-inspiring visuals and god-send innovations like Lumen and Nanite. It keeps pushing your creative boundaries. It's freaking FREE!!! It helps you grow as an artist and THAT feeling is nothing short of liberating. I just keep coming back to UE. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was switching to UE as well after 10 years of using Unity. Its nothing personal its just depends on each project. Its been nearly 2 years since i switched and i can say if you want to take advantage of cpp than its going to be hard since the documentation and resources are much less available than in comparison to unity
I loved the video. This was the last video that a assist that convince me to do right choice of switching. I was very annoyed with the way Unity is going forward, never finishing good tools and plugins. I'm think the could do that in the future, but for now is a mess. To do a game with quality you need to spend a lot in 3th plugins, or do a lot work/having to pay for that. The tools of the box are a shame. Thanks for the video! you're awesome, we be waiting for more updates about that transition!
When I first wanted to start making games, I tried Unreal and absolutely hated the node system. It was like learning Blender, but with less documentation lol. I couldn't figure out what nodes I had at my disposal or how to use them... So, I tried Unity and loved that all I had to really do was learn C# and everything else was pretty simple. With Unreal it felt like I have to learn all these different systems AND figure out how they work together. I still want to really learn how to make something with Unreal but every time I open it I am immediately disheartened by the complexity. I've never played your games but from one game maker to another, I wish you the best of luck!
After 5 years I also switched to Unreal and will never go back. I am both a game developer and an asset store publisher and I have lost faith in Unity which just focuses on nice videos and mobile games. On the other hand, Unreal shows real progress and they wait to have a working product before talking about it. What I do miss about Unity tho is c#, because coding in c++ is annoying as hell. Just this morning I spent 2h fixing a bug to then realize it was a false positive by Visual Studio... Edit: I see a lot of comments about Unity and DOT. Just google Unreal Mass Entity, Unity didn't invent anything.
I was a developer in Unity for about 5-6 years and I took the step to UE almost 3 years ago. Best decision you'll ever make, you can look at my channel to see my current project if you're curious
I been messing with Unity and Unreal Engine and always found myself running back to Unreal Engine. Something about it grabs my attention outside of using visual scripting. I feel like I can prototype a lot faster with it. It does help that I have a strong computer 120900K with 64GB of DDR4, and a couple of M.2 plus a RTX 3080. However I send people using Unreal with less hardware than I have. It does help running demos and stuff like the Matrix demo having that amount of ram. I do like the interface better in Unreal Engine, I do like the programming better in Unity due to C#. Now with Unreal Engine 5.1 coming out soon it is going to optimized and fix a lot of the stuff to make it worth it for mobile development and other neat stuff. I just wish they had a template for 2D game development like they did in Unreal Engine 4. I have however develop two projects that is base in 2D with Unreal Engine. I found it I can get started way faster with Unreal Engine and I seem to get stuck with Unity for to long that I get frustrated. Importing old assets is Super easy with Unreal Engine than Unity.
ok, dunno if you'll see this 8 months later but here are some things about Unreal to keep in mind: - with great power comes great responsability. Unreal will crash more often when you don t know what you want to do. For example, i was following an Unreal course and Unreal decided to crash when I created a material. That never happened to me with Unity. And Unreal kept crashing over and over again when i was interacting with that material. Of course, as an Unreal new user, the last thing you want to do is understanding the whole engine so that you understand when and why it crashes - you have to keep up with Unreal. If you want to make a game AND use megascans from the store, you have to make all the models created by you fit with that quality. That also includes game design, sound design and others. I don't know how big your team is, but if you want to make AAA games with a small team, you will have issues. Everything will have to be over polished to keep up with the megascans - also, if you use megascans, you need to take into consideration the future. Since everyone else will use the same megascans, every other game will look the same which will lead to player eye fatigue. Now the features are quite new and not a lot of games have been released using the megascans, but in the future, everything will look the same. If you want to do stylized work, then everything i said here is useless :) That's kinda it! Hope your transition goes well!
I think the 4th pro of UE is that it's made for people who want to make (high level, console style) games. I've seen 2D and side scrollers made in UE and they work fine. But it's easier and faster in Unity.
as a Unreal user 20+ yrs and Unity 15+ , I would agree, you on the 2d games. Unity has better 2d tools, I remember back in the day, Unity didn't and we had to use assets like 2d tool kit and such...
I think you are 100% right. Since Unity is not focusing on fixing and polishing the main system (like the lighting) and I have to spend more money on a third party asset that will do the thing that Unity was supposed to do in the first place.... Thanks but no thanks. I work with Unity for almost a decade now and I totally agree, even though UE is 'heavier' and it takes longer to do some tasks, it does have more useful tools by default. But as you said, the fact that Unity is focusing more on those casual games might be the reason there is such a big difference between them.
UE5 don't have good 2d tools. That's only one reason why i started to learn Unity. 2d mobile games are huge part of market and good start for beginners
we've been using Unreal Engine since it was first release in 2009 as UDK A.K.A. UE3 and YES is a BEAST!!! the best aspect of Unreal is it memory control which in unity is automatic garbage collection that's why big games are built in Unreal. Unity3d recently start working on adding more memory allocation and management.
Im currently in the process of trying Unity. I plan to stick to a solo dev role and the problem with unreal. Its too much and requires alot of know how and expertise to modify despite it being „open source“. The problem is that if you want to make a good stylized shading system, the shader editor isn’t enough and you have to basically modify the source code which is something I am uninterested in. Learning how they built the engine and working within their architecture is also that would take alot of time adjusting to. I think its great if you have a team and trying to make a next gen experience
Hey guys, Id like to make a follow-up video request, now that you guys are working with Unreal for over a year, and considering all of your experience with it and Unity, how do you compare them now? In which areas would you still prefer unity, if any? would be really good to get some more insight with more experience
Listen, if y'all can make it pass UE's UI; You're 80% of the way there - lol 😂 I kid, I'm excited to see wheree this joureny takes y'all and I'm just grateful to be apart of it - even if i'm just watching the DevLog and liking your videos.
It's a minor thing, but if you guys are using C++ to make the game.. Umm.. remember to check for null pointers, when Unity comes to a null pointer it shows a nice little error in the console window, but when Unreal comes across a null pointer, it's game over man, it's game over.. and the engine crashes. So just make sure you check for nullptr and it'll be fine :)
LMFAO.. its NOT hard to know where pointers go.... Just by this comment, some of you never programmed in the gaming industry... Learn to read the source and API and problem solved.......
I think the time being that a new project is started is a good enough reason to try something different or new, like your switch to Unreal. I don't agree with the statement that Unity's focus is mobile games. Unity does that well, but you can do much more. Thing is, the investments into higher tier features, which you can get with Unreal right now, have not taken fruit yet in Unity as they just acquired those assets and they have not been implemented.
@@jamesonvparker Not personally. My school, SCAD, does. I teach in the game design department. If you are serious about pursuing a career in games it's an option!
@@imperfectgamedev7533 Thanks! A friend of mine graduated from there. I studied at Full Sail but not Game Dev. So tempted to try and get formal education in it. Tutorials only get me so far! Thank you for responding.
I would probably spend the time to learn how to enhance the visuals in Unity, instead of spending more time learning a completely new engine from scratch. You have been using Unity for over a decade, don't underestimate that advantage.
@@joshcruzmadeit If you need source access, you are doing it wrong anyway. The point of an engine is to use it without dabbling with its code. Or you are a big studio that can afford a dedicated engine programmer who invests a bunch of his time to study the nitty-gritty details of the engine.
It was a couple years ago now - hoepfully they've firmed up their rendering features - but I gave up trying to create polished graphics in Unity because there were too many different approaches, gotchas and unclear timelines in the use of baked + realtime lighting across forward and deferred rendering, gpu baking, post effects as package on github(?) and then the various render pipelines. I'm happy to do my research and learn the features, but I couldn't get to a stage I even felt sure my learning was along the right path, or when and if features would begin to work well together.
What a nice video i love it ! 🙂 can you tell us about HDRP in Unity thoughts about it ? do you think it handle 3d high games compared to unreal ? thanks!
2 года назад
it's funny we migrated from unity to unreal at the end of the physical release of our last game, and we got through the exact same thought process
Annoyingly, I've found both engines have their pros and their cons which makes it _very_ difficult to decide which one may be 'better'. But I do find Unreal is much better at rapid iterations and generally just "getting things working". It also feels more modern and much more cohesive, unlike Unity which often feels like a patchwork quilt of various old crap that hasn't been maintained or updated in years. I can get things working much more quickly in Unreal and it feels like less of a chore to do so, but Blueprints can be extremely intimidating to a newbie and can turn into spaghetti very quickly. You are absolutely right about Unity being loaded with unfinished, buggy features that never really go anywhere, not to mention the engine itself is so barebones that you have to install all sorts extra just to make it viable and more comfortable to use. For example, the new Input System and niceties like Cinemachine are first party and Unity recommend you use them rather than handhacking everything - so why aren't they default parts of the engine? They should be. But for some people the key selling point is that Unity seems more versatile in the sorts of games you can create (really anything, including a sudoku game for Android if you like). Meanwhile Unreal Engine is really best suited for walking simulators, 3D adventure games, and shooters like Gears. You likely wouldn't use Unreal to make something like Pong or a sidescrolling 2D platformer.
only 4 real con about Unreal I found after using it for 6 month: 1/ Its huge and heavy. Not for typical laptop. You "NEED" decent laptop / pc to make a decent game. 2/ Its does not use strimline nameing or system or method. Its like unreal comes from another univers. almost everything is uniq to it. so if you migrate to it recently you will use google pretty often. 3/ Its does not have many resourse. If i say it more clearly... Unreal does not have on-point resourse. 4/ assets pipeline, you can use same assets in both godot and unity directly from godot. How ever unreal has issue of scale. it will messed up you animetion and uv. How ever there is a plugins SendToUnreal solved this problem, mostly.
Advice: Understand that everything you see in the editor can be created in C++. You don’t have to edit the engine. Create your own plug-in with all of the features your game will ever need. Blueprints are a great place to prototype, then you would move the code to C++.
The one con i had was that there aren't that many people using unreal like in unity. In unity you can just search something and you'll get it but in unreal, its kinda hard
That’s not true. There is not only documentation, unreal learning, forums, but also endless RUclips videos. If you’re truly looking, you will definitely find it. It’s right there.
I started to switch back to Unreal... Then I remembered why I hated it and kept using Unity. I've been using Unity since Version 3.4.2. The first time I've used Unreal, it was version 3. Unity has a similar setup (hotkey wise) to Maya and as a Maya user, everything feels better. Unreal takes a long time to compile shaders, lighting, etc. The biggest thing I HATE about Unreal, is setting up animations. Plus, I hate spaghetti code. Overall, I'm happy with Unity because of how easily and quickly I can fix any kind of issues I come across. So... for graphics, yes... Unreal is the way to go. There are so many more things that Unreal does for a user that makes it easy. But when it comes to particles, animations, coding, and setup. Unity has made it so much easier to get the results I need. Unity HDRP vs Unreal, I'm going to say Unreal has them beat. However, that does not mean that a beautiful game can not be made using the URP or HDRP. It just means that more work is required within Unity to get the results desired. I've used both engines and gone in-depth on both and I will never switch to Unreal because of issues I've encountered. Their particles systems, blueprints, animator systems, and because of how large project files become. (I.e. 10Gb in unity with Library compared to 43GB in Unreal)
I use Unreal Engine for more than a year and I've never used game engines before. And I don't use C++, only Blueprints. Cons are mostly the shader compiling, it takes hours. And the complex Lightning in Unreal must Be built also. An other con, is that Unreal is very huge. The Particle Editor, the Blueprint Systems, the AI Systems, the Material Editor etc. And you have to learn all this, to make the game you want. But at the end, at my opinion (without any experience in Unity) Unreal is the better game Engine.
I've been using Unity for so far 2 and half years, it's pretty easy, understandable, great engine, I think it's the best, I used unreal engine for 3 years, with Unreal Engine I haven't made much games as it's very complex if you just wants to make a material, but Unity for just 2 and half years I made so far 4 games, 2 of them is mobile games, the other 2 is for desktop and consoles, I just recommend to anyone who really wants to works on games and don't have much experience and like new to the industry, I think Unity is the best set for you.
I am looking to switch from Unity to unreal, after 6 years with loving Unity. I have not decided yet. so just having a play around Unreal. Unity Cons: Disjointed confused direction. Too many choices, and incomplete bits (Render pipelines, lighting etc) Difficult to get that great looking game experience. Unity Pros: Familiarity, C# coding. Ability to develop WebGL browser Games. More general game development. Unreal: Clearer direction and focus. High level game concept support built in. Easy to get great looking games and terrains up and running. Unreal Cons: Unfamiliarity, I am not sure that I can really get to grips with Blueprints, at scale or be fully productive with graphical programming. (I guess I may have to buckle down to C++) Little to no support to WebGL/ Browser Applications. Big focus on first/third person games. I dunno really,
Here's an idea: Open up blender, create a cube, fracture it. Apply physics on the pieces, press play and bake the explosion it makes to keyframes. Now try to import that into Unreal Engine. I dare you. If you succeed; please share 🤣
Hobby Unreal Engine user for 2.5 years. The biggest con I've found is the spaghetti code, such as you show at 3m 56s. However, I found that there is little to no performance decrease for using multiple references instead of having lines dragged everywhere. Having all your references close to your function makes readability SO much better. Once your code is tight, comment the bleep out of it. I can come back to a well commented program after 6 months and jump back in within moments. Just read the comments. UE can produce some of the worst spaghetti code you can imagine. Those old Obfuscated C challenges have nothing on UE for unreadable code. If you code right and tight, it can also produce the most clean and readable code I've ever produced.
Well, that's one thing, to keep it tight, but also to differentiate between scripting and programming. Any sufficiently complex enough task is better implemented in c++ and called in blueprints. Also, an Event Graph is just that, a graph, you can make multiple, you can make functions. I rarely have blueprints that have more than 5 nodes in each graph.
I've been considering this, but the biggest con I see in the long-term is the 5% gross revenue royalty after the first $1M. Sure, most games don't ever reach a $1M lifetime revenue, but if/once they do, your engine costs can suddenly skyrocket. At a lifetime revenue of $1.2M, you're already paying Epic $10K, which is more or less the price of 5 Unity Pro yearly licenses, so you might become "the victim of your own success" down the line. 5% of gross revenue is potentially quite a big chunk of money.
Things to know about Unreal Engine. 1. Ue4 USes Tesselation and ue 5 Nanite, that means ue5 doasn´t support Tesselation and not Nanite on Skeletal mesh. You could attach Nanit mesh to a Skeletal mesh and Stretch tham with splines but the way i had to run to get Tesselation to ue5 sucked. 2. There is a Content Gap between Exampels, Marcetplace Assets and a final Game, especialy if you go for Replicated Systems, that means to use assets is not anougth you have to understand tham. 3. Forget bone ik and Physic asset and use controllrigs. 4. How to learn unreal engine Autodidact and free. Advanced Locomotion System , Windwalker Echo , RPG example , Lyra Starter game but at first content Example.
Eu mudei da Unreal para Unity por vários fatores, um deles é que eu prefiro programar do que usar Blueprints e quanto tentava programar na Unreal Engine era muito lento, demorava em torno de 10 minutos para compilar algo simples e quando abria a unreal novamente, tudo que foi programado sumia e tinha que refatorar o código para aparecer novamente, tentei usar blueprints, até é amigável porém do jeito que se utiliza acaba sendo confuso já que tem que procurar os códigos e várias abas e fica dentro do blueprint do personagem eu acabei não curtindo a forma que se montava o script, a Unity é tudo tão simples, cria um script, abre apenas uma janela no editor de código, escreve, interpreta e coloca no objeto e pronto, fora que na Unreal eu nunca nem se quer consegui montar um protótipo, isso que eu mexo desde a UDK3 e nunca consegui, na Unity com vídeos qualquer eu consegui fazer um joguinho simples, aliás, vários joguinhos e pelo fato de ser programação C# é bem mais fácil de estudar os erros e corrigir, por causa desses detalhes estou voltando novamente para Unity de vez
The cons i have is the final package project never less then 120mb Sometime i want to do small app whit 3d but it allways be 120mb The software complex .. after you lern its awesome you have so many tools!! I really enjoy it the blueprint is 10 time faster then coding But some time i add c++ class to my game After i make 3 game i understand the engine and then make my big game
I hope you continue to update us on your conversion. While I don't agree with some of your reasoning I think that last comment about unfinished features is important. I'm curious if you used HDRP any prior to your switch? It seems like Unreal's default 3d project is comparable to an HDRP project, but I'm pretty ignorant of how both compare.
They only a month into unreal - give it time haha! Unreal becomes hellish ugly when you need to dig into code to make tweaks because the built in doesn't quite do what you want - then you on your own given the lack of a decent community,
ROFL, comparable?? No... I used both engines professional.... Unity has no idea what its doing with SRP's, having 3 rendering pipeline was the most foolish thing Unity could of done, ask any asset dev, what they are doing through...Hell...
Unreal was an inhouse engine for the longest time. Then it was available to approved AAA partners with deep pockets. Then it got opened up to everyone.
I have been recently doing some unreal religiously. The biggest pro unity will always have over unreal is the fact that it is lighter weight. Also, unreal is a full blown game engine. Unity is more of a general 3D engine. When I'm doing simulations, machine learning, robotics, I prefer unity because it is more suited for general 3D stuff. Unreal is for anyone that wants to take game dev seriously. btw, I started using unity in 2010.
Editing some part of classes in C++ need the engine to be compile and restarted again or you won't see any change, and it never tell you when it really needs a restart of the whole program. This is the main painful point to me, Live Coding can break project from what I've experienced and it's still not ready has it should Otherwise, great engine!
Blueprint only is not working in unreal.. or better.. Its not working if you want to create heavy complex codes. Structs f.e. are dangerous to do in BP only. Cause the reflection system sometimes stumbles over itself and destroyes whole BP Structures and Graphs. Its annoying to do heavy tasks and types in c++ and make them blueprinttype reflective.. But.. The whole UE System and Ecosystem is beautiful and i love each minute of work with it, since the last 7 Years 😊
I found if I delete a BP that has got a construction script code with an procedural Array and a For Each Loop connected up to the Construction Script exe pin This was in ver 4.15 even if that BP is not an active instance inside the game world and is just sitting all on its own in the windows browser the engine will remove the BP but when you try to create a new BP and start to add in any new nodes then the engine would just slow all down and crash. Rendering the project utterly useless. And that's how my project got bricked. I thought it was safe to just delete a unused BP but it turns out its not so safe to delete it if its got code still connected in the construction script. Unreal has always had trouble with Arrays inside of For Each Loops. And trouble with corrupting its own Structs. and BPS And also sometimes one or two nodes in the BP may turn dead and not work at all and unreal engine don't tell you why the node stopped working. And when things go south or the house is all on fire in your project, start a blank new project is Epic's answer and move it into a new house and start another fire. Migration of assets does not always work properly. it doesn't always copy everything all over. And you find material assets didn't copy over properly and find errors in the material with missing textures. You can also lose the static mesh collision socket from off your weapons if you upgrade the engine. Now I didn't know that upgrading the engine to a newer version would remove the static mesh collision socket from my weapon meshes but that's exactly what it did. Couldn't recover the socket collision back even when I had replaced the missing socket and put it back on the weapon, the code no longer recognized the socket anymore even though I had the socket name the same as the one that got deleted so my weapons had no collision detection anymore and was rendered useless, now the collision detection got bricked. This to me sounds like Unreal only recognizes that which is been saved with the current old engine version So I couldn't recover the socket back on the weapons.. Other Issues. Ghosting Issues with the Widgets sometimes a phantom copy of a widget component would appear behind or on front on the screen messing up the text or graphics. And you can't remove it from the stack in the designer without deleting everything because its an extra item or double text that unreal had somehow copied there but its not in the stack in the designer. And you have to delete the whole entire stack to just try to remove the strange double phantom copy. Disliked the fact that the built in subtitles system don't support data tables. Strange behavior with Box Collision Triggers. I place a box trigger down in the Map and assign Movie 1 for the trigger to play that movie when the player steps inside it That works fine with 1 trigger. But soon as I place more than 1 trigger instance into the map and assign them their different movie files to play then weird stuff starts happening. When I step in the trigger the assigned movie doesn't always play and shows me a white box, or it plays the movie just fine or sometimes it plays the wrong movie file of the other trigger even though each trigger has been set to play the right media file. So each time I step into the same triggers the value keeps on randomly changing. So I get a random result of unreal engine bouncing values around the triggers instead of staying with only whats been assigned to play for each trigger. Could never solve that issue. So I could not play multiple movie widget dialogs because of that problem with the trigger box collisions giving me random conflicting results. I found the same thing also with Data Tables. When entering in the Data table by hand with the built-in editor for dialog well sometimes the Array Data Pointer Index can become corrupted as well.. And then It starts reading in row 550 as row 562 so it displays row 562 instead of displaying up row 550. And then to display row 550 you have to go into the trigger box window properties of the Dialog actor Array and put in row 542 to get it to display row 550 from the data table. When index pointers in the array becomes corrupted that's what it does to the data table it throws the pointer array index out of alignment with whats listed in the data table.. And then you have to go through all your triggers to put in all the wrong row numbers just to get the data table to display all the right rows. Group AI Party Member follow me. Unreal Engine has no easy way to get party members to follow one another when switching over into different AI party pawns if you are not using the local level BP to switch the AI pawns over with which works well. But it only works with using the Local Level BP to posess (but if your game has got multiple levels). Then level BP AI Switching won't work when you load the next level.. So when I used possess pawn to switch from my own player controller into an AI party member, soon as I controlled them and then switched back again, the AI would not resume their own AI normal behavior anymore they would not go back to their AI controller to resume their follow me behavior and just stood around all dead after I switched out of them. Could not solve that issue either. So because of those issues I struggle to try to put my game in this engine.
One of the definite Con of unreal is not able to do 2D, C++ can be a con base on how you look at it. It is almost too professional on the sense that it will take you some real learning to understand why certain feature are designed the way they are. Once you understand it, you feel all powerful and enlightened and want to really praise them, but until then, you are puzzled like a dog trying to learn physics.
My main gripe with unreal is the language you have to use, blueprints aren't what im used to either, Unity has a really nice set of APIs in C# which is one of the cleaner languages of the bunch
I kind of agree. The C# in Unity gives you much more control and it's much easier to use, whereas the UE Blueprint system is very confusing for beginners and gets very ugly and messy very quickly. If you want the same level of coding control that Unity gives you, you then need to get involved in a weird implementation of C++.
It seems a lot of people are still making videos around unity being a "Mobile targeted engine" which isn't quite the whole story. The engine is built to be modular and work on many platforms such as tvs, switch, consoles, unix, webgl, mac, windows, vr, ar and many more. To put this into perspective here are some premium Unity games according to steam. Subnautica, The Forest, Cuphead, Rimworld, Bendy and the Inc machine So classing the engine as "Mobile only" or "Going in the direction of mobile games and micro transactions" just ticks me off whenever I hear it. I don't have much experience with Unreal but I'm sure it can make a much better looking game given the nature of its engine. Even with Unity's HDRP render pipeline making great strides lately it will never compete with Unreals graphics but it's certainly a great step up in history. After watching this video it does look like Unreal has a lot of stuff that is amazing with visualization but that is only if you need it. Someone like me I wouldn't use much of it like the blueprints, i'd straight up not use it as I'm a coder at heart - but others would greatly benefit from its ease of accessibility. You can make amazing games with all engines. Some have upsides compared to others and its just up to the individual to decide what to use for their kind of game and how they prefer to make games.
I've been using Unity for the last 5 years and I'm thinking about Unreal 5.1. I've thought about switching a few times. I'm planning a new Zombie game that has realistic graphics. Maybe not photoreal but I want it to look as good as I can. Unity does a good job for the most part until I start getting a good amount of draw calls into it. After that it's kinda bad. I try to optimize it but it seems no matter what I try I'm never really 100% satisfied. Also I've tried switching to Unreal before and found it overwhelming to take in all the newer stuff I wasn't quite used to yet. I ran straight back to Unity where I was familiar with everything. And finally there's all the Unity assets that I can't use in Unreal because they are tools for Unity. I'd lose out on Thousands of dollars of assets that I've paid for. Not to mention I have a paid Megascans subscription only because I use Unity and I can't get any of that money back. I'd really rather get Unity to work how I'd like than switch to Unreal. Unity is like home to me. Unreal is like the neighbor's house. It's basically like this when I'm in Unreal. Some things seem kind of familiar but it's not like home to me.
![Stromae, Pomme - “Ma Meilleure Ennemie” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Visualizer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1F3OGIFnW1k/mqdefault.jpg)
![Twenty One Pilots - “The Line” (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/E2Rj2gQAyPA/mqdefault.jpg)
Bro just dodged a bullet with this move
Who's here after the Unity's announcement of charging per install
In my opinion, it depends on what you (mostly) want to do, and what kind of a person you are:
If you want to do "a shooter", or "an action game", or just in general a game that neatly fits into any of the classic genres, you should choose Unreal. Also, if you know nothing about programming (and don't really want to learn too much about its technical side), you should choose Unreal.
If, however, your game idea(s) are more experimental, not really fitting into any classic genres, and/or if you know/enjoy programming, or if you want to learn programming in-depth, writing actual code, then you should choose Unity.
Why: Unreal is, I like to call it, a golden cage. The whole engine is designed with lots of built-in defaults that make assumptions about what kind of a game you're making. If you really ARE making that kind of a game, those defaults will be a blessing for you, because without having to put too much effort into it, stuff will just work, and it will work out in your favor. There's always The Unreal Way of doing things for everything, which lets you not have to think too much about the technical side of things (unless you want to), and you'll be able to just follow The Way, and things will work out nicely. Also blueprints are very friendly to non-programmers.
However, as soon as your game idea doesn't fit any of the classic genres, as soon as you need or want to do something your way, instead of The Unreal Way, all the assumptions and defaults that the engine has, and The Unreal Way imposes on you, will fight you every frikkin step of the way, and even the simplest thing will turn into royal pain where before you can even start doing the thing, you'll have to spend twice as long removing all those defaults, fighting your way out of that golden cage.
Also, its documentation is shit, and its community is royally unhelpful (and on this, a professional Unreal Engine dev of 15 years wholly agrees with me), but on the other hand, most of the stuff in the engine is more or less included in the visual UI, and can be set up by clicking menus and stuff. What you need to click is sometimes hidden in very obscure menus and dialogs, but in theory, if you spend poking around the UI for long enough, you will find it.
The documentation, and even answers from community, however very often boil down to "It's easy, you just click this button". However, nobody will actually tell you where that button is, and you often find, after literally HOURS of looking, that it's in some tab of some popup window that you open from a submenu of a dropdown button labeled by three dots in a specific line in a side bar of a specific component properties.
Unity takes the opposite approach - it's an empty universe. The upside is, there isn't really any The Unity Way of doing things - however you want to do a thing, you can, in 98% of cases. The downside is - most of everything you want to have in your game, you will have to make from scratch (or pull in from some library/asset, and those are of... wildly varying quality, often very clunky and obnoxious). Another downside is that if you don't think about stuff like your project structure, and how the game will work on a technical level, your code will very soon become a horrible, clunky, buggy, janky, slow, inefficient mess.
On the other hand, the documentation is AMAZING, Unity is one of the only dev tools where if I want a question answered, my first, and in most cases last stop, is the actual official documentation. On top of that, community, even though often slightly lacking in knowledge and skill, is extremely friendly and helpful.
And ON TOP OF THAT, the programming API is, to a very large degree, self-documenting. I've learned approximately as much about Unity by just poking in the code editor and reading the intellisense suggestions and toying around trial-and-error style, as I've learned from tutorials and docs. It's intuitive (at least to me), clear, and usually simple, straightforward.
Therefore, in unity, whatever crazy unusual gameplay idea(s) you have, you can just open a new project, and start implementing them right away, and gradually fill that empty universe with them, which is (to me) much more satisfying than having to fight the unreal's populated default environment.
For example, making something like Pedestrian in Unreal would be a royal pain in the ass, in my opinion. That's the type of thing Unity is better for, due to how unusual the mechanics are, so starting from an empty universe is the better approach.
HOWEVER, it also means, that: In unreal, you can get a pretty good result without really knowing what you're doing, and just letting the engine handhold you through the process. In unity, this isn't possible for real projects - in unity, if you don't really know what you're doing, it shows, IN A BIG WAY. This is where the "unity jank" stereotype comes from. In unity, if you want to achieve a good result, you actually have to learn the technical ins and outs of the engine, as well as be at least an average programmer, you will need to take time to make sure your code is actually good, you will have to take time and energy to set up things correctly (and to even learn and understand HOW to set them up correctly), you will have to take time and energy to design your own structure for the project, for the code, for how everything interacts and fits together... otherwise you'll end up crushed under a flaming pile of shit kind of mess.
Incredible summary of both engines, thanks for writing this!
Great comment! I’ve been using Unity for over a decade and use Unreal at work on commercial projects and this is pretty accurate.
Thank you, very detailed unbiased and useful review 🙏
i don't agree with you ... shooter or action game isn't limited to unreal only. if you do the exact same scene in unreal and unity, you will notice unity run 2-3x more faster and require way less a powerful video card.
the main problem with unreal is the lack of asset. you have no choice to use the build in api for everything and that's one of the reason why i switched to unity 3 years ago.
but you are right, it's nice when unreal tune up everything but again this can be a good and bad thing because for simple project this is very nice but for big project and long time support this is very bad because you have no choice to edit unreal source and if you edit unreal source you will have to stick with that version forever. in unity, you can upgrade the version and download a backyard compatible api like hdrp 10 so your project don't break and you have access to new feature.
@@martindubois9279 I don't agree as well with him. He does a very bad illustration of the two engines that i doubt if he has any experience in any of them.
The speed as you mentioned is obvious to anyone. But that shouldn't hinder people from using Unity for many good games.
The OP mentions that Unity is better for programmers just because Unreal has Blueprints. He obviously doesn't know that Blueprints are just a scripting language that are supposed to be used for less "intensive functionalities" and others. For more "serious" features c++ is the solution.
That is, i hope he is talking about blueprints and isn't proposing that programming in c# is more difficult than c++.
That would be really throwing all the work done in creating c# a higher level programming language, which is 15 years younger than c++, into the sewer. Worse if one realize what type of "programs" the two are respectively commonly used to creating.
I don't think that the often mentioned idea that Unreal is strongly aimed at a certain type of games is in any doubt. Note that this is not a real obstacle against doing any other kind of game with it. In that same idea, one could say the same thing about Unity. Although it isn't felt as strongly. Don't believe it. One just has to try to use other engine to see how obvious it is.
I will note that i also disagree with some points you made.
You mention the need to edit the source code for Bigger projects. Although it will depend on the the projects itself. I do agree that it will probably be necessary. Is it a pain? Yep.
That is why version control of the editions is important. So there will not be any "sticking to a version forever". But that only applies to big projects.
If an indie team feels the need to edit the Unreal source then it is a sign that they have done some weird decisions about their projects. This or maybe what they need is a custom engine where not even Unity will help them.
Unreal could be generally classified as better for bigger projects than Unity. While Unity is better for smaller projects. The API of the two are not even comparable.
Of course although the difference in the APIs is true, this kind of categorisation is to say the least very crude and should not really be accepted so easily.
The two have their own particularities and one should avoid to much random qualifications.
But if one needs a quick shortcut (shortcuts are not always trusty), an easier way to understand more about the two engines, is to compare the games that have been done (and are being done at this moment) with them. That should give a better idea if a certain engine is appropriate for our own project or not.
As for Bigger projects. Unity has been growing more and more and is getting really competitive, but it is still not comparable to Unreal. The history and resources of the two companies are not on the same page. I think it is a disfavour that people make by easily comparing the two engine that are so different in so many aspects.
In the end one should realize that more than the engine one choose, it really depend on the team, their budget and time, their previous knowledge, ... and not forgetting their project needs.
I bet you're feeling pretty great about this decision after the Unity's changes to their fee structure the other day =)
lol same i was thinking about it too 😂😂
That right there is the reason my indie shop switched from Unity to Unreal at the end of September. Unity can go eat a giant bag of *[insert plural expletive here]*.
that video suddenly became highly relevant
Great Video. I have also switched from Unity to Unreal, and as a Software Engineer I despised the idea of using Blueprints instead of C++. After I gave it some time it really became second nature and my preferred way of writing code. I never thought this would be possible, and it is so much faster than writing and compiling C++ code. Best of luck to you guys :)
Agreed
Umm, not agreed. I do lots of web programming andI have very little C++ experience.. So I have to use it blueprint. Sure blueprint system has own merits.
However reading and decoding others blueprints are painful, even reading my old code is painful and finding blueprint solutions from the web are painful.
Maybe it's because I'm an old web programmer. But from my point of view, the thing that limits me the most in the unreal engine is the blueprint system.
Between C++ and blueprint. It would be great if it was a lightweight programming language like C# or Google go or Javascript.
Otherthan that it was great.
@@delifisektuxedo if you add plenty of comments for each section of blueprint code to describe what it's doing then it's a lot easier to decipher when you come back to it
@@territorygameofficial Probably, however I got lots of external assets plus, good code explain himself
@@delifisektuxedo ok well you just said decoding your code and others is painful so...
@SkookumArts - one year into the switch to Unreal (after 10 years in Unity) and in light of Unity's new drama, imagine we're all curious to hear your takes on everything.
awesome video. I think my biggest gotcha in the last 7 years in UE is understanding how the editor handles migration of assets from one project to another and how it deals with references. I wish I would have learned to right click - "fix up redirectors" on content browser folders sooner, I usually do it on the root to make sure they're all handled. I have a project with 70GB of assets in it and it's been my master project for what I'm working on. It was really difficult to migrate what I need to focus on to a blank project before I understood what was going on with references under the hood but I finally got the hang of it and have been able to optimize into a new master version of the project without all the unused assets.
Perspective of AAA UE programmer rather having a solo project in Godot:
I won't list UE upsides here, but the biggest downsides are:
- Source control. Blueprints are binary asset, so you move a node and your source control only sees changed binary asset. It's like that for many things.
- Blueprints. They are fine for artists and simple setup (this switch links to that door) but anything more still needs programmer mindset and at that point, they are just slowing you down. Add to it the previous point and yeah, they are bad.
- Size. That engine is big in every sense of the word. Download is big, startup is long, building from source takes hours. Changing your cpp and restarting engine to restart the game takes minutes. Branching takes ages, switching and rebuilding branch takes ages...
- Bonus point: Complexity. If you are one person in an army of people and do only animations for example, UE will have a slew of tools just for you. If you are trying to make a game "solo", you'll need to understand many workflows like that. You cannot "ignore" the complexity of something even when you don't really need it.
Yep, as someone who can code I find the Blueprint system really rather annoying.
I was much happier in Unity just defaulting to C# scripts. It was quick, i understood what was going on, I felt as if I knew what I needed to do. It was fine. You write C# code and attach it to whatever you like. I feel as if Unity added visual scripting just because Unreal had it. That doesn't mean it was necessary for Unity to do, and I certainly never used it.
In Unreal the Blueprint system turns into a pan of spaghetti in no time. It's not that intuitive, the Graph ends up cluttered, and you really have to know what nodes you need. I often found that "Context sensitive" was just wrong and was hiding things I actually did need, but wouldn't have realised I did, because I assumed the edtor knew what to do. And there are multiple things with the same name and different types, you won't realise you've picked the wrong one until it won't compile or the lines won't connect. They are, as you say, also binary assets, so you can't just easily dump them to use in other projects. Converting blueprints into C++ is also a crap shoot and doesn't work too well.
Also the UE Blueprints are kind of interpreted and don't seem to compile down to neat C++ so there is a performance hit. Part of me wonders if I'd rather write the C++ myself, but it seems to be a non-standard implementation and I'm not enough of a C++ expert to get the most performance out of it.
EXTREMELY ACCURATE
@@halfbakedproductions7887 these are also very valid points
lol, mans was ahead of his time.
Hope you've been enjoying Unreal!
Unreal Con: Documentation is all over the place or not at all. Look for something about 5.1? Nope, nothing, you find deprecated 4.x stuff ,they change or removed some command and there's no way of knowing how to do the same exact thing now. Find some API documentation, no example how to use it. Spent hours trying to automate changing the skeletal mesh of assets today, no luck at all. Yeah I really want to click in a field to filter, then select the skeleton, then click okay 200 times, thanks Epic, you're a real mother and that's only half a word. The other con is the TERRIBLE GUI of the launcher, hello, I don't need 256x256 pixel icons for the 500 assets I downloaded to test, found out they are junk or the 85 gigabyte city demo that gave my computer graphics card a brain hemorage and I'll never use. At least a decade of complaints on their forums about that, and they never listened. "Oh we make billions of dollars from Fortnite, big F you developers, eat a bag of raw sausages!"
You guys dodged a bullet, eh?
Looks like you guys really picked a great time to switch lol. Dodged a bullet.
IMO the biggest advantage to Unreal is also its biggest drawback, and that's the fact that the engine already has so much functionality built into it. One the one hand, it means you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you want to do something simple like make a character jump or crouch. On the other hand, it means if you want to implement jumping or crouching in a different way from how the engine does it, you'd better be prepared to bash your head against a brick wall for a few days while you struggle to figure out what obscure aspect of the built-in functionality isn't playing nice with your modifications. I've been in and out of game dev in some capacity for a decade now and have completed projects in both engines, and at the end of the day I've settled on Unreal as my engine of choice. All the features it comes with are just too useful to pass up, but goddamn I do sometimes envy how lightweight and unbloated Unity seems by comparison.
That’s one of the things I dislike the most about Unreal, especially as someone with a heavy background in Unity. I was working on a project where I had a custom way for handling character movement and rotation but it just wasn’t rotating. Turns out it had something to do with the player controller’s “control rotation”, which had to be disabled in the character class’s settings panel. Spent a good couple of days chasing my tail and trying to figure out where my code was wrong only to discover my code was fine all along, it was just Unreal imposing its rules again…
what are you talking about?? its mostly built in, or you can add it very easy with in under 5 mins..... Use the engine longer than a few days next time..
Considering recent events, this is quite a prescient decision you guys made!
One thing that I've been noticing that more experienced C++ developers I talked to didn't mind as much: The state of the API documentation in Unreal. In Unity, for all the common API methods you get a longer description and even usage examples, and you can filter the method documentation per Unity version. Unreal also has a per version method page, but their documentation for it (C++ especially but also Blueprints) often doesn't tell you more than if you just looked at the method name and parameters yourself. It is pretty hard for beginners to get into. This has caused me to frequently check other resources to understand how certain blueprint methods or C++ methods work and how to use them (for example "Mathew Wadstein" on RUclips has a great video on explaining invidivual Blueprint nodes and how to apply them)
chatgpt solved this problem perfectly
would seem you made the right decision hearing todays news
Ive been working on Unity for about 5 yrs now and about 2 yrs ago I started using Unreal. While my day job is still with Unity and mobiled, for my personal projects I am by now using only Unreal. Sometimes I'm still shocked of how many features there are in the engine for which you needed plugins from asset store in Unity. There is quite steep learning curve and a lot to get a hold of but after that it became at least for me very intuitive. My last selling point was when Unreal 5 also adapted and ecs system, that's what I was lacking and also allowed for properties for animation logic to be accessed from side threads and not from the main gameplay thread which was a huge bottle neck. Yes, in comparison to C# especially when writing gameplay code Cpp can feel nightmarish but it is just a question of time and getting used to it. But it's a price of a faster code given that blueprints have a similar performance to C# and can also be compiled natively which I guess compares to Unity il2cpp compilation process. BP graphs does not beed to be horrifically complex if you break them into functions and macros and remember to replace performance critical chunks with functions and methods written in cpp. Good luck guys! Looking forward to your shared experiences with the new workflow!
This really aged well lol
You guys should go buy a lottery ticket
Unreal isn't open source, it's source available, which is very different.
toxic
@@Spark5050 it's not open source. It's source available. Open source would indicate that you could literally take the source code and sell Unreal Engine for yourself or use it's source code and not pay any money after 1mil, but you cannot. There are specific licenses that are open source and allow you to use the code as you see fit completely for free without any repercussions or catch.
Please see: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
And:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software
To learn the difference
@@Spark5050it's a free software
@@mmfarrell this is exactly right. Simple mistake and the point that they can extend the engine still stands. Just good to know the difference.
open source, not Open Source
you made a quick decision friend because unity will strat to charge money for download
I have been dabbling in Real Time filmmaking and I actually went opposite and went from Unreal to Unity. The HDRP is amazing and I just prefer working in Unity, it's faster and like you said waaay more responsive. Unreal was crashing constantly. That was my experience. With Unitys aquisition of WETA FX tools and their Enemies tech demo they will have some really cool next gen stuff coming in the future
The future is a really elastic concept with Unity.
"Updates are comming are it will fix X and Y will be better" Rinse, repeat, cope.
HDRP is a buggy mess.....period... I been using both engines professional for decades and Unity does NOT make games, and they don't have a clue, with having 3 rendering pipelines, HDRP in a real game is slow and buggy as hell...
@@recondeveloper2023 Wow, you've been using both engines for decades and manage to talk so much rubbish in just one sentence. For example, what the hell is a REAL game? 🤦🤦♂
I don't even want to start with the concept of the 3 (or 2) render pipelines. Any idiot can read that in just a few sentences in any book.
@@recondeveloper2023 What part of HDRP is buggy exactly?
As a hobbyist, I started with Unity a few years ago because Unreal didn't run well on Linux, looked complicated, and I couldn't stand the big icon buttons (UE 4). After the recent Unity drama, switched to Unreal, and when trying to do similar things, found myself always thinking, 'oh, so that's what that feature / tool / process is supposed to do'. Somehow Unreal is just much clearer, just looks so much better with little effort
Good bulletpoints. Good analysis. I usually focus more on the "preference analysis" approach (as you can see from my other comment), but your breakdown from the... let's call it more objective angle is good.
Man, the whole unity situation is funny and add up in the end.
I have found myself slowly slipping away to Unreal as well, I've discovered it to be much faster to iterate on with specific styles of games. If you're working on anything first or third person, targeting a PC or console market. It will do almost everything you ask of it. However when you start to drift away from conventional game design I have it found it harder to work with.
Also a few other things from the video I had thoughts on:
- Love Unitys store, lots of regular sales and assets are such a wide range!
- Unreal, unless it is free that month or forever. Lots of things will be very pricey since Epic curates a lot more on their store and you will find less of a range to select from and less of a budget to spend because things are $$$
- Unreals source is available to look at, but technically isn't 'open source'. It's a bit of a weird area you have to be careful on.
- Unreal being slow, I found CPU it be a bigger bottleneck since it still does a lot of processing there. Also just working in engine with lower settings does help speed things up. If you are not specifically working on visuals at the time, turn your settings down as low as you can.
- No other engine in the world can compete with Unity forums
- At the end of the day you could argue endlessly between Unity, Unreal, Godot, Flax, GameMaker etc Understanding what you want to make first, how you plan to make it and what tools / pipeline would benefit you the most really is the deciding factor. If you hate compile times don't use unreal, if you want visual scripting don't use godot...
I think you have made the right decision with changing to unreal though, once you start to understand the quirks of the engine and really lean into it's strengths, you'll find yourself spending less time on learning the engine and more time focusing on development.
Unreal is not open source as you said but his source code is available to be modified and you can contribute to their development, saying that unreal can be used for free based on the their EULA and after you pass the profits limits you have to play royalties to epic or you can also pay for support/licensing of the product so you dont have to pat royalties based on the profits
Unreal 5.1 solved the compiling issue the is selective compiling now you no longer have to buy an intel i9 😂
@@p30virus You also KEEP your first million dollars....You also can release for 12%, vs STeam/Unity 30% greedy bullshit...
- Unreal's Marketplace has regular sales and a wide range of assets too.
- Not true, Unreal's marketplace is very reasonably priced and you know you're getting good quality for the asset, Unity's asset store is a major gamble on if the product will even work. And their return policy is broken, I tried returning an asset on Unity store for a legit reason and got told no.
- They clearly state that the source code has the same rules as the standard compiled version.
- I agree Unreal is a bit slow
- Unreal's forums and reddit page are far more helpful than Unity's, everyone on the Unity forums is so damn arrogant and unwilling to answer the actual question, instead giving stupid half responses or completely dodging the question and placing accusations for not knowing certain things.
- I spent 2 years working in Unity, then had to work in Unreal for a new job and was converted over straight away, so many simple things are handled for you by UE so you can actually focus on making a game.
The only thing I'd say Unreal Engine struggles with is 2D games
My biggest issue is C++. I just don't like it, and I don't care to use it. I love the direction things are headed with DOTS, which can, in a number of ways, help make up that performance difference. The other major thing for me is extensibility of the editor itself. I spend most of my time making editor tools, because I just enjoy it.
Yeah, I agree. And if Unreal would just support C# out of the box, I think the shift from Unity would be massive.
I can't stand C++
I still hold out hope that DOTS will greatly improve, but it's important to note that DOTS has been in development for around 5 years and has never been fully completed. Even now, they've completely overhauled the API and stated that version 1.0 will come with the 2022 LTS version of Unity.
I fear that when the 2022 LTS version of Unity is released in March or April, they will only release a few features. And if the important features, such as "Spikeless Streaming and Large-scale Rendering," do make it into this version, they will probably be heavily cut or still completely flawed.
@@ToadieBog bruh you know that’s not possible right
While C++ isn't that much harder, specially Unreal's C++, is definitely a lot slower to code in than C#. It is also my biggest gripe with Unreal, and blueprints aren't an alternative...
Here are my pros/cons about Unreal Engine. I recently switched to Unreal (about 1 month ago). I really liked it and my new favorite game engine (have used Unity almost 5+ years now).
Pros:
- Blueprint is well integrated and not just an afterthought. You will work seamlessly with it. My initial thought was I was only too work with C++ and never with Visual Scripting. After a week, Blueprint doesn't seem that bad. However, switch to C++ after three weeks, since I love programming. Still uses Blueprint to hand in hand with C++. Like a matching couple. It's a perfect solution for game development.
- Most tools are well-intergrated to each other
- C++ is not hard, really hard when you get the hang of it. Helps when you know about C#. But can be frustrated when C++ doesn't have all features or weird syntax compare to C#.
- Most of the negative stuff I have about Unreal is just "pet peeves" overall I'm happy with my decision. Great engine! Unreal is really focused at making video games and offers great tools.
- SoundCue/MetaSounds are really cool tools for making sound interactions.
- It supports Network right out of the box.
- A lot of handing components/tools. Like ProjectileMovementComponent, CharacterMovementComponent, MovementComponent, RotatingMovementComponent. It took less than 5 minutes to create a spinning coin that moves up and down.
- It has an amazing asset called ALS (Advanced Locomotion System), that is free to use. And it has Project Acoustics by Microsoft, really awesome tool for audio development (Ray tracing for audio system, also free). Unreal is also working on making motion matching.
Mid:
- Unreal's Architecture - I couldn't decide either is a pro/con, is both. You will learn that some specifics class is supposed to do one thing and class inheritance is important as well naming conversions and terms. For an example, you need to learn what: Pawn, Controller, Character, Game Instance, Game State, Actor, etc.
You might think well that's complicated, but once you learn all about it. It kinda makes sense. Recommend watching Alex Forsythe's video on "Blueprints vs. C++: How They Fit Together and Why You Should Use Both".
Cons:
- Poor Documentation. Unreal lacks API docs compare to Unity. Also, just examples and guide on their site is not best either.
- Poor integration with Visual Studio. You create scripts inside Unreal, not Visual Studio. And intellisense is not very respondent with C++ code. Also, removing/renaming scripts in Unreal is a pain in the ass.
- You can't use "scene-view" and "game-view" at the same time. When you start the game, only one can be chosen. Unless you pause the game and exit "game-view" into "scene-view".
- Unreal is using "cm" instead of "m" as Unit. You cannot change it. However, in "inspector" or "details panel" as they called. You can mark variables with unit attribute, which can be easily converted on the UI side (Read more on benui - UPROPERRTY Units).
- Unreal doesn't have a drag and drop reference system like Unity has. It was so nice with Unity, just to drag and drop Components/GameObjects inside the Inspector.
- Unreal lacks supports for different file formats (like .mp3, .DAE).
- World Partition has some limitations. I could only create 10^2 km map without glitching out. I think they are implemented in double precision, which should increase size limitations.
- Nanite don't work (right now) with foliage. They are introducing in Unreal 5.1, I think (You can read their roadmap).
- Marketplace is really high cost for some asset. Also, a lot less assets compare to Unity. And also horrible UI design for Marketplace.
- I couldn't find any information about Machine Learning, when it comes down to AI. Where Unity already have some Machine Learning package to work with
Great pros and cons! Thanks for all the details. Ha! Yeah I watched Alex's video, it was really well done and helpful.
Idk if I'd really concider the marketplace costs a con. Since unreal doesn't decide those, it the users. And you can use unity asset store products in unreal, quality/transfer difficulty/licence will vary.
@@SkookumArts why not cry engine?
The buggy and unfinished features also apply to UE... I've experienced it myself and often hear from piers that there are a lot of bugs (in the new World Partition, One-file-per-actor or other tools) and unfinished features (like the procedural foliage tool) within unreal. So be prepared to fiddle around a lot and not be sure if a system is just buggy. lacking features or if you just made a mistake using it.
Also, while blueprints are easy to use and pick up, using C++ is way slower and complex in unreal than C# is in Unity. Expect a 3-4 times increase in time it takes to develop a feature. This is especially true when compiling the engine, as you might want to do. Compiling the engine takes ages and requires you to really know what you are doing.
Also, unreal is best when making "typical" unreal games, like FPS, third person stuff games. A lot of their tooling has been build around it. If you are making something super custom (like your "playing captured animations backwards" mechanic) really prototype things out and see if unreal can handle that. Implementing those kinds of features yourself is especially difficult in UE, because of the huge amount of complex systems they have.
Some smaller points: UE deprecates a lot of API stuff from minor version to version. Expect breaking code when switching versions. Also try to get access to the internal Unreal Developer Forums. There you can actually get answers to your questions, and many epic employees try to help out there.
Anyway, I wish you good luck on your endeavor :)
Thanks for the in depth answer! Much appreciated. I thought as much with the buggy features, it seems like you can't avoid it when it comes to complex software.
Yeah I've been experiencing the slow turn around with C++ compiling :)
Exactly, that's something I've also noticed. Unreal has a lot of built-in assumptions that you'll be making a first/third person game. That's perfectly fine for this new game though. The playback mechanic will definitely need to be a custom implementation. I initially attempted to use Unity's built-in timeline tool and what we need is way to complex for it, so I'm assuming unreal will be the same.
I'll have to keep an eye on the api then. Great tip about the forum! Didn't know that was a thing, I'll look into it.
Thanks again for the advice :)
Really good description of the quirks of UE!
The big difference here is that Unity's business model incentivizes building flashy features to lure in new customers, whereas Epic's business model (royalty-based) incentivizes helping your licensees succeed in building a successful game/franchise.
@@xNaxdy as long as you are a big studio, np. Epic won't waste time with indies, just look at the forums and find unanswered questions for years
@@jorhoto7064 not true. I have personally worked with epic to track down & resolve issues in their network replay system as a solo dev. people report issues to epic all the time and get them resolved.
moreover, community members also contribute source code into the engine on a regular basis. look at the release notes (not the news article, the release notes) of any UE4/UE5 release and see the list of community members that contributed.
epic has a documented track record of working with small studios & solo developers when it comes to engine features.
cons :
1-too much to learn
2-c++ knowledge combined with blueprint (it will take time and effort to learn)
3-project building problems (its slow and it can show errors after waiting for too long)
4-hard to fix glitches
5-exporting 3d models with texture (it requires some work
6-giving up
I think unreal is going to be every experienced choice eventually, but not the choice for beginners just because unity holds your hands while unreal yeet you to the documents and wish you well
It's like the difference between primary school and university
That is nonsense, you need to learn patience and learn to read, every single person out there, that actually takes the time to learn any engine will learn it... Using assets in Unity , is not learning an engine.....
Biggest cons I know when being a beginner (me doing unreal sincer 2013 UE2.5): Blueprints is probably the most beginner friendly way to program. However it is not as efficient/fast as C++. Usually that does not matter, but it could. C++ however is a lot harder to learn/understand/master than C# for example. However you can do anything with both Bluepritn AND C++. You can even make your own blueprints using C++. And C++ is probably the fastest out there besides assembly.
The UI might look like there is sooo much and you're getting overwhelmed BUT after a few days its not like that at all, and you will see it is alll you need and actually kinda simple.
The biggest issue I’ve had with Unreal so far is that Engine sometimes crushes with really obscure errors. Today, I’ve spent the whole day fixing an error that crashed the engine when the editor boots up, effectively preventing me from accessing my project. It’s also harder to find people who have had the same problem as it has a much smaller community compared to unity.
My main reason to choose UE was - blueprints, I'm not a programmer so this is the easiest way to start coding gameplay, of course you must know basic principles and etc, but its much easier to start than C#.
I really like how many great tools UE has built-in and you don't need to have a ton of marketplace stuff to make you own game.
your problem is that you really think coding is the hardest part. those are just lines of code you need to memerize. you can learn that easly. but try to model on blender and i mean like entire levels where you need to model every little object and trust me. you will want to slit your wrists. unlike with coding. there isnt any real guide for modeling. its all trial and error. and its a nightmare. especielly with terrible blender
@@DracoMeteor91 Creating a mid-level 3D model is much easier than writing a mid-level code. And with the growth of the size of the game, the complexity of modeling does not grow, only the amount of work increases, but this cannot be said about programming.
The blender is not bad at all, at least for modeling, it's better to sculpt in Zbrush, and do animation in Maya, textures in Substance painter.
@@pamparam3495 you dont get the point. you can learn coding. all the information is on the net. you need just to look for it. you cant learn modeling. not for uniqe models. because you cant copy someone else work in your game. and modeling is a pain in the butt its easy at all. its only easy when you make a terrible indie game. not if you want to make an actual good game
@@DracoMeteor91 it's not true. You can learn modelling as any other skill. And you can copy methods, technics, art style - anything. I'm gamedesigner and do both programming and modelling, the second one is much easier.
@@DracoMeteor91 You have no idea on what you're talking about. Blender isn't exactly easy to use. You need to learn how to use it (plenty of YT vids on it). But it's just fine as a 3d modeling, rendering and animation software. It gets better every version (most of the time lol). You can't compare coding withh asset creation. 2 different worlds. If asset creation isn't your thing, or if you just suck at it, that's fine; but don't knock the software you clearly don't know how to use.
Thanks for sharing your thought process. I'm currently in the same boat and thinking about switching from Unity to Unreal.
The first thing I would personally look at is version control and backup system. I have not really had too many issues in UE5, however, I have had a couple, it may have been my fault but I would have preferred to roll back my changes than diagnose it. UE5 is still new so there will be some issues.
I also would look at trying to be careful about just throwing in nanite objects everywhere because you can, assets such as trees and bushes really have issues with it and it all still comes at a penalty in resource usage.
For speeding up blueprint compiling look into Blueprint Nativization as that Project Setting may help.
If you really get into it, building pipelines for Asset validation and builds automation could really save significant time.
my pain points using ue5:
- retargeting skeletal meshes is still really painful (needs manual fiddling to make it work, hard to map animations from one skeleton to another)
- the concept of animation graph and the connection to your regular player controller blueprints / C++ is somewhat complex to grasp when you are getting started
- collision channels (physics, nonphysics, or both, overlap and hit responses) should be well understood to avoid debugging collisions later
- you need decent hardware to run it (minimum specs: 32GB, RTX 2060, i9 10900k, or 5800X CPU at least in my opinion)
- plugin system can be a mess (compatibility issues, outdated plugins need to be recompiled and sometimes the source has to be fixed to make it work with a new engine version until plugin developers update the plugin to latest)
- understanding and setting up lighting can be hard ( I can recommend William Faucher's youtube channel for correct understanding and setup of lights, he's an excellent tutor and a great guy, too)
Thank you for your video, enjoy the ride!
Regards,
RAGD
My 20 yr old old quad core with a 950, 32gb, runs Unreal just fine...." has to be fixed to make it work with a new engine version until plugin developers update the plugin to latest)" That is the same in every engine on the market, you have to wait for developers to update... Dude how many games have you made or plug ins?? you understand its better to wait for the update until you make changes to plug ins, so it don't break shit every 2 seconds and add more work?? Seriously...
@@recondeveloper2023 If you code Pacman 2D I guess it runs fine. Or If you have time to wait for hours while shader compile 🫣
Using UE since 1 year (I have a background in cinematography and advertisement). Never used Unity so take my words with a grain of salt. So far it's a love-hate relationship with UE. My crash dump is several hundred megabytes big. Auto-saves never work. I can brew some coffee or do my weekly chores when booting up a project for the first time. It's such a heavy piece of software that I had to upgrade to a 3090ti to get my s**t done on time. The folder structure is super weird and clunky. Sometimes you don't even know if UE is bugging out or you did something to startle it. That all sucks so so much! And then ... then it surprises you with the most jaw dropping and awe-inspiring visuals and god-send innovations like Lumen and Nanite. It keeps pushing your creative boundaries. It's freaking FREE!!! It helps you grow as an artist and THAT feeling is nothing short of liberating. I just keep coming back to UE. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Welcome to the club ;) Had over 10 years myself and sold stuff in the Unity store. Now it's All Unreal
i just discovered your channel and it is awesome
I was switching to UE as well after 10 years of using Unity. Its nothing personal its just depends on each project. Its been nearly 2 years since i switched and i can say if you want to take advantage of cpp than its going to be hard since the documentation and resources are much less available than in comparison to unity
7:46 "There's still potential for Unity. Who knows where they're gonna go in the future"
Hits pretty hard right about now lol
And boom goes the dynamite
Would love to hear peoples opinions on engines for VR. Currently using Unity since I plan to develop for Quest/standalone
I switched to unreal after 3-4 yrs in Unity, and I'm happy
I loved the video. This was the last video that a assist that convince me to do right choice of switching. I was very annoyed with the way Unity is going forward, never finishing good tools and plugins. I'm think the could do that in the future, but for now is a mess. To do a game with quality you need to spend a lot in 3th plugins, or do a lot work/having to pay for that. The tools of the box are a shame.
Thanks for the video! you're awesome, we be waiting for more updates about that transition!
It's a great choice for you guys!!
When I first wanted to start making games, I tried Unreal and absolutely hated the node system. It was like learning Blender, but with less documentation lol. I couldn't figure out what nodes I had at my disposal or how to use them... So, I tried Unity and loved that all I had to really do was learn C# and everything else was pretty simple. With Unreal it felt like I have to learn all these different systems AND figure out how they work together. I still want to really learn how to make something with Unreal but every time I open it I am immediately disheartened by the complexity. I've never played your games but from one game maker to another, I wish you the best of luck!
After 5 years I also switched to Unreal and will never go back.
I am both a game developer and an asset store publisher and I have lost faith in Unity which just focuses on nice videos and mobile games.
On the other hand, Unreal shows real progress and they wait to have a working product before talking about it.
What I do miss about Unity tho is c#, because coding in c++ is annoying as hell. Just this morning I spent 2h fixing a bug to then realize it was a false positive by Visual Studio...
Edit: I see a lot of comments about Unity and DOT. Just google Unreal Mass Entity, Unity didn't invent anything.
"Who knows where they're gonna go in the future" 👀 sounds a bit different now
I was a developer in Unity for about 5-6 years and I took the step to UE almost 3 years ago. Best decision you'll ever make, you can look at my channel to see my current project if you're curious
I been messing with Unity and Unreal Engine and always found myself running back to Unreal Engine. Something about it grabs my attention outside of using visual scripting. I feel like I can prototype a lot faster with it. It does help that I have a strong computer 120900K with 64GB of DDR4, and a couple of M.2 plus a RTX 3080. However I send people using Unreal with less hardware than I have. It does help running demos and stuff like the Matrix demo having that amount of ram. I do like the interface better in Unreal Engine, I do like the programming better in Unity due to C#. Now with Unreal Engine 5.1 coming out soon it is going to optimized and fix a lot of the stuff to make it worth it for mobile development and other neat stuff. I just wish they had a template for 2D game development like they did in Unreal Engine 4. I have however develop two projects that is base in 2D with Unreal Engine. I found it I can get started way faster with Unreal Engine and I seem to get stuck with Unity for to long that I get frustrated. Importing old assets is Super easy with Unreal Engine than Unity.
120900K 😱
@@MuhammadHosny0 lol typo.
It’s all depend on your project type. Both are great in their own space.
ok, dunno if you'll see this 8 months later but here are some things about Unreal to keep in mind:
- with great power comes great responsability. Unreal will crash more often when you don t know what you want to do. For example, i was following an Unreal course and Unreal decided to crash when I created a material. That never happened to me with Unity. And Unreal kept crashing over and over again when i was interacting with that material. Of course, as an Unreal new user, the last thing you want to do is understanding the whole engine so that you understand when and why it crashes
- you have to keep up with Unreal. If you want to make a game AND use megascans from the store, you have to make all the models created by you fit with that quality. That also includes game design, sound design and others. I don't know how big your team is, but if you want to make AAA games with a small team, you will have issues. Everything will have to be over polished to keep up with the megascans
- also, if you use megascans, you need to take into consideration the future. Since everyone else will use the same megascans, every other game will look the same which will lead to player eye fatigue. Now the features are quite new and not a lot of games have been released using the megascans, but in the future, everything will look the same. If you want to do stylized work, then everything i said here is useless :)
That's kinda it! Hope your transition goes well!
I think the 4th pro of UE is that it's made for people who want to make (high level, console style) games. I've seen 2D and side scrollers made in UE and they work fine. But it's easier and faster in Unity.
as a Unreal user 20+ yrs and Unity 15+ , I would agree, you on the 2d games. Unity has better 2d tools, I remember back in the day, Unity didn't and we had to use assets like 2d tool kit and such...
I think you are 100% right. Since Unity is not focusing on fixing and polishing the main system (like the lighting) and I have to spend more money on a third party asset that will do the thing that Unity was supposed to do in the first place.... Thanks but no thanks. I work with Unity for almost a decade now and I totally agree, even though UE is 'heavier' and it takes longer to do some tasks, it does have more useful tools by default. But as you said, the fact that Unity is focusing more on those casual games might be the reason there is such a big difference between them.
UE5 don't have good 2d tools. That's only one reason why i started to learn Unity. 2d mobile games are huge part of market and good start for beginners
Unity is better for mobile-like games and 2D
Unreal is better for high-quality 3D games
Just depends on what game you're trying to make
I'd argue Godot is better for 2D games. So much easier to use. Though exporting to mobile seems like a headache.
we've been using Unreal Engine since it was first release in 2009 as UDK A.K.A. UE3 and YES is a BEAST!!! the best aspect of Unreal is it memory control which in unity is automatic garbage collection that's why big games are built in Unreal. Unity3d recently start working on adding more memory allocation and management.
Im currently in the process of trying Unity. I plan to stick to a solo dev role and the problem with unreal. Its too much and requires alot of know how and expertise to modify despite it being „open source“. The problem is that if you want to make a good stylized shading system, the shader editor isn’t enough and you have to basically modify the source code which is something I am uninterested in. Learning how they built the engine and working within their architecture is also that would take alot of time adjusting to. I think its great if you have a team and trying to make a next gen experience
Hey guys, Id like to make a follow-up video request, now that you guys are working with Unreal for over a year, and considering all of your experience with it and Unity, how do you compare them now? In which areas would you still prefer unity, if any? would be really good to get some more insight with more experience
Listen, if y'all can make it pass UE's UI; You're 80% of the way there - lol 😂
I kid, I'm excited to see wheree this joureny takes y'all and I'm just grateful to be apart of it - even if i'm just watching the DevLog and liking your videos.
It's a minor thing, but if you guys are using C++ to make the game.. Umm.. remember to check for null pointers, when Unity comes to a null pointer it shows a nice little error in the console window, but when Unreal comes across a null pointer, it's game over man, it's game over.. and the engine crashes. So just make sure you check for nullptr and it'll be fine :)
LMFAO.. its NOT hard to know where pointers go.... Just by this comment, some of you never programmed in the gaming industry... Learn to read the source and API and problem solved.......
@@recondeveloper2023 Uh... Okay!
I think the time being that a new project is started is a good enough reason to try something different or new, like your switch to Unreal. I don't agree with the statement that Unity's focus is mobile games. Unity does that well, but you can do much more. Thing is, the investments into higher tier features, which you can get with Unreal right now, have not taken fruit yet in Unity as they just acquired those assets and they have not been implemented.
I teach Unreal at a University! Good choice. Let me know if you guys have any questions.
Do you offer an online course?
@@jamesonvparker Not personally. My school, SCAD, does. I teach in the game design department. If you are serious about pursuing a career in games it's an option!
@@imperfectgamedev7533 Thanks! A friend of mine graduated from there. I studied at Full Sail but not Game Dev. So tempted to try and get formal education in it. Tutorials only get me so far! Thank you for responding.
I would probably spend the time to learn how to enhance the visuals in Unity, instead of spending more time learning a completely new engine from scratch. You have been using Unity for over a decade, don't underestimate that advantage.
hmm. Good point. Time is very important. But at the same time, they cannot be stuck with unity for life.
No access to source code? No Ty
@@joshcruzmadeit If you need source access, you are doing it wrong anyway. The point of an engine is to use it without dabbling with its code. Or you are a big studio that can afford a dedicated engine programmer who invests a bunch of his time to study the nitty-gritty details of the engine.
It was a couple years ago now - hoepfully they've firmed up their rendering features - but I gave up trying to create polished graphics in Unity because there were too many different approaches, gotchas and unclear timelines in the use of baked + realtime lighting across forward and deferred rendering, gpu baking, post effects as package on github(?) and then the various render pipelines. I'm happy to do my research and learn the features, but I couldn't get to a stage I even felt sure my learning was along the right path, or when and if features would begin to work well together.
What a nice video i love it ! 🙂 can you tell us about HDRP in Unity thoughts about it ? do you think it handle 3d high games compared to unreal ? thanks!
it's funny we migrated from unity to unreal at the end of the physical release of our last game, and we got through the exact same thought process
Annoyingly, I've found both engines have their pros and their cons which makes it _very_ difficult to decide which one may be 'better'.
But I do find Unreal is much better at rapid iterations and generally just "getting things working". It also feels more modern and much more cohesive, unlike Unity which often feels like a patchwork quilt of various old crap that hasn't been maintained or updated in years. I can get things working much more quickly in Unreal and it feels like less of a chore to do so, but Blueprints can be extremely intimidating to a newbie and can turn into spaghetti very quickly.
You are absolutely right about Unity being loaded with unfinished, buggy features that never really go anywhere, not to mention the engine itself is so barebones that you have to install all sorts extra just to make it viable and more comfortable to use. For example, the new Input System and niceties like Cinemachine are first party and Unity recommend you use them rather than handhacking everything - so why aren't they default parts of the engine? They should be.
But for some people the key selling point is that Unity seems more versatile in the sorts of games you can create (really anything, including a sudoku game for Android if you like). Meanwhile Unreal Engine is really best suited for walking simulators, 3D adventure games, and shooters like Gears. You likely wouldn't use Unreal to make something like Pong or a sidescrolling 2D platformer.
only 4 real con about Unreal I found after using it for 6 month:
1/ Its huge and heavy. Not for typical laptop. You "NEED" decent laptop / pc to make a decent game.
2/ Its does not use strimline nameing or system or method. Its like unreal comes from another univers. almost everything is uniq to it. so if you migrate to it recently you will use google pretty often.
3/ Its does not have many resourse. If i say it more clearly... Unreal does not have on-point resourse.
4/ assets pipeline, you can use same assets in both godot and unity directly from godot. How ever unreal has issue of scale. it will messed up you animetion and uv. How ever there is a plugins SendToUnreal solved this problem, mostly.
Advice: Understand that everything you see in the editor can be created in C++. You don’t have to edit the engine. Create your own plug-in with all of the features your game will ever need. Blueprints are a great place to prototype, then you would move the code to C++.
The one con i had was that there aren't that many people using unreal like in unity. In unity you can just search something and you'll get it but in unreal, its kinda hard
That’s not true. There is not only documentation, unreal learning, forums, but also endless RUclips videos. If you’re truly looking, you will definitely find it. It’s right there.
unreal has a lot of users. Unity just has much more.
I started to switch back to Unreal... Then I remembered why I hated it and kept using Unity. I've been using Unity since Version 3.4.2. The first time I've used Unreal, it was version 3. Unity has a similar setup (hotkey wise) to Maya and as a Maya user, everything feels better. Unreal takes a long time to compile shaders, lighting, etc. The biggest thing I HATE about Unreal, is setting up animations. Plus, I hate spaghetti code. Overall, I'm happy with Unity because of how easily and quickly I can fix any kind of issues I come across. So... for graphics, yes... Unreal is the way to go. There are so many more things that Unreal does for a user that makes it easy. But when it comes to particles, animations, coding, and setup. Unity has made it so much easier to get the results I need. Unity HDRP vs Unreal, I'm going to say Unreal has them beat. However, that does not mean that a beautiful game can not be made using the URP or HDRP. It just means that more work is required within Unity to get the results desired.
I've used both engines and gone in-depth on both and I will never switch to Unreal because of issues I've encountered. Their particles systems, blueprints, animator systems, and because of how large project files become. (I.e. 10Gb in unity with Library compared to 43GB in Unreal)
I use Unreal Engine for more than a year and I've never used game engines before. And I don't use C++, only Blueprints.
Cons are mostly the shader compiling, it takes hours. And the complex Lightning in Unreal must Be built also. An other con, is that Unreal is very huge. The Particle Editor, the Blueprint Systems, the AI Systems, the Material Editor etc. And you have to learn all this, to make the game you want.
But at the end, at my opinion (without any experience in Unity) Unreal is the better game Engine.
I've been using Unity for so far 2 and half years, it's pretty easy, understandable, great engine, I think it's the best, I used unreal engine for 3 years, with Unreal Engine I haven't made much games as it's very complex if you just wants to make a material, but Unity for just 2 and half years I made so far 4 games, 2 of them is mobile games, the other 2 is for desktop and consoles, I just recommend to anyone who really wants to works on games and don't have much experience and like new to the industry, I think Unity is the best set for you.
I am looking to switch from Unity to unreal, after 6 years with loving Unity. I have not decided yet. so just having a play around Unreal.
Unity Cons: Disjointed confused direction. Too many choices, and incomplete bits (Render pipelines, lighting etc) Difficult to get that great looking game experience.
Unity Pros: Familiarity, C# coding. Ability to develop WebGL browser Games. More general game development.
Unreal: Clearer direction and focus. High level game concept support built in. Easy to get great looking games and terrains up and running.
Unreal Cons: Unfamiliarity, I am not sure that I can really get to grips with Blueprints, at scale or be fully productive with graphical programming. (I guess I may have to buckle down to C++) Little to no support to WebGL/ Browser Applications. Big focus on first/third person games.
I dunno really,
UNreal engine is NOT open source!!
Here's an idea: Open up blender, create a cube, fracture it. Apply physics on the pieces, press play and bake the explosion it makes to keyframes. Now try to import that into Unreal Engine. I dare you. If you succeed; please share 🤣
10/10 intro :D
Hobby Unreal Engine user for 2.5 years. The biggest con I've found is the spaghetti code, such as you show at 3m 56s. However, I found that there is little to no performance decrease for using multiple references instead of having lines dragged everywhere. Having all your references close to your function makes readability SO much better.
Once your code is tight, comment the bleep out of it. I can come back to a well commented program after 6 months and jump back in within moments. Just read the comments.
UE can produce some of the worst spaghetti code you can imagine. Those old Obfuscated C challenges have nothing on UE for unreadable code. If you code right and tight, it can also produce the most clean and readable code I've ever produced.
Well, that's one thing, to keep it tight, but also to differentiate between scripting and programming. Any sufficiently complex enough task is better implemented in c++ and called in blueprints.
Also, an Event Graph is just that, a graph, you can make multiple, you can make functions.
I rarely have blueprints that have more than 5 nodes in each graph.
@@MrSofazocker yes never use only blueprints for things like that and never put all of your functionality in just the main event graph
I've been considering this, but the biggest con I see in the long-term is the 5% gross revenue royalty after the first $1M. Sure, most games don't ever reach a $1M lifetime revenue, but if/once they do, your engine costs can suddenly skyrocket. At a lifetime revenue of $1.2M, you're already paying Epic $10K, which is more or less the price of 5 Unity Pro yearly licenses, so you might become "the victim of your own success" down the line. 5% of gross revenue is potentially quite a big chunk of money.
Elder Scrolls Legends. Love the shirt. Hate what happened to that gem of a game
Things to know about Unreal Engine.
1. Ue4 USes Tesselation and ue 5 Nanite, that means ue5 doasn´t support Tesselation and not Nanite on Skeletal mesh. You could attach Nanit mesh to a Skeletal mesh and Stretch tham with splines but the way i had to run to get Tesselation to ue5 sucked.
2. There is a Content Gap between Exampels, Marcetplace Assets and a final Game, especialy if you go for Replicated Systems, that means to use assets is not anougth you have to understand tham.
3. Forget bone ik and Physic asset and use controllrigs.
4. How to learn unreal engine Autodidact and free. Advanced Locomotion System , Windwalker Echo , RPG example , Lyra Starter game but at first content Example.
Eu mudei da Unreal para Unity por vários fatores, um deles é que eu prefiro programar do que usar Blueprints e quanto tentava programar na Unreal Engine era muito lento, demorava em torno de 10 minutos para compilar algo simples e quando abria a unreal novamente, tudo que foi programado sumia e tinha que refatorar o código para aparecer novamente, tentei usar blueprints, até é amigável porém do jeito que se utiliza acaba sendo confuso já que tem que procurar os códigos e várias abas e fica dentro do blueprint do personagem eu acabei não curtindo a forma que se montava o script, a Unity é tudo tão simples, cria um script, abre apenas uma janela no editor de código, escreve, interpreta e coloca no objeto e pronto, fora que na Unreal eu nunca nem se quer consegui montar um protótipo, isso que eu mexo desde a UDK3 e nunca consegui, na Unity com vídeos qualquer eu consegui fazer um joguinho simples, aliás, vários joguinhos e pelo fato de ser programação C# é bem mais fácil de estudar os erros e corrigir, por causa desses detalhes estou voltando novamente para Unity de vez
The cons i have is the final package project never less then 120mb
Sometime i want to do small app whit 3d but it allways be 120mb
The software complex .. after you lern its awesome you have so many tools!!
I really enjoy it the blueprint is 10 time faster then coding
But some time i add c++ class to my game
After i make 3 game i understand the engine and then make my big game
Initial size is like that. It doesn't add up crazy after that
@@madaraainna after the first 120mb it not getting bigger much
(Unless you put 4k/8k textures or complex 3d model)
sometimes you must modify the engine itself in order to get result you seek
open source is big deal tbh
you make graphics heavy games! Unreal will serve you well. unity is better for quick programming/prototyping.
unity being "lightweight" its so funny lmao, compared to unreal, sure, but generally speaking, its huge
UE5 is absolutely amazing. Welcome!
I hope you continue to update us on your conversion. While I don't agree with some of your reasoning I think that last comment about unfinished features is important. I'm curious if you used HDRP any prior to your switch? It seems like Unreal's default 3d project is comparable to an HDRP project, but I'm pretty ignorant of how both compare.
They only a month into unreal - give it time haha!
Unreal becomes hellish ugly when you need to dig into code to make tweaks because the built in doesn't quite do what you want - then you on your own given the lack of a decent community,
ROFL, comparable?? No... I used both engines professional.... Unity has no idea what its doing with SRP's, having 3 rendering pipeline was the most foolish thing Unity could of done, ask any asset dev, what they are doing through...Hell...
@@recondeveloper2023 thanks person who I wasn't addressing for your comment that doesn't actually give any useful details. 👍
"Unreal has been made by people that use it" that's enough to switch from unity to UE
Unreal was an inhouse engine for the longest time. Then it was available to approved AAA partners with deep pockets. Then it got opened up to everyone.
I have been recently doing some unreal religiously. The biggest pro unity will always have over unreal is the fact that it is lighter weight. Also, unreal is a full blown game engine. Unity is more of a general 3D engine. When I'm doing simulations, machine learning, robotics, I prefer unity because it is more suited for general 3D stuff. Unreal is for anyone that wants to take game dev seriously.
btw, I started using unity in 2010.
Editing some part of classes in C++ need the engine to be compile and restarted again or you won't see any change, and it never tell you when it really needs a restart of the whole program.
This is the main painful point to me, Live Coding can break project from what I've experienced and it's still not ready has it should
Otherwise, great engine!
Rule of thumb: Close the editor when compiling C++. Hot Reloading is no bueno.
Blueprint only is not working in unreal..
or better..
Its not working if you want to create heavy complex codes.
Structs f.e. are dangerous to do in BP only. Cause the reflection system sometimes stumbles over itself and destroyes whole BP Structures and Graphs.
Its annoying to do heavy tasks and types in c++ and make them blueprinttype reflective..
But.. The whole UE System and Ecosystem is beautiful and i love each minute of work with it, since the last 7 Years 😊
Sounds like user error....
I found if I delete a BP that has got a construction script code with an procedural Array and a For Each Loop connected up to the Construction Script exe pin This was in ver 4.15 even if that BP is not an active instance inside the game world and is just sitting all on its own in the windows browser the engine will remove the BP but when you try to create a new BP and start to add in any new nodes then the engine would just slow all down and crash. Rendering the project utterly useless. And that's how my project got bricked. I thought it was safe to just delete a unused BP but it turns out its not so safe to delete it if its got code still connected in the construction script.
Unreal has always had trouble with Arrays inside of For
Each Loops. And trouble with corrupting its own Structs. and BPS And also sometimes one or two nodes in the BP may turn dead and not work at all and unreal engine don't tell you why the node stopped working.
And when things go south or the house is all on fire in your project, start a blank new project is Epic's answer and move it into a new house and start another fire.
Migration of assets does not always work properly. it doesn't always copy everything all over. And you find material assets didn't copy over properly and find errors in the material with missing textures.
You can also lose the static mesh collision socket from off your weapons if you upgrade the engine. Now I didn't know that upgrading the engine to a newer version would remove the static mesh collision socket from my weapon meshes but that's exactly what it did. Couldn't recover the socket collision back even when I had replaced the missing socket and put it back on the weapon, the code no longer recognized the socket anymore even though I had the socket name the same as the one that got deleted so my weapons had no collision detection anymore and was rendered useless, now the collision detection got bricked.
This to me sounds like Unreal only recognizes that which is been saved with the current old engine version So I couldn't recover the socket back on the weapons..
Other Issues.
Ghosting Issues with the Widgets sometimes a phantom copy of a widget component would appear behind or on front on the screen messing up the text or graphics.
And you can't remove it from the stack in the designer without deleting everything because its an extra item or double text that unreal had somehow copied there but its not in the stack in the designer. And you have to delete the whole entire stack to just try to remove the strange double phantom copy.
Disliked the fact that the built in subtitles system don't support data tables.
Strange behavior with Box Collision Triggers.
I place a box trigger down in the Map and assign Movie 1 for the trigger to play that movie when the player steps inside it
That works fine with 1 trigger.
But soon as I place more than 1 trigger instance into the map and assign them their different movie files to play then weird stuff starts happening. When I step in the trigger the assigned movie doesn't always play and shows me a white box, or it plays the movie just fine or sometimes it plays the wrong movie file of the other trigger even though each trigger has been set to play the right media file. So each time I step into the same triggers the value keeps on randomly changing.
So I get a random result of unreal engine bouncing values around the triggers instead of staying with only whats been assigned to play for each trigger. Could never solve that issue. So I could not play multiple movie widget dialogs because of that problem with the trigger box collisions giving me random conflicting results.
I found the same thing also with Data Tables.
When entering in the Data table by hand with the built-in editor for dialog well sometimes the Array Data Pointer Index can become corrupted as well.. And then It starts reading in row 550 as row 562 so it displays row 562 instead of displaying up row 550. And then to display row 550 you have to go into the trigger box window properties of the Dialog actor Array and put in row 542 to get it to display row 550 from the data table. When index pointers in the array becomes corrupted that's what it does to the data table it throws the pointer array index out of alignment with whats listed in the data table..
And then you have to go through all your triggers to put in all the wrong row numbers just to get the data table to display all the right rows.
Group AI Party Member follow me.
Unreal Engine has no easy way to get party members to follow one another when switching over into different AI party pawns if you are not using the local level BP to switch the AI pawns over with which works well. But it only works with using the Local Level BP to posess (but if your game has got multiple levels). Then level BP AI Switching won't work when you load the next level..
So when I used possess pawn to switch from my own player controller into an AI party member, soon as I controlled them and then switched back again, the AI would not resume their own AI normal behavior anymore they would not go back to their AI controller to resume their follow me behavior and just stood around all dead after I switched out of them.
Could not solve that issue either.
So because of those issues I struggle to try to put my game in this engine.
Unreal for 3d, VR and AR. Godot for 2D and 3D and C# background
YEP
Hey how's going guys
One of the definite Con of unreal is not able to do 2D, C++ can be a con base on how you look at it. It is almost too professional on the sense that it will take you some real learning to understand why certain feature are designed the way they are. Once you understand it, you feel all powerful and enlightened and want to really praise them, but until then, you are puzzled like a dog trying to learn physics.
My main gripe with unreal is the language you have to use, blueprints aren't what im used to either, Unity has a really nice set of APIs in C# which is one of the cleaner languages of the bunch
I kind of agree. The C# in Unity gives you much more control and it's much easier to use, whereas the UE Blueprint system is very confusing for beginners and gets very ugly and messy very quickly. If you want the same level of coding control that Unity gives you, you then need to get involved in a weird implementation of C++.
It seems a lot of people are still making videos around unity being a "Mobile targeted engine" which isn't quite the whole story. The engine is built to be modular and work on many platforms such as tvs, switch, consoles, unix, webgl, mac, windows, vr, ar and many more.
To put this into perspective here are some premium Unity games according to steam.
Subnautica, The Forest, Cuphead, Rimworld, Bendy and the Inc machine
So classing the engine as "Mobile only" or "Going in the direction of mobile games and micro transactions" just ticks me off whenever I hear it.
I don't have much experience with Unreal but I'm sure it can make a much better looking game given the nature of its engine. Even with Unity's HDRP render pipeline making great strides lately it will never compete with Unreals graphics but it's certainly a great step up in history.
After watching this video it does look like Unreal has a lot of stuff that is amazing with visualization but that is only if you need it. Someone like me I wouldn't use much of it like the blueprints, i'd straight up not use it as I'm a coder at heart - but others would greatly benefit from its ease of accessibility.
You can make amazing games with all engines. Some have upsides compared to others and its just up to the individual to decide what to use for their kind of game and how they prefer to make games.
I've been using Unity for the last 5 years and I'm thinking about Unreal 5.1. I've thought about switching a few times. I'm planning a new Zombie game that has realistic graphics. Maybe not photoreal but I want it to look as good as I can. Unity does a good job for the most part until I start getting a good amount of draw calls into it. After that it's kinda bad. I try to optimize it but it seems no matter what I try I'm never really 100% satisfied. Also I've tried switching to Unreal before and found it overwhelming to take in all the newer stuff I wasn't quite used to yet. I ran straight back to Unity where I was familiar with everything. And finally there's all the Unity assets that I can't use in Unreal because they are tools for Unity. I'd lose out on Thousands of dollars of assets that I've paid for. Not to mention I have a paid Megascans subscription only because I use Unity and I can't get any of that money back. I'd really rather get Unity to work how I'd like than switch to Unreal. Unity is like home to me. Unreal is like the neighbor's house. It's basically like this when I'm in Unreal. Some things seem kind of familiar but it's not like home to me.
hmm you mean something like Dead Island?