Unity vs Unreal: UWP

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi, sorry if i’m in the wrong area of the forum for this.

I’m currently a unity developer developing a game targeting Xbox Live Creators Program, which means developing for UWP rather than Xbox specifically.

I understand there is a Microsoft maintained fork of Unreal that supports this path, but it is not well supported. For that reason I use Unity engine. However, while it’s much better than no support, it’s not particularly well supported on Unity either.

Recently there has been some information about Microsoft’s upcoming GameCore, which is supposed to replace UWP and launch with the next Xbox in the next year or two. Microsoft has no clarification on whether games currently in development for UWP will have an upgrade path, or are dead in the water. Neither does Unity, which I suppose is not their fault, Microsoft hasn’t made any actual announcements yet.

For these reasons I’m looking for a way out, and It’s not too late in development for me to switch engines.

I just want to use whatever engine gives me the most flexibility and portability. Currently for the purposes of Xbox Creators Program, Unity wins by a mile or ten, but with no information about the future from either Microsoft or Unity, that development path seems like a dead end in light of the upcoming replacement.

So my question is, does the lack of support for UWP mean unreal won’t support Microsoft Gamecore, or is this something that could be on the table?
If it weren’t for the lack of UWP/Xbox support i would be using Unreal already.

It;s probably too early to be asking these questions, but I don’t want to develop for something that will be obsolete soon. I just don’t want to waste any more time on a platform that seems to be signalling it’s own death, and if Unreal can do any better than Unity in this regard I would quite happily switch

Gears of War 4 came out for UWP if I remember correctly, which gives me a bit of hope for using Unreal, Just seeking clarification

2

I researched a bit about this GameCore stuff and turns out: Everything is pure speculation. MS hasn’t even confirmed the existence of GameCore at all. I bet if there’s a new API for Xbox, Epic is working on integrating it as long as MS is more open about everything. The primary reason for missing first party support from Epic is Microsofts policy. Our Lord and Saviour Tim Sweeney stated multiple times that UWP in its current shape sucks.

Long story short: Don’t panic :slight_smile: MS will very likely have a plan for upgrading or something. There are so many XB Live Creators Program users, they’d shoot themselves in the foot by abandoning all of 'em.

3

Thanks mate. Yeah I’m aware i’m too early on asking this, just trying to keep an eye on the future. Sweeney is correct that UWP has issues, but it’s very cool that xbox offers this as a development/publishing path using a retail Xbox as a dev kit in the first place. Rival consoles don’t really have anything similar. Groundbreaking idea but flawed execution, classic Microsoft style.

In any case , Unity’s (mild) support for this program is why I use Unity over Unreal. I must have missed the beef between MS and Epic, I find it a bit confusing why Epic wouldn’t support this program, especially if they want to entice Unity devs to move to Unreal .

I’ve been developing for this program for a while now, and it just seems undersupported from everyone involved. Sure you can make an xbox game, but you get no documentation at all on the hardware and you end up blindly optimising everything trying to get the performance up, unsure of what the hardware is even capable of because you get no info at all, not even access to the xbox forum.

Unity’s dev team are responsive to problems with UWP and will fix a bug quickly if reported. I want to switch to unreal for quite a few reasons, but what’s stopping me is the seeming lack of support compared to what Unity offers. Their engine is technically inferior to UE4, but their quick and effective support keeps me using it. I just want to know if Epic will ever match them on this sort of thing. From what it seems all they offer for UWP is a Microsoft github branch that’s a while out of date

Just saying I would for sure switch to UE4 if they picked up the slack on this and competed with Unity. I’ve had some severe setback bugs with unity and a bit fed up of it

4

If it’s the only way to make games for Xbox then it’ll be supported by both engines fully. If it’s some evolution of UWP and it’s a more inferior alternate way to develop then most likely it wouldn’t be supported by Unreal.

The thing is though, if you’ve got a good project, which you can execute, then you should be able to get into the Xbox dev program, it’d just be more expensive, and at this point it’d be a problem with the next generation console coming probably before you release.

5

You’re right, applying for the ID@Xbox program is probably the best idea. From what I’ve read though they want to see a decent vertical slice or nearly complete game before approval, which kind of rules out UE4 for the pitch stage. I suppose applying is the only way I’ll find out, thanks again for the advice

6

If you have a good amount of work done in Unity already just show that, if you want to switch engines later then I don’t see a problem. Really they just want to know that people in the program are serious about making a game and have the capability.

7

The game running well on a PC is usually more than adequate for pitching your game to ID@Xbox - porting across once you have access isn’t too much of a nightmare, particularly if you have been performance-minded from the outset (the XBOne’s performance is weaker than it’s hardware specs might indicate).