Sell me on Unreal Engine as the future main engine that my company uses?

I have not had any experince working with unreal engine yet as my company currently uses unity and other various platforms. I would like to see you guys sell me on why i should start using this unreal engine? This is not meant as a bashing post or anything. I am in no way saying anything bad about unreal engine I just have not used it yet and am wondering what the reasons you guys decide to use it? I am looking to see if there is anything specific that you guys enjoy that may make me decide to give a shot to learning it. Also can someone tell me what coding languages are supported by this engine? thank you!

This information is all available on their website, and these forums. Just start reading about what other people are doing here, and look at all the top-notch major games that use UE4 (Final Fantasy 7 Remake! FINALLY!)…

If you’re not sure then download Unity and UE4 and play with them both, you’ll find out soon enough. I mean… it is free, they don’t have to sell you on anything, just try it.

okay, sorry. I meant not to cause any issues. I just wanted to hear from the developers themselves who use it why they do and why they do not use other various software that is available for development. I see no reason in completely learning many various development platforms if i only need to master 1 in order to acomplish my game goals. I just want to make sure i put that time and effort into the best possible option available at the time

Not only can Unreal be used to make the ANY game you could possibly want to make, it gives you the power to create some of the most breathtaking, realistic scene imaginable. For proof, just check out Koola’s work with Unreal. It is beyond words.

I also wasnt meaning JUST unity vs Ue… i meant all the various development software out there. Why did you choose to work with UE

awesome, thank you. Does Unreal have its own modeling system built in then so you dont need to use blender or maya3d?

No, you will still need to use an external 3d Modeller in order to create assets. They do offer tools to help, such as the Maya ART tool, to help make sure things are fully compatible with the engine. Luckily though, even if you acquired a 3d model from some other program, importing into the engine and assigning a skeleton to it is fairly simple. Also the amount of tutorials from both the Epic Staff and the Unreal Community is outstanding.

To answer your question: I chose Unreal because I loved the old games and I used to make maps here and there for them. The ease of use with Blueprints makes it so you never have to learn (or in my case re-learn) C++. Everything can be done with Blueprints. It is real is as simple as saying “I want to test out <insert gameplay feature here>” and you can have it up and running within 10 minutes.

If you tell us more about your studio and what kind of games you make, it will be easier to tell you relevant advantages and disadvantages.

Personally I switched to UE4 after a short time with Unity 4 mostly because the out of box grapics was so much better. I also belived in Epics plans for the engine and its community. It was more fun to learn UE4!

I was skeptical about going from C# to Blueprints and C++ but now I think the combination is great.

oh, see i am more into the actual code writing, so your saying that unreal engine is more suited to those who dont want to or dont know how to code vs other platofrms that actually allow you to use your own code when creating the game?

The best way to describe it You can do all three:

  1. Pure Code
  2. Pure BluePrints
  3. A Hybrid of both Code and BluePrint
  1. UE4 is open-source. Don’t like something? No worries, just modify the engine to your liking.
  2. UE4 is powerful. I am constantly amazed by what UE4 is capable of (Speaking from experience) when I set out on something that others say cannot be done.
  3. UE4 is FREE. Sure there are royalties, but the 5% is nothing compared to what UE4 is worth.
  4. Epic Games is a great company. Don’t like corporate money-hungry companies? Good, Epic Games is not that kind of company. They are a pleasure to work with, and are the most flexible company I have ever come across. Interacting with the staff is a pleasure: When interacting with staff, I don’t feel like I am talking to someone who is waiting till they can leave work and go home, I feel like I am talking to someone that enjoys their job, and who’s sole purpose is to help me get what I need. Staff are also frequently seen on the forums, and other social areas.

I myself am a developer for a game in UE4, and am also working on various project for the UE4 marketplace. I started using UE4 as soon as it went free. I was literally browsing some C++ forums one day, and someone said that companies pay big $$$ to those who know UE4, so I downloaded the engine, and started using it. Many say that there is a steep learning curve to UE4, but there is no such thing that I have encountered, as by now I am more than comfortable in the engine, and not a day goes by that I do not use UE4.

Blueprints is programming, just another way to write it. If you prefer C++ you can use it for almost everything. I personally belive that for most projects a mix of the two will be most productive.

If you want to go deeper than the scripting layer exposed to C# in Unity and Blueprints in UE, this is definately an engine for you. With access to the source (not open source in the usual sense) you can modify any part of the engine.

Our project switched to unreal from unity, because we hit couple of issues in the engine and those weren’t getting fixed.

Basically, it was decided that having source code access is a good idea, and there’s no guarantee that unity engine won’t be suddenly broken during one of the updates.

If you have no problems with unity, you have no reason to switch.

If you heavily rely on mecanim humanoid animation retargeting and using root motion for locomotion, then you should know that those areas are realatively weak in UE4.

The good thing about UE4 is that out of the box rendering quality is vastly superior and some of the features that require purchase in unity are available for free in UE4 (for example, ai decision/behavior trees)

Also see

and
http://www.extroforge.com/the-switch-from-unity-3d-to-unreal-engine/

Unreal 4 is not opensource. Opensource usually refers to software develped under FOSS license like GPL. UE4 is not that. It is proprietary software, where you get access to source code under strict conditions.

Your right, my bad.

Something to keep in mind is that UE4 is relatively new (in comparison to the other engines), and new things are being introduced all the time.

@franktech, here you go:

While it not being open source as http://opensource.org/osd-annotated (only the royallity from my POV, but it is OK because they are a company paying nice employees)… eek even blender suffer a little from paid members (thought they have one or two or more amazing programmers :P)… xD.

Thought havent ended a game xD… yeah out of the box graphics are better than unity (motion blur and other adjust settings for cams), and you ahve a lot of integrated things liek behaviour trees, material node editor (well in unity there are options, but none original from unity AFAIK), inside ddebugger, the full graphics (not a paid or get a ugly “personal edition” banner… I mean you are proud of have UE logo in your game…), graphic debugger for blue prints, AI debugger and so on… and also a very nice separation of concerns: actors->pawns->characters ai, anim and so on… also you have now papper2d.

Even I want to implement some “features” that hope maybe get integrated on editor someday xD… (hopefully).

U totaly right with it :slight_smile:

awesome, thank you for the discussion and ideas. I am sorry I have not said much about my company yet. I know that is actually a very large factor in the engine of choice. I do appreciate the discussion and the thoughts about various engines etc. How often do updates to the Unreal Engine come out, and when they do do you have to redo your current projects to make them compatable with the current version of the engine? sounds like Unreal has a lot of great features and i think that i will take a look at it as well. Got it downloaded yesterday. Could someone post me a link to some beginer tutorials that go over how the engines laid out/how to get started with it from a new users side? thanks! I think that we will probably stick with unity, but also look to unreal for the higher end graphic projects in the future a little bit. Are you able to build projects for android, ios, and wii u with unreal? it sounds like maybe unreal is more suited for the playstation 4 xboxone and pc development side of things with the higher res graphics capibilitys.

UE4 supports the following platforms:
• PC
• Mac
• IOS
• Android
• HTML5
• Xbox One
• Playstation 4

Hotfixes for the latest engine version (Currently 4.10) are rolled out every week or two. Major engine versions (4.11 is next) are rolled out every few months. You do not need to make changes to the project for hotfixes, but do need to upgrade your project if you want to use the latest major version, which for larger projects may require changes in code, etc. Major engine versions usually introduce entirely new aspects of the engine, or major optimizations. Here is a look at the release notes for 4.10: What's New | Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation

To get to know the UI of the editor, there is this video series by Epic Games (almost a year old): A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums