Engine Wars...How do you explain UE4 to other Engine users?

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

@VFe;10936

I’m a Unity Refugee, I never(seriously) used UDK before, but switched instantly. The major things that hooked me:

• Price. Unity isn’t expensive, but it isn’t “cheap” either. License+addons is roughly $3000~ per seat(you need a lot of **** add ons in Unity when working on professional projects). The most upsetting part is basic engine features are pay gated, over the years the “free” version has become so handicapped that if you’re making anything besides a simple 2d platformer, you’re basically going to pay.

Unreal is technically more expensive in the long-term, but it’s not pay gated up front. I don’t need to spend thousands upfront just to be able to use features that are basic in UE4, from a workflow perspective this is invaluable.

• I was tired of poking a black box.
  In Unity you have no access to the underlying engine outside big studio dollars. As a manger I’ve seen Unity waste large swathes of valuable time due to issues that were fundamental problems with the engine, but since you can’t verify it, you generally assume it’s problems with your code.
  I’ve estimated that my studio has wasted roughly $40,000 in labor last year, due to issues that could have been solved by source access.

We already switched over one project to UE4, and will probably consider it first for future ones.

People don’t even look at this aspect. They don’t account for the cost of time it takes to properly implement, learn, and setup all of these addons. They don’t account for the inefficiency and the extra optimization you need to mess with to get things to work efficiently. You want multi-core compatibility through Unity?..you’ll be coding and optimizing that on a per-project basis.

UE4, while being massive compared to Unity, runs MORE EFFICIENTLY for many things out of the box. In Unity I stress test pathing with 300 Agents and end up with a frozen editor (sub 1fps). Everything is so CPU bottlenecked in Unity which is why it runs so well on lowend hardware. I question whether Unity even fully utilizes my GPU properly. I guess I’m supposed to code in AI staggering so that only X number of Agents path per iteration…I have to learn the messy code that the person who created this addon wrote…FOR EVERY PLUGIN I BUY. I had to do it for A* pathfinding project. I had to do it for UFPS…it’s tiring and time consuming. I CAN’T EVEN TEST REALTIME GRAPHICAL PERFORMANCE UNLESS I SPEND $1500 ON PRO UPFRONT WITH NO RETURNS.

In UE4 with the same rig, I stress test pathing with blueprints running on 500 Agents and end up with a 15fps drop on Epic settings, which my PC cannot even handle properly graphics-wise. While learning the UE4 way to do things (function/class names) can also be time consuming, I’m finding that the solutions are actually simple and straight forward. I’m usually slapping myself after I realize how straightforward many of the solutions are.