Why is Unity the most popular engine?

[anonymous_user_7133436a]

As someone who is a gamedev student, here is what I’ve noticed during these years.

Unity fame came first because there was only UDK from Epic, it took roughly 3-4 years to UE4 to be finally released.

Unity doesn’t require a significant hardware machine to run, in fact, an 2006 PC can run it, at least that’s what the official site says, in fact, that’s why the college classes focused only in Unity, you could barely run UDK in the old PCs here (C2D, 2xxx Radeon and 4gb RAM). Months ago the college replaced for new ones and now they have an optional class of UE4. I also believe that because of this, you can port to entry/mid level mobiles with no problems over optimization.

The engine GUI is more friendly and simple than UDK, no wonder why UE4 “copied” it.

It supports a wide range of code languages, especially Js and C#, UDK relied on UnrealScript, according to one teacher, people said it was acutally a good point of UE4 getting rid in favor of C++.

UDK was an standalone UT3 and was known fore being more oriented for FPS, Unity can be worked out for other game modes, it does even have it’s 2D project.

Because of those things, developers that know programming have moved to Unity as sometimes they didn’t need UDK visual power, and the engine malleable for many types of games, as I believe that working with the unrealscript could end having to even do some workaround in the .uc from the core.

UDK advantage over Unity that time, and as still today, is the fact that you can do visual programming and some interesting features, this is especially great for those who can’t program like me (tried to do on my own years ago with .uc), but if you wanted something different, that’s another story.

However, I think that things may come to change, UE4 is a full flegde engine unlike UDK, and even I saw a few flash and 2D games being developed on it, played one of them and while you may think it would be hardware heavy due to the engine nature since the origins, it went fine like a charm, and as far as I recall, only the vehicle set was not introduced in the initial 4.00 release, being instead in a month later, who knows that UE4 may end being the engine choice for indies in the near future? IMO Unity compared to the UE4 is not so friendly now, especially over what i’ve stated in the paragraph above.

[BrUnO_XaVIeR]

Sure; If UE4 were anything like UDK I personally would be still tied to Unity… UDK really wasn’t a good system IMO.

[ambershee]

UDK was always a ‘full fledged’ engine, and working in Unrealscript is no different to working in another scripting language (e.g. javascript) in Unity.

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

@;595126

UDK was always a ‘full fledged’ engine, and working in Unrealscript is no different to working in another scripting language (e.g. javascript) in Unity.

UDK had this stigma for being overly difficult to pickup. Unity comes out with this stripped down, easy-to-pickup engine and it gains a reputation as being the “best engine for indies and solo devs!”. Unfortunately, this reputation still follows UE4 around. Just read the Unity forum threads about this particular subject. Many of the people making these claims have never taken a serious look into UDK or UE4 and they run back to Unity because that’s what they are comfortable with. Unity is only “easy” because it’s heavily stripped of features. It’s sort of like saying MS Paint is better than Photoshop because it is easier to pick up and draw circles with.

Being comfortable with 1 tool does not make another necessarily “Harder to use”. I was able to re-produce things in UE4 that I already made in Unity much more quickly because I had more tools available and a more consistent workflow. You learn one piece of Unreal and it really snowballs into the other sub-editors and things just make sense.

UE4 has done a great job with releasing tutorials and improving their documentation over the last 2 years, but I think what is needed, is a serious push into the indie market if Epic is to chew away at Unity’s market share. Perhaps rewarding indies in some way and pushing finished indie projects out there in front of people. “Made with Unity” does not sell the same way that “Made with Unreal” does and I think changing the opinions of the indie dev community might be a step in the right direction.

[motorsep]

One thing I hate about UE4 by now is how it handles instanced meshes.

[jwatte]

One thing I hate about UE4 by now is how it handles instanced meshes.

It’s fine that you have an opinion, but a little more detail would perhaps help others understand better where you’re coming from.
Are you talking about editor limitations? Or inherent runtime limitations that come from using instancing? Or how material instance setup is done? Or what?
And what would the better alternative look like?

[BrUnO_XaVIeR]

The thing is the gigantic amount of platforms Unity can support;
Epic Games have no manpower to ever dream of supporting that many platforms. I just read Pokemon Go is about to have a Apple Watch launch, go figure…
Now imagine if Unity could stop a little adding platform over platform (new platform = new license to sell)… And actually invested all that workforce turning Unity to a real game engine, with level design tools and all that.

[anonymous_user_138c2332]

Unity is popular due to being modular, fast and easy to pick up, C# etc

Hence why only in Unity you’ll find custom shaders, different GI lighting methods and so much more,
so having source access to UE4 means nothing if the engine is not flexible.

[BrUnO_XaVIeR]

lol a unity user today was asking their forum admin to ban me from their forums for the shiit I write here, outside of their forums;
this is internet to a whole new level rofl.

“-Ban him! Kick him out of OUR forums!”

sensitive much…

@Errvald;595548

Unity is popular due to being modular, fast and easy to pick up, C# etc

Hence why only in Unity you’ll find custom shaders, different GI lighting methods and so much more,
so having source access to UE4 means nothing if the engine is not flexible.

I think what you mean is that creating a GI solution for Unreal on C++ is much more complicated, thus it feels less flexible. no?!

[EvilCleric]

@;595556

lol a unity user today was asking their forum admin to ban me from their forums for the shiit I write here, outside of their forums;
this is internet to a whole new level rofl.

“-Ban him! Kick him out of OUR forums!”

sensitive much…

I think what you mean is that creating a GI solution for Unreal on C++ is much more complicated, thus it feels less flexible. no?!

I was following that thread. Unity’s forum is full of funny people.

[anonymous_user_138c2332]

@;595556

I think what you mean is that creating a GI solution for Unreal on C++ is much more complicated, thus it feels less flexible. no?!

Not only GI but shaders too. I wouldn’t blame C++ but the way the engine was built. I’m not saying Unity is perfect but I think it’s easier to do things like that.

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

@Errvald;595548

Unity is popular due to being modular, fast and easy to pick up, C# etc

Hence why only in Unity you’ll find custom shaders, different GI lighting methods and so much more,
so having source access to UE4 means nothing if the engine is not flexible.

Perhaps the reason you find this stuff in Unity Asset store is because Unity gives you something out of the box that is roughly a decade old in tech? Who cares if you can buy all of this **** on the Asset store if you don’t even need it with Unreal…

I have two cars that I am going to try to sell to you. (Lets pretend these are the same price)

1. Toyota Camry with manual windows and no A/C
2. Chevrolet Corvette decked out with everything

What would you say to a salesman who tried to sell you the Camry with the sales pitch: “This is actually better than the Corvette because you can easily add Power windows and A/C later if you want it…I even know a good shop down the street that you can pay to do it for you!”

[anonymous_user_138c2332]

@alg0801;595585

Perhaps the reason you find this stuff in Unity Asset store is because Unity gives you something out of the box that is roughly a decade old in tech? Who cares if you can buy all of this **** on the Asset store if you don’t even need it with Unreal…

Unreal is older than Unity and you seem to have completely missed the point here.

For every difficult task the response some people get is “you have the source code!” as if it’s enough. Sure you have the source code but is the engine itself componentized enough to allow adding custom features? I doubt it! Why? Because it’s an old engine. It is why you have people asking for custom shader support in the Feedback forum section and much more.

As for calling those assets ****, I’m pretty sure UE4 users would love to have GI lighting, custom shaders and much more available to them.

As for your car sale, I’d definitely NOT buy the Chevrolet unless you told me there are shops I can replace parts.

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

@Errvald;595594

Unreal is older than Unity and you seem to have completely missed the point here.

For every difficult task the response some people get is “you have the source code!” as if it’s enough. Sure you have the source code but is the engine itself componentized enough to allow adding custom features? I doubt it! Why? Because it’s an old engine. It is why you have people asking for custom shader support in the Feedback forum section and much more.

As for calling those assets ****, I’m pretty sure UE4 users would love to have GI lighting, custom shaders and much more available to them.

As for your car sale, I’d definitely NOT buy the Chevrolet unless you told me there are shops I can replace parts.

Unreal Engine 4 is much much newer than Unity…what are you talking about?

UE4 was completely rebuilt. It is not UDK rehashed. It’s 2 years old. I have also heard that every major release of UE4 is rebuilt and refactored piece by piece to keep all of the code clean…i cannot confirm this though. I have also heard that Unity source code is a complete mess.

Unity GI isn’t even usable. It’s clunky as hell and some are even calling it a step back from Beast. Even with GI, Unity still cannot touch UE4 in lighting and you drop 20fps or more using the exact same scene between UE4 and Unity…why is that?

[ambershee]

There’s still code in UE4 from 1998, let alone from Unreal Engine 3. Large parts of Unreal Engine 4 are still very heavily derived from it’s predecessor and some of the tools are largely identical.

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

@;595608

There’s still code in UE4 from 1998, let alone from Unreal Engine 3. Large parts of Unreal Engine 4 are still very heavily derived from it’s predecessor and some of the tools are largely identical.

I’m sure Windows and every other large scale piece of software reuses parts of their code as well. Not the same as “Old Tech”

Unity has a poor renderer out of the box for example. It looks and plays worse than games released in 2006 without heavy use of the Asset store. Unity can’t even get raw input from the mouse properly ffs.

[anonymous_user_138c2332]

@alg0801

Didn’t know Epic was able to build game engines in such a short time frame.

Epic themselves said that they could not keep SVOGI as the renderer required too much work to be maintainable, which only means parts of the engine, if not all, are not built around the idea of replaceable modules.

You can get SEGI (similar to SVOGI) in Unity, and SVOTI in CE 5. In CE 5 it’s just a checkbox to turn it on.

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

Didn’t know Epic was able to build game engines in such a short time frame.
[/QUOTE]

Modifying and Piecing together old working code into a new engine is still building a new game engine. I don’t know how long it took to create UE4…I would estimate that it took around 4-5 years but how would I know this? UE4 is 2 years old. Unity is 11.

1. It’s illogical to compare UNITY WITH ASSETS to UE4 out of the box. UE4 out of the box blows Unity completely out of the water in tech and features. This not debatable. Unity 3d requires upwards of $1000 PER SEAT in Assets to approach UE4s visual capabilities and editor/engine functionality. Not to mention you now have wildly different workflow patterns between “The Unity way” and those 10-15 plugins.

2. It’s illogical to compare type of content on the Unity Asset store with type of content on UE4 Asset store. The Assets that pop up on their respective Asset stores are representations of what is in demand by the market. For example, there are around 5 major Behavior Tree Assets available for Unity. Why? Because Unity does not come with an adequate solution for AI. As a result, they’re almost all over-engineered, bloated messes because they attempt to out-do their competition. This is the trend for all major Assets that I have looked at on the Unity Asset store. You will find loads of GAME ENGINE related assets on the Unity asset store, while UE4 contains mostly CONTENT (at a higher quality) to make actual games with.

[anonymous_user_138c2332]

@alg0801;595645

Modifying and Piecing together old working code into a new engine is still building a new game engine. I don’t know how long it took to create UE4…I would estimate that it took around 4-5 years but how would I know this? UE4 is 2 years old. Unity is 11.

You’re contradicting yourself.
Unity 5.4 was released on JULY 28, 2016, according to you that makes it a few months old game engine.

I won’t bother with the rest of your assertments because you don’t seem knowledgeable enough and I value my time.

[anonymous_user_cae9bcfa]

Didn’t know Epic was able to build game engines in such a short time frame.

Epic themselves said that they could not keep SVOGI as the renderer required too much work to be maintainable, which only means parts of the engine, if not all, are not built around the idea of replaceable modules.

You can get SVEGI (similar to SVOGI) in Unity, and SVOTI in CE 5. In CE 5 it’s just a checkbox to turn it on.
[/QUOTE]

I think you mean SEGI. Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making

For the low price of $80 per seat…and it’s beta…and it runs like **** in any actual game scenario.

@Errvald;595650

You’re contradicting yourself.
Unity 5.4 was released on JULY 28, 2016, according to you that makes it a few months old game engine.

I won’t bother with the rest of your assertments because you don’t seem knowledgeable enough and I value my time.

Unity 1.0 was release June 6, 2005. Same engine, different features bolted on. Take a look at how much old deprecated junk still remains in Unity after 11 years. Cysis 1 was released in November 2007. Why does it still look better than any game that has been produced professionally in Unity 3d?