I’ve been having a lot of issues trying to get instances working with baked lighting. I am not done with investigation yet, but at this point results vary depending on how I create instances. If I manually add them inside BP actor - no problem. If I use construction script - they don’t get any lightmaps and some instances are missing.
Also, why on earth would I need to make a BP actor to house instances when it would be much easier to have a check box in the details panel and let engine do whatever it needs to do when cooking or in runtime. BP method should be used for some complex manipulations with instances, but if I need to build a cave using bunch of rocks, I don’t need to be concerned with making BP for it. Talking about (hierarchical) instanced static meshes, not materials.
On top of that I think mobile and mobile VR receive very little attention from devs. Another thing is poor way of handling upgrades - moving project from version to version (from 4.11 to 4.12 to 4.13) causes some weird stuff to happen to assets (and that’s what Epic suspects in my case with ISM + lightmapping issues).
Unity doesn’t have these kind of issues (or at least I did not experience them in that short time I was messing with Unity for mobile VR project).
I think UE4 is very strong in PC/consoles department, but other than that it could do better (but the money is in the PC/console market, so that’s what the focus is going to stay on).
Yes, I know. What I don’t understand is why you said that @alg0801 was contradicting himself. Reusing some old code to build a new product, is still a new product. After all, how many changes can you make to, for example, a 3D math library?
You can also paint instances with the foliage tools.
Regarding lightmapping, that seems like a bug. Every engine has bugs, unfortunately. I’ve run into several on both the Unity and Unreal sides, as well in my own previous work.
That doesn’t work (well) on mobile. Performance is abysmal. I wonder if ISMs are even optimized for mobile.
Epic is convinced it isn’t and I still need to make a few more test cases to either prove that it is, or see if it’s corrupted project or something else.
Anyways…regarding UE4 vs Unity GI. I am admittedly more familiar with Unity than I am Unreal. I know that UE4 tabled their real time GI implementation before official release. I took a long break from Unreal since then. Enlighten implementation seems like another checkbox addition by Unity. It’s a mess. What is the current solution in Unreal for GI?
I don’t need GI for my project but I am just curious.
The problem is not a 3D math library but the way the engine is structured.
In my opinion UE4 wasn’t built with modularity in mind as Epic probably didn’t think back then that they would take the Unity route (by going , marketplace etc). It was built on top of the older UE versions for their own games first and foremost the licensees.
That’s why all old/new features are made specifically for their upcoming games and it’s extremely hard to replace them.
That is the biggest difference between UE4 and Unity.
The problem is not a 3D math library but the way the engine is structured.
In my opinion UE4 wasn’t built with modularity in mind as Epic probably didn’t think back then that they would take the Unity route (by going , marketplace etc). It was built on top of the older UE versions for their own games first and foremost the licensees.
That’s why all old/new features are made specifically for their upcoming games and it’s extremely hard to replace them.
That is the biggest difference between UE4 and Unity.
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False.
UE4 is not UDK. Try again. At best, it has similarities and things that worked well were carried over.
Care to elaborate on how you believe UE4 could be more modular?
Old/New features made specifically for upcoming games? Epic must be developing a 3D FPS VEHICLE OPEN WORLD FLYING VR MOBILE 2D TOP DOWN THIRD PERSON SHOOTER MOBA in secret…
UE4 is very much a significant iteration of the previous engine.
It’s also not 2 years old, it is considerably older than that. Just because you didn’t have access to it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t around and being used by other developers over four years ago.
Windows 10 is an iteration of Windows 8.1 … and that sequence goes all the way back to Windows 1.0…It doesn’t mean that Windows 10 is windows 8.1
And obviously UE4 was finished and in use before its release. I would be willing to bet that Unity was also finished and in use before its 1.0 release. The difference here is that Unity 5 IS Unity 4 IS Unity 3 and so on… built up over the last 11 years. This means that the code base and foundation of Unity will be significantly older than UE4’s
UE4 has beautiful source code, either indicating its youth, or some ongoing continuous effort to refactor UE4 to keep source clean.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The material, landscape, particle systems, and BSP is very very similar to how it was in UDK. In fact, at some point early in UE4 lifetime, the material editor even used the exact same nodes as the old UDK one instead of the newer blueprint nodes. Level design, particles, or material tutorials from UDK are still quite valid in UE4. Even scripting is similar, as its still a very similar pawn/controller/gamemode/etc framework. After all, why fix what isnt broken?
Unity delivered poor rendering several versions ago, now it doesn’t, even out of the box, it’s become pretty sophisticated even with no Asset Store. But of course, they rely a lot on the Store, it’s their business model and it’s not necessarily bad.
I’ve been using Unreal consistently for a couple of months now, and I’m very satisfied (just a little annoyed with some loading times, saving times etc and rare crashes).
Saying UE4 or Unity is older I believe may lead to very controversy conclusions; First of, older may mean many things, good and bad. It may mean to be more consistent, more stable, or may be slower, outdated. I tend to believe that the good code was kept kind of intact in UE4 and the outdated code was rewritten, but we can imagine some of it still exists and may slow UE4 down.
Unity was built to be fast and simple from day 1; on this I believe they have the edge. On my experience Unreal is slower in the editor itself.
As a designer, I believe Unreal is more designer friendly, though Unity is simpler to use overall. At the end of the day I don’t think we can say one is older than the other, that really depends. Unreal is surely more robust.