Unity vs Unreal

[Bester]

Their licensing is now very very competitive with Unity. (better)

Better how? What exactly is "very very competitive" in real terms? What the fk are you talking about?

- Unity is $75 per seat per month or buy a license for ~100k for the entire company.

- Unreal is "free", plus 5% of gross sales, plus ~$25,000/year for access to UDN. UDN is an answerhub behind a paywall. LoL. Or you can ask for a tailor made deal, which will cost you depending on what amount of money they think they can get out of you. In case of PoE, it would've been perhaps 100k, perhaps 300k? Nobody knows, certainly not you.

Now in case of PoE, they would've had to pay ~375k bucks for UE4 without a tailor made deal (or less with one) and ~100k for Unity.

Bottom line is, those licenses either cost more or less the same, or UE4 may cost more, but it's certainly not the other way around.

Now apparently there's something I don't know. So how about you tell me something that makes UE4 "very very competitive" or even "(better)".

 

[Immortal]

Now apparently there's something I don't know. So how about you tell me something that makes UE4 "very very competitive" or even "(better)".

Calm down Comrade.

Your opinion is under the assumption those engines are of equal quality and performance.
I am personally getting Unity Fatigue - way too much shovel ware being released on that engine that can barely load a level without buckeling under its own managed weight.

 

[Bubbles]

Now apparently there's something I don't know. So how about you tell me something that makes UE4 "very very competitive" or even "(better)".

Well...

Most likely we'll switch to Unreal 4 for our next project (not the dungeon crawler, but the spaceship one).

I don't really see it as a gamble. It does cost you 5% of gross revenues whereas Unity is free, BUT you can make a game with better visuals which does increase sales. So hypothetically let's say your Unity game sells 10k copies at $20, whereas your Unreal game sells 15k copies. With Unity you get $200k *0.7 = $140k. With Unreal you get $300k*0.7*0.95 = $199.5k. Alternatively, let's say you can sell 50k copies with Unity and 60k copies with Unreal; 1mil *0.7 = 700k; 1.2mil *0.7*0.95 = 798k.

Basically, Unreal offers more but charges 5% of the gross income (which makes sense otherwise the developers will simply inflate the expenses and throw everything they can think of in there and a lot of time will be wasted arguing which expenses are legit and which aren't). It doesn't include Steam's or payment processors' cut. If you think that you can take advantage of what Unreal offers (for the record, I'm not sure that we can do that yet), go for it. If not, cheaper is definitely better (Torque or Unity).

Indeed. No source code was the main reason why we didn't even consider Unity.

 

[Bester]

Your opinion is under the assumption those engines are of equal quality and performance.

It's certainly debatable.

I can give you an example of the kind of shit you have to go through with Unreal. Each version fixes previous bugs, but introduces new ones wholesale. You constantly find out about some shit that doesn't work and you face options which are all bad. You can either port your product to the new version to fix some critical bugs, but then you'll be facing new ones. Or you can try to fix those errors yourself in the code which is like yeah, right, good luck with that. Or you can port your product to the new version like I said before, then find out about new bugs, then out of a thousand commits find the one that introduces these new bugs and reverse-commit it. And this shit happens all the time, UE4 release versions are of WIP quality. It gives migraines.

 

[Bester]

Well...

Like I said, it's not a no-brainer. It may be one for VD because he never worked with UE4. You get access to sources, this is a plus. You get better graphics. However, on the minus side of things, you have to work with C++ or unstable blueprints. You have no editor extensions. Everything is bugged and underdocumented, which means longer production time. And if you really need graphics whoring, you can do so with custom shaders, at cost to performance ofc. Here. It's pretty close to UE4 graphics:

 

[Immortal]

It's certainly debatable.

I can give you an example of the kind of shit you have to go through with Unreal. Each version fixes previous bugs, but introduces new ones wholesale. You constantly find out about some shit that doesn't work and you face options which are all bad. You can either port your product to the new version to fix some critical bugs, but then you'll be facing new ones. Or you can try to fix those errors yourself in the code which is like yeah, right, good luck with that. Or you can port your product to the new version like I said before, then find out about new bugs, then out of a thousand commits find the one that introduces these new bugs and reverse-commit it. And this shit happens all the time, UE4 release versions are of WIP quality. It gives migraines.

Unreal has full source control.. your complaint just stinks of tightly coupled code breaking and being difficult to fix.
Welcome to the world of software development.

You get access to sources, this is a plus. You get better graphics. However, on the minus side of things, you have to work with C++ or unstable blueprints.

In all the time iv worked with blueprints they seem anything but unstable.
You say it like working with C++ is a bad thing.. I would take C++ over C# / Java any day of the week..

What's wrong with C++ besides being faster and not relying on a Virtual Machine? Dafuq am I reading.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Access to the source code is certainly a good thing, if you have the manpower and knowledge to deal with it. At least you theoretically could fix bugs without an individual contract.

C++ seems to be a more mature development environment than the custom c# runtime they use with Mono, which is a couple of generations behind the current C# release. Debugging during runtime was also quite tedious for a long time (haven't tried Unity5 though).

 

[Infinitron]

Vault Dweller Elhoim This discussion is relevant to your interests.

 

[Irenaeus II]

This is interesting because InXile apparently traded Unity for Unreal in their future games starting with Bard's Tale IV.

https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?t=12654

 

[Immortal]

This is interesting because InXile apparently traded Unity for Unreal in their future games starting with Bard's Tale IV.

Again, When Wasteland 2 / Planescape was on the table and just being first worked on.. Unreal had the most jewish terms and conditions possible for licensing their software.
There was a one size fits all and that size was AAA.

They now have a much more affordable option for indie level developers.
Anyone serious about making a successful game should ditch Unity as quickly as possible. IMO.

I don't see a downside other then initial learning curve.

 

[Infinitron]

This is interesting because InXile apparently traded Unity for Unreal in their future games starting with Bard's Tale IV.

https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?t=12654

They're using Unreal for one game. We don't have any indication that this is a permanent shift. Seems likely to me that they'd return to their existing Unity code for any new isometric RPG.

 

[Irenaeus II]

Yeah, that was poorly phrased.

After I posted it, I noticed there was no base to assume whether they will continue using Unreal in any hypothetical future games, particularly since Fargo is a man who changes his mind a lot about future projects and also because the game engine landscape seems to change continually, but then I thought it was best to leave it like that to either be corrected or to fool the naive.

 

[Lyric Suite]

This Unity shit can't die fast enough.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

Unreal Engine can do anything but you probably need dedicated programmers and millions in budget or it's going to turn out like shit. Unity is just shit, period.

At this point those are the only real options.

 

[Davaris]

I tried both after C4 closed temporarily. Started with Unreal because "free and awesome graphixxx". First problem I found is there is only one way of doing things - The Unreal way which means Blueprints. If you don't like Blueprints well tough shit, because its their way or the highway. The other problem I found and what ultimately made me give up, is how slow the compilation was. 20 seconds to compile a small change. With C4 it was 5 seconds!

Unity by comparison the compilation is instantaneous, so there is zero friction while developing. They also have an asset store which adds 10-20 products every day. So if you don't like how Unity does things, you can find tons of options that suit your style. IMO the asset store is the best thing about Unity and it is what will keep them going, while the other engines starve to death.

As blue dog says, Unreal is suited to big dev houses because everything is included for the one price. But IMO Unity is best suited to indie developers. Try them both, see which one you can get things done with.

 

[likaq]

Silent storm engine why they kill you

 

[Excidium II]

At this point those are the only real options.

Use SDL and make your own engine.

 

[Immortal]

Use SDL and make your own engine.

better be trolling again.

 

[Excidium II]

The license is free, there's no bloat, compiles on everything and has wrappers for every language under the sun. Clearly the best choice~

 

[Alchemist]

Unity and Unreal aren't the only options.

Another up and coming contender I've been looking at is the Godot Engine. Full open-source and 100% free, with no royalties. I think this will be a good option for indies especially once documentation is complete and the 3D part is beefed up a bit. 2D is already very solid and feature-rich. And its nice that the 2D is in a dedicated 2D engine, not a 3D scene tweaked to look 2D.

I've tinkered with it a bit and will definitely be considering Godot for my CRPG.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

Use SDL and make your own engine.

If you will go to that level, may as well just use OGL directly. Same for Ogre and any engine that doesn't have exactly everything you need. Otherwise all you gain are limitations and all you get is quick ability to make hello world app.

 

[Excidium II]

If you will go to that level, may as well just use OGL directly. Same for Ogre and any engine that doesn't have exactly everything you need. Otherwise all you gain are limitations and all you get is quick ability to make hello world app.

But SDL abstracts away all the ugly stuff. You wanna deal with stuff like xorg and shit directly? Thought so men.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

But SDL abstracts away all the ugly stuff. You wanna deal with stuff like xorg and shit directly? Thought so men.

If you use OGL directly I don't think you need to worry about X. Maybe you do, but considering where it has headed I don't really care about Linux any more anyway.

 

[Jigawatt]

I've use both Unity 4/5 and UDK (old free UE3) to make a few things (not games - VR apps for research) and basically I'd be happy to never use Unity again. At every turn in Unity you run into walls of "I should be able to do this, but there's no API". And it's slow as molasses. To make anything decently usable you need a fair amount of programming chops at which point that talent would be better put to use with Unreal.

When I code 3D for fun (yeah) I like to stay at a much lower level. These days I'm writing in Rust using gfx-rs and glfw. I'm really enjoying that quite a bit when I have time for it.

 

[Immortal]

SDL is woefully lacking.
Are we talking about babies first C program or actual viable options for making a game?

I've use both Unity 4/5 and UDK (old free UE3) to make a few things (not games - VR apps for research) and basically I'd be happy to never use Unity again. At every turn in Unity you run into walls of "I should be able to do this, but there's no API". And it's slow as molasses. To make anything decently usable you need a fair amount of programming chops at which point that talent would be better put to use with Unreal.

When I code 3D for fun (yeah) I like to stay at a much lower level. These days I'm writing in Rust using gfx-rs and glfw. I'm really enjoying that quite a bit when I have time for it.

Do you post on UnknownCheats?