Why is Unity the most popular engine?

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

@jwatte;595705

Factually, Windows 10 is probably more like Windows 8.1 than Unity 5 is like Unity 4 (if you measure % of code change/added – Windows is a much bigger codebase, of course!)

The core of this sub-discussion is this: The claim that “UE4 is a new engine” just doesn’t hold water.
UE4, itself, has been used in shipping games for several years, and it traces its direct lineage all the way back to original Unreal, just like Unity 5 traces its lineage back to Unity 1.
Whatever the differences are, “age of engine” isn’t a major one.

Unity 4 -> Unity 5 … same code base with some things added. Same API. Deprecated functions dating all the way back to Unity 3.0 or even further. Many tutorials from UT3.0 still work syntactically in UT5.0

UDK -> UE4 … completely new code base (yes it is built from previous pieces). Different API (correct me if Im wrong here). UDK Tutorials do not work in UE4. UE4 is very much a “new” engine when compared to Unity despite its roots dating back to UE1 (18 years ago)

CoD engine is a heavily modified version of the original Quake 2 engine…would you say that they are the same engine? Where do you draw the line?

@;595706

This is what is happening.

Windows 10 is indeed an iteration of Windows 8 - but this does not mean it was “completely rebuilt”, like your original claim. UE4 when it first became available had a new renderer, but otherwise was very similar to UE3 in most aspects. Over time, many of the tools and features have been replaced by newer ones, making it what it is today. Slate UI, Blueprints, Landscapes etc. all have their roots in UE3.

Completely rebuilt is kind of the wrong choice of words, though it isn’t completely inaccurate. If I took a LEGO castle, destroyed it, and put it back together with the same pieces, it is still rebuilt. UE4 is assembled from pieces of UDK (while many of those pieces were replaced or revamped). I may be wrong about this, but I followed UE4 a lot when it was first released to the and this is the way I understood it to be.