Should I move from Unity 3D to UE4?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi

I have been using Unity 3D engine for 6 years full time. I develop mainly training simulations for large corporate clients. Although I am a very loyal Unity 3D user, I have always loved the UE and I am now at a point where I think I need to start making the transition (to at least allow me to use both tools if needed). Please allow me to ask a couple of questions to convince me (and others) this is the right move:)

  1. I often need to develop custom behaviors, e.g. audio voice recording, graph plotting or recording users screen interactivity. Does the UE lean itself towards achieving tasks like that?
  2. Can the UE compile/load dll’s at runtime?
  3. How are tasks like serial comms or UDP achieved in UE4? Are the libraries for those things or can I add c++ plugins or what?

Thanks in advance for any help!

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  1. You can do anything with the ue4, long as you possess the programming knowledge, just about , literally anything.

  2. No idea, not a programmer atm ( wip).

  3. No idea on that either sorry, another member will need to assist you, OR try IRC at: irc.freenode.net : #unrealengine ( last I checked , cussing is allowed, so be prepared if that kind of thing bothers you ).

I responded, seeing no one else had, and wanting you to at least see something reasonable :wink:

Cheers
nl

3

UE4 supports hot reloading module DLL’s in the editor.
Whether or not that is what you need, its at least a place to start looking :slight_smile:

4

The community alone is worth it.

5

,
Making transition from one engine to another is difficult, because you probably have to create lots of new code, modify existing ones and learn new things (you have been familiar with Unity for 6 years which is invaluable). So what are the strongest reasons for engine migration - perhaps there are things which cannot be achieved in Unity (and can be done in UE4)? I myself am in the same boat with you - TBH, it is quite difficult to adjust from open source libraries to UE4. There are difficult features like having UE4 level loaded in a child window within an application, which I still cannot bring myself to get done.

6

I have come from Unity to UE4 i just want to learn blueprints when i learn it everything is going by inaginations :slight_smile: just keep building :slight_smile: as i know there is c++ and blueprint u can do same things as at c++ with blueprints right ?

7

Blueprints are just a visualizer for the C++ code they will generate. Basically the engine will convert your blueprints to C++ code.

8

Ehm… not quite. Blueprints will be converted to bytecode. The VM that executes the bytecode will call C++ functions.

9

Basicly u can do everything with blueprints as c++

10

Thanks guys. , for sure. For me it is also a financial decision. I really like UE’s 5% royalty model. I have a developer and freelancer I use and will need to purchase 3x3xpro licenses soon which is a lot of money. I also loe the blueprints as there are a lot of c++ libraries I currently use. I am currently going through the “UE4 for Unity Developers” section, will give some feedback when I am done.

11

“Should I move from Unity 3D to UE4?”

Yup!!

12

Beside UE4 being an AMAZING piece of software… Epics license is the best around. (Thanks Epic!)

13

Remember learning blueprints FIRST that is the power of UE other stuff

14

Lot’s of childish replies but not a single answer to the 3 questions.

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  1. Yes you can create custom tools in either Blueprint or C++.

  2. Not sure where you are going with this, maybe modding support? Unreal definitely can hot reload the gameplay code so I guess it should have support for this.

3.) You mean like networking? This is a big feature of UE, you basically have to annotate your code with macros and UE will generate the code for you for example


UFUNCTION(Server,Reliable,WithValidation)
void ServerMoveTo();

Unity’s UNET is very similar to UE4’s networking. At least it feels that way.

I don’t think that you have to switch, Unity is a great Engine. Personally I chose UE4 because I had the least amount of trouble with it.

That doesn’t mean UE4 doesn’t come with its own problems. For example upgrading from 4.x to 4.y is always a pain, at least for me.

16

Why do I need to load dll at runtime? I wrote a compiler some time ago that takes a user math formula with parameters/properties and build adll from that. I only found out Unity wont load dll’s into codedom at runtime. This is not allowed by iOs and Android, but most of my products ship as Windows standalone exe files.

Regarding the serial and UDP, that is purely for hardware interfacing with Arduino for some hardware products of mine.

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Arduino plugin: UE4Duino - Arduino to UE4 plugin Release! - Programming & Scripting - Epic Developer Community Forums! :slight_smile: