So I am looking for an engine to build a sudo-MMO in. Players are never directly playing with each other but rather data from one is affecting another. I am looking for an engine that is very easy to develop with cross platform, mainly PC, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS, and Web Browser. As of right now that plan is to make it 2D, though that may change. Cross platform play is also a big sticking point. Another engine I was considering (which I already have experience in) would be Unity. Just trying to decide between these two engines and I am having a rough time with it, as they both seem like great engines! It would also be nice to be able to have the Web Player play without having to install anything, which is an upcoming feature in both engines. If you have any word on this I would very much like to know! If there is anything I neglected to mention let me know, and thank you for your time!
I think you could do that pretty easily with the REST plugin and stock UE4 - basically hook up your server that collects stuff to use a REST api for getting data, then hook up what to send it and later what to get from it via the REST plugin’s blueprint nodes.
I am most concerned with how developing for multiple platforms works. In Unity you don’t really have to change your code much at all to get it to work across all platforms, what is it like for Unreal since it uses strait C++ in stead of a scripting language?
It does use a scripting language - Blueprints. They’re just a visual scripting language.
As far as being able to write once and run on any of the platforms, I think that’s roughly true, especially for 2D projects. 3D projects are a bit different in that mobile of course doesn’t support many of the desktop graphics features and can’t handle the same level of fidelity in textures/meshes, though that shouldn’t be a problem for you I think.
So are blueprints the recommended way to do things, much like c# is the recommended way to do things in Unity? Because doing it in C++ is modifying the engine itself correct?
C++ is not exclusive to the engine code no. You’re game can and probably will include at least some C++. However you do not need to write any special code to hit different platforms… At least not any more than you would have to in Unity.
Interesting, I was worried that using C++ would mean I would have to take a lot of extra care as to not break it on other platforms. In Unity you can use almost any function, outside of a select few, and it will still build on any platform. If Unreal is the same way then I can see it just being more appealing to use as I prefer C++. However when I try and open a project in C++ it opens in visual studio, and then I am a bit confused as to where to go from there, and how the editor and visual studio interact with each other. To the tutorials!