Hello there.
I’ve started ‘playing’ with UE4 some months ago, I really want to took my gaming dev somewhere else because at the moment I’m using Unity (still on 4, no plans on upgrading to 5) and I’m really hating where it’s going and the community which were brilliant in the past gone full retarded nowadays, that may sound silly and stupid, but I’d really like to have a decent community to interact with. When I’ve started looking for alternatives, the obvious one was UE4, but after some months now, I’m still struggling to perform the first steps and I wonder if I choose the right tool for the job.
Some things that really turned me down are the fact that the engine itself seems much bloated compared to Unity, specially for mobile platforms; when you want a simple game you end up with a massive installer and too much overhead, and the lack of a modern non-visual (and high-performance) scripting engine, plus of course some features like decent 2D tools and simulation. Note: I’m not saying UE4 is slow or something, I wouldn’t be surprised it if substantially outperforms Unity for heavy games, but for simpler ones it doesn’t scales very well.
I’m not saying UE4 is bad or lacking, but perhaps it simply isn’t the right tool for the job in my case. The community is really great and so far I’m quite satisfied with the discussions here, but perhaps it’s inevitable that once any community grows enough it will eventually become retarded as a whole, but that’s surely nothing I should be considering at the moment. I also think that UE4 is going the ‘right’ way, as opposed to Unity which every release gets more and more distant from what I expect from an engine.
Perhaps the problem is just the lack of decent C++ tutorials and documentation, since most people say it’s easy and productive to program in C++, but so far I didn’t see anything I’d call easy, or even intuitive. I like having the option to use blueprint but if I could choose I’d surely rather have a scripting language like C#/JS or even Lua, but it seems that’s never going to happen, at least officially.
When I look for example at Godot (2D+3D&Python-like for scripting, and I love python) or LibGDX (which seems to support languages like Groovy nowadays, since I hate Java), I see something that at least to me seems more fitting to my purposes. My games are light on graphics, I plan to do a lot of 2D (w/ physics) and I totally don’t need all the rendering features UE4/Unity5 have. To tell the truth, Unity4 is almost the perfect tool for me, that’s why I’m still using it (but ‘under protest’).
I’m not telling you that I’m giving up or unsatisfied, it’s much the opposite, I’m very satisfied with UE4 for what it proposes to do, and I somewhat hope that you will point me to some complete noob-to-pro C++ tutorial that will allow me to start using UE4 the way the others are using it, because so far people has been quite passionate about C++ programming in UE4 but I didn’t see anything lovely.
Any word is appreciated.
Thank you.
Nothing anywhere near as complex as Unity or Unreal, but maybe just having a chance to create something is the motivation you need to continue expanding your skillset into the more complex engines?