Hi everyone,
So, tl;dr, I’m over 2 years down the line into a Unity project and I’m at the stage where it’s more or less pointless to keep on using Unity. My entire codebase (about 150k LOC) is abstracted out nicely so it wouldn’t be such a nightmare to switch out on the whole in terms of code, apart from translating the API calls over to UE4 (it’s all plain C#, all I do in Unity is use MonoBehaviours to reference backend classes if any physical interactions need to occur). Having access to the source- not a source license, I was given their repository by a friend for finding pitfalls in the big old black box of Unity- has put me off using the engine even more. Some release code is honestly structured like it was put together by a monkey intern, and I’m not talking obscure systems, I’m talking main processes. It’s a mess.
A friend of mine is always telling me of the enormous benefits of UE4 and I desperately want to switch over. On the graphical side, Unity’s default lighting is hugely capping the quality of my renders at this point, and not being a graphics dev I’m quite limited in what I can do about that (not the mention the closed-source limitations).
There are only a couple of things putting me off; I’ve developed an enormous amount of backend editor tools which will likely take a lot of work to get going with UE, and I have a hell of a lot of UI set up with Unity’s uGUI.
In terms of Unity-specific stuff like UI, is it going to be heavily involved moving it over or could I perhaps automate it? I’m assuming that it’s not going to be possible to easily migrate over, given the different UI structures, so even if it’s possible to read Unity’s markup scene format over to UE4 and rebuild, it could end up taking even more time than just reconstructing it.
I am only going to be able to do this if it isn’t going to take a ludicrous amount of time but it’s been on my mind for a while now. I’m seriously disillusioned with Unity and know that it’s putting very strict limits on the quality I can achieve, so if anyone has migrated themselves I’d really appreciate hearing about their experiences, and just get some general thoughts from people around here.