Let me briefly explain my problem. I want to develop a few games (obviously), one of which will be a PS1-like game with an open world and the second project will have a procedural world generation and be something like a survival game with more stylized visuals.
Now I’m facing a delema, a while ago I made a game in Unreal Engine 4 for a high school project based on a few tutorials on YouTube and to be honest I really liked it. I liked how simple it was without these modern, “impressive” graphics tools like Nanite, Lumen, and so on. Besides, these features would also be overkill for my games tbh. Also UE4 seems to be more lightweight and optimized then UE5, I am right? Now I’m wondering whether it makes sense to prefer UE4 to UE5 these days, and I would like to have answered a few questions about that.
Is it true that the documentation of UE4 is significantly worse than that of UE5?
Is the blueprint version of UE5 more powerful than the one in UE4?
Does UE4 have procedural generation features and are they as good as UE5’s?
And how difficult will it be to integrate its multiplayer function in the UE4?
First of all, let’s get rid of the questions about why I don’t use Godot or Unity. Godot is nowhere near as good at 3d as Unity or Unreal + I hate Python syntax. I tried Unity once during my school years and again recently, and it’s a collection of gray matter. You get one error after another right after you create a project. Exporting Blender models to Unity is pure hell. My experience with UE4 and 5, on the other hand, was nearly perfekt until now and when there were problems, there were only a few and even those were easier to fix.
I thank everyone in advance for their answers and help.
for the most part UE5 is bigger, but that size is optionality (the way you can accomplish things), and what has been exposed through blueprints. Most of the big issues with Unreal in larger games is studios and developers not optimizing their own assets, and relying on auto-magic features to fix it for them (non-square, non-power-of-2, large texture files that have way to many render passes) while having hundreds of shaders that need to be compiled at startup or open world streaming.
Nanite and Lumen are dialable features (you can turn them off), and if you want Raytracing and the DLSS stuff you can look into NVidia branch “NvRTX”, but this requires compiling from source
you don’t have to do anything with the C++ after you do the compile from source if you don’t want to.
technically the NvRTX could be considered like UE4.30 but in reality instead of Nanite and Lumen Nvidia implemented native RTX support, and yes it is still mostly compatible with AMD and Intel Raytracing, their flavors of DLSS, and technically Vulkan), and again if you don’t want Raytracing you can just turn the feature off.
when it comes to “stylization” that technically has nothing to do with the engine or engine version, it will be a matter of polygon distributions, Shader/Materials, and post processing. it just so happens that Unreal does “realism” “better”, and realistically Unity and Godot can get close to “realism”. while in Unreal unless you do some major tweaks it is far too easy to end up with a “realistic” washed out scene, that makes the player feel they have Glaucoma every time they transition from interior to exterior lighting.
Godot has full C# integration now, so you wouldn’t have to work with Godot script unless you wanted to (there is speculation that Godot Script might go the way of Boo for Unity)
for the Procedural Generation stuff: this actually depends on what you mean by “Procedural Generation”? for runtime placing chunks or pieces into the world either UE4 or UE5 have the same capabilities (you are just doing SpawnActor() and SpawnComponent() these systems might have seen a bit of improvement in UE5 but that is to combat the shortcomings when it comes to rendering)
UE5 has added editor time procedural generation features (the ability to make those chunks and pieces faster), while allowing for those chunks and pieces to be used at either runtime spawn, or for an authored level.
if you still have a UE4 install great you can use it if you want. if you don’t have the install already then you would need to find someone that has the install or compile it from source.
UE4 runs faster than UE5, has more tutorials (or did) due to it’s age, and I believe blueprint used to be nativized to C++; now it runs in a virtual machine.
EOS may no longer be supported for UE4, but I can’t really comment on that.
With a bit of tweaking to the rendering settings (disabling Lumen, Nanite, Raytracing and all the myriad of shiny stochastic-based stuff - there is several articles on that on the web), you can technically make UE5 very lightweight, almost like the earlier UE4.
UE4 is no longer maintained (I think, but maybe I’m wrong), so it’s a safer bet to move on with the 5.x versions.
1 - I would not say UE4 documentation is “significantly worse” than UE5, but just simply “a bit worse”. There is more tutorials on UE4 though on the web.
2 - It depends on what do you mean by “powerful”. In terms of performance, I think this is roughly similar. In terms of features/expressiveness, probably UE5 have a couple of nice additions, but no revolutions here.
3 - I don’t think so. PCG is an Unreal 5 only feature.
The Engine is more optimized and runs even better on the new CPUs. As for Documentation well yeah, your screwed no matter which version you use Epic Sucks at Technical Writing it seems. as for effects Definitely go and use UE5.7.1
As a Programmer since pre-Z80 CPUs one thing I find I hate is building upon Buggy Platforms. Much of the Bugs that exist in UE4 are gone in UE5.7 Too many people build an application or game with bugs and then later build on top of those bugs and later they abandon and make something new with bugs and repeat the process and then tell you see it’s a great Software… Yeah right, sure it is… NOT! Start with the cleanest basis and the quality of your end product will be much better. Furthermore, there will be less headaches along the way.
