Things that would make me switch to Unreal from Unity

[zooby]

@karltheawesome;288001

I don’t think C# would add much to be honest. The problem I always had with C# in Unity is it fell in an awkward middle ground. You didn’t have enough low level access to do really awesome stuff with the engine but it’s also not simple enough that just anyone can pick it up. You still need to learn quite a bit of programing before you can use it. In this way Unity wasn’t really accessible to artists and non-programmers.

Blueprints bridge this gap, someone with almost no programing knowledge can start doing stuff straight away and coders can still do anything they want in C++. What I would like to see is a way of writing blueprints using simple text scripts since it can be slow to hook up all the nodes and everything. I don’t think sandwiching C# in the middle would do anything but make it more complex and hard to manage.

On the stability of Unity, it rarely crashes to desktop because the editor is running in a mono sandbox. Exceptions are caught and displayed as warnings or errors. In my experience of using it it doesn’t actually have less bugs. The bugs it does have are much harder to find since you don’t have source code access and it doesn’t always tell you about them. As much as crashes to desktop are annoying you do get a full stack trace allowing you to identify the issue.

This would be nice. But if you’re going for text scripts then you shouldn’t invent a new scripting language… what about… C#? The problem with blue prints is that you really need a massive screen to be able to see anything at all. They’re not exactly compact. I mean to do Math.sqrt(xx+yy) in Blueprints would can take up a whole screen. (Yes they have little scripts for math expressions now). But personally I prefer the middle ground of a scripting language somewhere in between C++ and blueprints. Other options would be Javascript/Python/Lua. But I just happen to like C#.

A compromise would be that blueprints are created from a text box. What I mean is you type in “myFunction” and a myFunction blueprint is created. Then you type in “(” and it jumps to the first variable, then you type in “23” and it fills in that variable, then you type in “,” and it jumps to the next variable. I think you get what I mean. So that typing a script and creating a blueprint from the keyboard is virtually identical.

Or just make blueprints more compact so you can fit more on the screen while still being able to read them!

Maybe people don’t realise that for people trained in text programming, switching to a visual system is actually quite hard!