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

I didn’t imply that UE4 will rule over all, but it will rule over Unity (or what’s left of it). I’m being specific. Unity has an advantage of their own browser plugin stuff, but that’s a sole and only advantage left. Soon enough, for those who develop 3D games on other platforms (Mobile, PC, Consoles), will find no reason to stick with Unity. You will find many Unity users converting to Unreal, because the choice is a no brainer for the vast majority.

How 'bout those royalties? That’s a pretty legitimate thing to consider when starting a new project from a business perspective, and can deter more people than you think. Personally I’m willing to deal with them for a small game I’m working on in my free time, but I’ve worked on projects where the company I worked for had the cash to buy full Unity licenses, and didn’t care if we had to put a bit more development muscle into making the game pretty all to avoid what was perceived as unnecessary long term loss of revenue.

For the sake of having at least a vaguely constructive conversation, if you really want to get into reasons to use the likes of Unity over Unreal, here’s one that I don’t feel I need to go terribly into detail about: give me a comparable alternative to .NET’s BCL that’s as comprehensive as it is, as cross platform as Unity presents it, integrates effortlessly with a UE4 project, and functions with no additional external dependencies that I the programmer have to worry about that “just works” natively with C++. STL doesn’t count here as a lot of things (such as XML parsing) fall outside of the scope of STL (however you could write your own or use someone else’s, but that’s besides the point of this exercise). Boost is also disqualified by default for effectively the same reason. UE4’s runtime offers a lot of things, but also falls short or divides functionality in a way that distinctly cements it as a game engine. Of course, that last bit could change based upon user demand.

My overall point here is that in a practical scenario Unity offers everything you need to make a game, and much more. UE4 feels exactly like what it’s advertised to be: a game engine. With Unity I can make much more than just games without any additional dependencies that I need to care about. This is not always going to be the case for UE4 once you start venturing outside of the category of “games”. I also have a few choices about what lighting pipeline I can use for my game in Unity: per-vertex (handy for older cards that barely support SM2.0), per-pixel, and deferred lighting. It’s highly configurable, and offers a lot of APIs out of the box even if its toolset doesn’t quite compete with UE4 1 to 1. That being said, the choice in many cases is going to come down to a matter of preference, especially with Unity 5 coming out before the end of the year. You’ll be harder pressed to point out discrepancies in functionality between Unity 5 and UE4 purely based upon the features they’re marketing for it, however a valid point here would be that Unity 5 isn’t released yet where UE4 has been released since Epic’s event at GDC.

TL;DR, Unity has more advantages to it then you’re seemingly aware of, and as a result of competition will be comparable with UE4 in its current state by the end of the year. Similarly, Epic will likely find ways to leap frog Unity 5 after it’s been released, again, as a direct result of competition. Really pick which ever one you feel suits your needs more, but don’t blatantly say “X is better than Y” without explaining why X is better and Y is worse.

Read this. In point #6 I address the royalty issue from my point of view. Anyways, when it comes for the big boys (companies with budgets) who have no problem with upfront payments, they can simply talk with Epic on custom terms because they can afford a custom license. If we talk about broke indies, students, and the likes, then UE4 is a much better choice.

I agree that UE4 needs a scripting language, but I think you keep on missing the point that UE4 is 2 weeks old ( release wise), and I’d say lets have this conversation 2 years from now. The *potential *of UE4’s new philosophy is huge, and that’s what I’m comparing. Not the current state of both engines.

Oh no, I understand that 5% isn’t going to break things for many small developers. I never once said it was an absolute deal breaker in a general sense. But there are many who would look at a 5% royalty on their gross revenue, look at how much they have in the bank, and consider buying Unity licenses instead. For those of us who have Unity licenses, and in my case have been using Unity since 2009 amongst other engines depending on a project’s needs, it’s a pretty straightforward case of “what’s another $750 every two years to upgrade?” Granted, not everyone’s in a similar situation to mine where my position as a contractor enables me to have the money to put out for that every couple of years. Don’t get me wrong, Epic’s done a great thing with its licensing, and I think you’re right - Epic is doing something revolutionary here. But just as Unity’s licensing isn’t right for everyone, Epic’s isn’t right for everyone either.

Honestly, I don’t think UE4 needs anything further for scripting. You’ve completely missed the point of the exercise I outlined above. It’s not to find a comparable scripting language or setup. It’s to find a library that’s comparable to the .NET Base Class Library that provides a similarly diverse set of functionality to Unreal as .NET’s BCL does to Unity. For my purposes, this is quickly turning into compiling a small piecemeal library of other libraries that fills the gap. It’s not a bad way to do it, but it’s not the right approach for everyone.

And one other thing here: I do identify that UE4 hasn’t even been out for a month yet. This is also Epic’s first time making Unreal Engine available to the masses in a way that only the big could really afford in the past, so hiccups and functionality gaps are to be expected for a first release like this. One of the biggest rules in software development, whether it’s games, the technology that drives games, or non-game applications, is development is iterative. I’m reasonably sure that everyone here understands that, and I’m sorry if I didn’t make it clear with my first post denoting what UE4 does not yet support that UE4 will eventually. I’d be very surprised if Epic didn’t fill the more common runtime gaps by the end of the year that holds UE4 back from being as general purpose as Unity.

My point previously was more to provide an example to outline the differences between two engines relative to each other at this time, which is honestly the more productive thing to do if you want to make a decision sooner rather than several months down the road. Of course we can talk about how things may be two years down the road, but that doesn’t really help anyone anytime soon in their decision making process.

I think there will always be some tiny loyal Unity usergroup that like it because Unity will probably find some obscure niche that every 1/1000th person will appreciate. But for the vast majority its a no brainer which engine to use.
Once everyone who is using Unity finishes their current project I can’t see many going back to it to do the next project.

And the royalties argument for Unity doesn’t make sense at all either, to me at least. No serious game use Unity and they are the ones that might care about the 5% loss of revenue. Casual game developers are happy for any sales at all and the added advantages of UE4 vs a 5% cut in revenue more than balances it out. If some indie makes $1m of a title would they cry about the $50k lost? I’d be surprised if that was the case.

Fanboy much Seenoh?

Even wanting one engine to rule over others is bad. You need competition in the engine space or it’ll stagnate.

There will still be reasons to pick Unity over UE4 and vice versa. Unreal isn’t best suited to all game types.

**Guys! Stop this ■■■■■■■■ engine battle! **
There is no engine that can do everything just out of the box, every engine has its own strength and weaknesses!

People who are serious about developing a game will choose an engine based on the project needs and not because of the fact that the engine is used in every 2nd game. My advise to everyone who is not sure which engine to choose from is always the same. First develop your concept (design doc) of the game, sharp out every detail you want to have in the final game, then grab as much whitepapers as you can get from all the engines you might consider a candidate and study them. After that you have a much more clearer look on which engine might be suitable for your project.

Lets let time decide that :D. Have a nice day. :wink:

Do you want modern graphics out of your engine? Unity can do this…if you buy $500+ of buggy plugins. UE4 does this out of the box. Unity still won’t look as good.
Do you want to make a FlappyBird clone? UE4 can do this…but it’s completely overkill and your packaged product will be bloated by all the excess features you won’t use. Unity could do this using the free version.
Can you make a 2d game in Unity/UE4? I’d say yes and it’s probably even easier to make or simulate 2d through these engines than it is to do real 2d through GMS.

You can make anything with any engine. Having more or less tools doesn’t mean one engine is better suited for your project. I don’t see how “You can buy it off the Asset store” makes a product better than one that has that same feature out of the box. It doesn’t matter if you use the features or not. More tools makes an engine more flexible. Unity lovers would have you believe the opposite (I use Unity too). It’s your choice whether you use the tools given to you and how you use them.

FOR VERY NICHE goals like “I need to make something playable in the Web” or I want to develop clones for mobile…you might have a point there, but most indie developers or hobbyists don’t aim to make these sort of things. Expanding their skillset in an engine catered to these environments (Unity) will not necessarily help them learn an engine that is probably better suited to their long term goals (UE4). However, they COULD spend that time making those same clones in UE4 and learning the engine that will work for them better in the long run.

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.

Don’t insult UE4, Unity is a bag of horse manure compared to this and I doubt they borrowed anything, except the market place idea maybe, and that’s a really bad idea!

Of course you can decide that. It’ll be your own project so you can make that decision but its not the same for everyone.

How is Unity *****? Why is the marketplace a bad idea? You’re offering free animations in your sig so how is having a centralised location for that sort of thing a bad idea?

Q:“UE4 is too hard for indies!”
A:Wrong UE4 breaks projects down into bite size pieces so no one person has to take on the bulk of the work. A map maker can just as easy work on the animations as an animator with over ten years worth of skill and experience.

Q:“Why would you use visual solutions like a Behavior Tree…just code it with mass if statements.”
A:Why because there are many things that you don’t want some coder to hard code. Get any where my blend space you die.

Q:“I don’t see a point in blueprints.”
A: I don’t see the point in creating a game inside whats no more than a glorified notepad either. I’m a content artist and I need that visual feed back.

Q:“I don’t see a point in prototyping with CSGs”
A: Because it’s there why would you need a reason?

Q:“X engine is easier to import assets into…” (No.)
A: Right if it was that easy then everyone would be doing it and you could buy X engine at X-mart.

Q:X engine can look just as good as UE4 if you buy enough plugins from the Asset store!" (over $500 per seat added onto upfront licensing cost)
A:Well you can do the same with PhotoShop but that does not mean you will. Also I find it rather insulting as a content artist that I could not make something even better by just stealing the idea from their store in the first place. After all that’s what artist do best. :wink:

Q:“You’ll have a hard time finding artists to work on your project with UE4.”
A:Well I know at least 30 guys right now who say other wise, me for one.

That was fun. :smiley:

Why is it a bad idea? What you said makes absolutely no sense at all.

Hehe :smiley: spot on! Although you can’t truly compare marketplace Unity to marketplace UE4 cause they don’t seem anything similar.