Frustrated With Unity, Looking At Unreal As An Alternative

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

Hey, thanks for your thoughts!

I figured I would do a little update post as some may be curious as to what was decided when I finally brought this up with my friend.
We basically looked at what we had, what we were running into with Unity, and decided that UE4 was worth a try. That was around a week and a half ago. Since then, I’ve worked almost non-stop doing crash course learning of the engine and its features, seeing what can be accomplished with its toolset as opposed to Unity’s.

What I found out was, and still is, surprising.

First off, I would not call UE4 a beginner’s engine. I feel that without previous experience in Unity, I would have been completely at a loss as to what I was doing.
I also have found its visual scripting to be honestly quite astounding. I’m more a visual person, and this feature has really saved me a fair few times already. If I was stuck only doing code, like I was in Unity, then all in all I would have been out of luck, getting almost nowhere.

Visually-speaking, the user interfaces are great, and, concerning gameplay visuals, you can make great-looking things with UE4 with just a bare minimum of knowledge. I hated having to dive into so much of the nuances of why things look the way they do, and when they look that why, and so on, that I honestly had given up with making the game look the way I had envisioned it inside of Unity. Not so with UE4.

I’ve also been surprised with just how much official content is out there. Yes, there are videos, which Unity had, but those videos are accompanied with source, which is just amazing. Fully featured projects ripe for tearing apart and learning from? I love that.
Also the networking, oh my the networking. The fact it’s literally just out of the box ready for you to network and make multiplayer games is just… Wow. I mean yes, it’s mostly generic and not highly specific to what my friend and I are doing, but comparing it to the hell we had with Unity… There is no comparison, really.

Then there are the tools at your disposal. From Persona to level design, to landscaping, to just everything, it feels so much more robust and flexible. It makes Unity feel more like a jack of all trades type of deal. It can do a fair amount with a large number of platforms, but when it comes to PC games, it just comes up short in so many areas. UE4, on the other hand, has felt very refreshing in this regard.

Sure, UE4 isn’t without problems, I’m not a huge fan of having to reorganize folders, for instance, and having to fix redirectors, all that stuff, but at the end of the day, its bugs or shortcomings, however you want to put it, fall into the quality of life category more so than Unity (at least that I’ve experienced so far.) Unity felt more like it lacked major necessary features, and just left me wanting something more, something better.
From the vast depths of tools, learning and otherwise, at my disposal, to the simple fact that it’s so simple to work with once you have the idea of what you’re doing, UE4 has met and exceeded all my expectations.

Now, what have I done in this week or so of power learning?
So much has been done that within another week or so, we’re looking at our first release. It’s obviously not going to be fully-fledged, I think the term is milestone alpha, but this is just huge for us. Within this week and a half, we’ve met what we did in Unity and gone past it. We had been working, on and off, with Unity for about three years at that point, and each time we got close to having something, it just fall apart. I don’t blame the engine entirely, far from it, but being honest, the engine didn’t help.
Our vision for a combat system has been realized without limitations inside of Unreal. We have fully functional locational damage. The thing is getting very close to being networked even, which is the last step before we can release this thing.
It’s just all come together so beautifully, and all in under two weeks of work.

I’m blown away, honestly. I hate to sound like I’m gushing, but it’s hard not to when so much has been done with such a little amount of time.
It’s great, is all I can really say. =-)
I don’t think he and I would be getting ready for our first release if it wasn’t for the engine switch. There were just too many hurdles with Unity.

I suppose with all that being said, to anyone on the fence, if most of your work lies outside of the engine you’re in now, like our work had been (like models, textures, ideas, etc) then definitely consider switching. At the very least, consider trying it for a week, or a few days even. I can’t say you’ll like Unreal as I have, but what I can say is you’ll be better prepared to make a well-informed decision of what works best for you and your game.

I also want to take one last moment and thank everyone on this thread for essentially helping my friend and I take the plunge. When we talked about it, I shared this thread with him, and from there, well, you see what happened. =-)

So again, thank you all, and take care!

I would say that Unity is more of a “Jack of Nothing” engine until you create/buy all of the necessary systems and editor extensions to specialize it to your need. Unity isn’t fully equipped to make ANY type of game out of the box. You will always have to spend, at least initially, large amounts of time building things so that you can then build the game you want. UE4 comes packaged with so many things out of the box that it’s relatively effortless to snap together core systems and logic to make at least a framework for your game.

In Unity, you feel like you are making great progress while developing all these systems/tools yourself, but none of that progress is towards actually making the game you desire.

[anonymous_user_1f3288fb]

I have been following UE4 for a while now, but i just recently started really giving it a go. All i can say is i am blown away. This is the best engine for my personal needs. Once you get past the initial learning curve, which is not that hard, depending your background. It’s got everything built in, like others have mentioned and it’s all better in my opinion.

[Harry_Florencio]

Hey, thanks for your thoughts!

I’m blown away, honestly. I hate to sound like I’m gushing, but it’s hard not to when so much has been done with such a little amount of time.
It’s great, is all I can really say. =-)

I don’t think he and I would be getting ready for our first release if it wasn’t for the engine switch. There were just too many hurdles with Unity.
So again, thank you all, and take care!

Hey man, glad to hear that! It’s quite true, Unreal puts the ultimate power in our hands in many aspects. The major criticism is “oh, it’s not so easy like Unity” but man, if you can cope with complexity, you can have it all! It’s much more robust and consistent. I love Unity as well, but so far I haven’t regretted the switch. And you know, so many things worth learning are simply not that easy and clean, many times we must get our hands dirty to learn something deeply. Worth it! Love Blueprints, and though I’ve seen mixed feelings all around C++, we all know it kicks ***. So we have an entire world to explore and at no extra cost.

Welcome to the community!

[mid_gen]

I’ve been dabbling in narrow scope plugins and stuff for a while, but I’ve spent a few days building out a prototype game in UE for the first time to see how it goes.

Honestly, if you read through and understand the gameplay framework before you start, UnrealEngine blows Unity out of the water for fast prototyping. Sure you can hack together something that works in Unity quickly…but with UE you can very quickly build out not just a prototype demo, but a solid game foundation that’s ready to be honed into a polished product.

From never having built a game in UE, in about 8 hours total effort I’ve got a working multiplayer twin-stick arena shooter game with destructible environments, spawning, pickup systems, scoring, levels, UI. All built with blueprints on top of custom C++ base classes so it’s easily extendable through either path. It isn’t some cobbled together hack that will need throwing again and rebuilding on top of a proper framework, it’s all done properly, GameModes, States, Controllers, Pawns. I’m really impressed with it all.

Just simple stuff like the Actor class already having Damage system hooks already in place…it’s been a breeze. A world away from the empty slate Unity gives you.