Greetings!
I’d like to know if Paper2D (That’s what the 2D part of Unreal Engine is called, right? :p) is the way to go for my future plans in 2D game design. To make this decision, I’ve boiled it down to 3 factors I require, other than that I already know of.
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Does it have animation support?
By this I mean using bones and nodes to create animations in-engine from different body parts, rather than an animated image (.gif or sprite sheet animation). The game I’m thinking of making has dynamic animations that would require such support in order to work properly.
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If it has such animation support, does it have blending?
I’m hoping that this game would have animation blending as well as the kind of animation system I mentioned above. I want my game to have characters that smoothly change stances and do actions depending on the situation they’re in to give more polished looks.
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Good 2D physics engine?
Note here that I’m mainly comparing UE4 with Unity in terms of 2D game development features. I used Unity2D once and it has some pretty nifty tools for physics design, like a ‘polygon collider’, which lets me add a 2D collision mesh to a sprite and edit it dynamically within the editor, ‘wheel joints’ that have many options like torque, dampening etc., and I actually found the physics ran quite well on low-powered PCs and androids. What does UE4’s 2D engine have to contest these features?
Thank you in advance! (Sorry for the long question, no need to have an answer this long!)
To my knowledge (I have been working with Paper2d for a few months now), Paper2D does not have skeletal animation, does not have a 2D physics engine (though the 3d physics engine works just fine for most 2D physics) and does not have any kind of blending or blendspaces or state machines or animation blueprints for 2d animation.
It is strictly a sprite sequence based system as far as animation goes. You can certainly build your own tools in the engine to accomplish all of the above, and maybe the marketplace has something like that. But I imagine you dont want to go to all that work and trouble before you can start making your game.
For physics the unreal physics can be set up to connect multiple components or actors together and each of those can use different types of physics joints and can be constrained to a 2D plane. I did something like that in order to make a touchscreen game where you pick up Ragdolled cats and drop them into a giant carafe.
Although the cats were single skeletal 3d meshes not sprites.
But yes it has torque and dampening etc and you can apply those to any object that is simulating physics and you can attach sprites to those objects.
The sprite editor in unreal doesn’t let you edit the sprite pixels but it does let you draw or auto detect 2D collision hulls for both the animated sprites and the tilesets.
Thank you, both of you!
It seems Unreal Engine, even today still doesn’t match Unity’s flexibility and extensibility in 2D game creation, for smaller developers at least. There is, of course, the option of making a 3D game, but locking the positions and camera, but I think as of now it may be just a better option to stick to another engine better designed for 2D game creation, or at least use UE for 2.5D games
From what I’ve heard, it is currently significantly easier to use other engines for 2D but I can’t say for sure.
One more addendum: In Unreal’s project settings you can change a couple of things to make the 3D physics engine act like a 2D physics engine.
I tried to use Paper2d for a gamejam recently and hit a big brick wall. I mostly blame myself though, inexperience using 2d, and only about 1 year experience in Unreal anyways. I’m sure like with everything in unreal you can do it with patience and just really working at it.
I did not find any Animation stuff while using paper2d, any “animation like” stuff were done using flip book’s. I don’t believe Paper2d has been a focus for Epic, and there may be easier options out there.
I will say the 3d sidescroller template, works very well though if you want a side scroller.
On the Unreal Slackers discord channel you’ll find in the paper2d room that there is an indie project called PaperZD which fills in a lot of Unreal’s 2D gaps.
I should also mention that I have found plugins and tools for putting vector graphics into the engine and also I heard of one which gives you skeletal 2D animation and 2D animation blueprints, but haven’t looked it up yet.