Unity vs Unreal

[Absinthe]

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.

Pretty sure AoD is made on the Torque engine. Call me crazy but that giant Torque logo on the starting screen seems like a hint.

 

[Infinitron]

Pretty sure AoD is made on the Torque engine. Call me crazy but that giant Torque logo on the starting screen seems like a hint.

Read the post I was replying to again

 

[Absinthe]

InXile, woops. Surprised they'd use Unity though. Personally I think of Unity as buggy shit.

 

[bylam]

So the conclusion is both are shit for serious development but for differente reasons?

Maybe, we released The Park in UE4 in 6 months of development. We had *almost* no coders, everything in the game is blueprint.
The only thing we used coders for was fixing a bug with subtitles (which was fixed in Unreal 4.9 by Epic anyway), adding a custom network interface for connecting The Secret World accounts (our custom billing system involved, so our code needed), and the save system.

In my experience with engines, if the tools allow designers to iterate on the design quickly, without involving code until they are satisfied with the feel/feedback of a system - it is a win and saves everybody time. Unity/Unreal whatever. Pick the tool that makes the most sense for what you are doing.

 

[Icewater]

Sadly, that would involve doxing myself.

pussy

 

[Burning Bridges]

Unity as an engine is just sick at its core.
Any game made with It uses about 10x as many resources as it has any right to, and that applied to disk usage, RAM usage, and CPU usage.

You definitely forgot Kerbal Space Program in your shitlist. The only game I know where once the world is loaded you have to wait another 5 seconds until it registers mouseclicks and keystrokes.

The Long Dark is actually an ok game made in Unity, which has extremely fast loading times. However some shit pops up in the newer versions too, like Unity mysteriously crashing when you exit a cell. I think that a good programmer can get a good game out of Unity if he disables a lot of shit, but he cannot afford even the slightest mistake.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Tbh I dont know if U4 is good, but it's propably better than Unity, simply because Unity is shit.

I think in the end the question is, do you care more for yourself / artists' / programmer's unwillingness to learn and work on your inadequacies, or do you care for the quality of end product? Unity is so lazy that even the homeless guy who is begging for a new computer could make a grass level in 3d, and now thinks he's a game developer. Unity is the ultimate hello world maker for people who can't program. Other than that, everything else than Unity probably gives a much better end product, simply because Unity is shit by default. Unfortunately people dont realize their code is just hello world, continue working on it way past its usefullness and release it as early access game. You can see the end results by the thousands on Steam.

 

[JamesDixon]

Tbh I dont know if U4 is good, but it's propably better than Unity, simply because Unity is shit.

I think in the end the question is, do you care more for yourself / artists' / programmer's unwillingness to learn and work on your inadequacies, or do you care for the quality of end product? Unity is so lazy that even the homeless guy who is begging for a new computer could make a grass level in 3d, and now thinks he's a game developer. Unity is the ultimate hello world maker for people who can't program. Other than that, everything else than Unity probably gives a much better end product, simply because Unity is shit by default. Unfortunately people dont realize their code is just hello world, continue working on it way past its usefullness and release it as early access game. You can see the end results by the thousands on Steam.

Hyperbole much? There's more to game design than just art and programming. There's the actual system that powers the game which is it's own discipline. Without a good system, any game, regardless of engine, is crap. There are a lot of games done in Unity like most of the Warhammer Fantasy and 40k games already released or in the process of being made. An engine is just a tool, so I don't see why everyone has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making games. By the way do you know how much a custom engine costs to be programmed? Of course not, you're speaking out of your ass. A custom engine costs, that does what Unity or Unreal does, at the cheapest of several million dollars. I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of money laying around.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

Hyperbole much? There's more to game design than just art and programming. There's the actual system that powers the game which is it's own discipline. Without a good system, any game, regardless of engine, is crap. There are a lot of games done in Unity like most of the Warhammer Fantasy and 40k games already released or in the process of being made. An engine is just a tool, so I don't see why everyone has to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making games. By the way do you know how much a custom engine costs to be programmed? Of course not, you're speaking out of your ass. A custom engine costs, that does what Unity or Unreal does, at the cheapest of several million dollars. I don't know about you, but I don't have that kind of money laying around.

You just don't know what you are talking about unless you are a professional programmer and spent a lot of time on the issue. Crapiness or at least suitability mainly towards certain kinds of games like console and cell phone games is a huge reason for all the dumb downing in games. this got even worse when cell phones came out.

Complex games with complex rules won't be getting made in Unity very easily. They did not even use a drag and drop interface for inventory in Wasteland 2. Why? Well, for technical reasons this is not very easy to deal with in Unity, it is a pain in the ass to do anything like that.

I always wondered why nothing like Jagged Alliance 2 or temple of elemental evil gets made in a 3D engine. Well, after working with them for many years I see why. You are realistically speaking going to either make your own engine or else go with 2D if you want to make a game with this level of complexity. OTOH if you want cool particle FX easily then Unity is the tool for you. Money can solve almost any problem but if we are speaking of lower budget games with just one programmer then these engines are not going to cut it for such a game and even with a big budget you will have to fight uphill.

 

[Davaris]

This is the deceptive problem with Unity. It is very easy to create prototypes. Creating complex systems that are re-usable is a mess. As is creating the type of UI you would require for an RPG.

I came to the same opinion after doing one of Unity's video tutorials. Everything was hooked together and I couldn't see how you could make anything as complex as an RPG. Then I got the idea to buy a game tool kit for making RPGs and it seems well thought out so far. Can't say how a well a game will run with it, or if I will ever finish anything with it, but that's a motivation issue. lol

 

[Turjan]

Unity as an engine is just sick at its core.
Any game made with It uses about 10x as many resources as it has any right to, and that applied to disk usage, RAM usage, and CPU usage.

Cities: Skylines
- for the first few runs, the game tried to open the game as fullscreen over both my screens; it failed and ended up as 1920x1080 on my second one with all the game content off screen.
- The second run it was half-offscreen
- It needs nearly 6 GB of RAM to simulate a small 20k person town!!
- Game stops appears to hang after a few hours, but simulation still goes on in the background and it responds to input events appropriately (again, in the background), so you can't see what you're doing at all. But you can quicksave and then restart the game without losing any progress.

As someone who has extensively played this game, I just wanted to comment on this. I didn't experience any of these specific issues (and I use two monitors). That does not mean I did not experience other issues. You had to use the DX9c render for AMD cards at some point (a Unity update broke that). The game suffers from crashes during exit if you load too much custom content. It doesn't like repeated returns to the main menu. Otherwise it runs completely stable, and I haven't seen any savegame corruption yet that some people mention (probably an autosave bug).

Regarding your memory issue, this is, from my (and from other's who tested this) experience, completely false. The game runs a 400k person city with about 3.7 GB memory usage. This rises quickly with custom content you use. When I had 920 different custom assets (many of them poorly optimized) and two dozen mods, the game grasped all it could get on my system (12.7 GB RAM). This means, RAM usage depends purely on custom content use, and the limit how much you can use depends on your system. The base game without custom content stays strictly within the official minimum specs, which means below 4 GB. As with all simulations, the true limit is CPU power.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

It will probably use up all your memory basically, over time. That's how garbage collection usually works and how bad resource management in general works.

 

[Bester]

They did not even use a drag and drop interface for inventory in Wasteland 2. Why? Well, for technical reasons this is not very easy to deal with in Unity

Wtf am I reading lol. Moving a sprite in 2d space, yes, very very complicated indeed. A crucial point in any game development on Unity. Google a tutorial for newbies or something.

I came to the same opinion after doing one of Unity's video tutorials

Yet another pro opinion.

 

[Turjan]

It will probably use up all your memory basically, over time.

With custom content, yes. But that's not unusual for simulations. The 12 year old Simcity 4 does the same (a 32-bit engine, but you need a 4GB patch or turn that on yourself to be able to run the NAM traffic mod). Load times were also similar.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

Wtf am I reading lol. Moving a sprite in 2d space, yes, very very complicated indeed. A crucial point in any game development on Unity. Google a tutorial for newbies or something.


Yet another pro opinion.

Considering you don't even understand how linking works (your "weird" orc error) you should probably just shut up because obviously you don't know a fucking thing about programming.

Until recently unity didn't even have any drawing in 2D space for fuck's sake. It would not have been impossible to make a DnD inventory using billboards in 3d space and a shader to correct the fact it looks slightly fucked up (lol what people actually did) but really it's not practical to make a GUI system based on that sort of insanity, hence we get shitty GUI in WL2 and every other Unity game ever made.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

With custom content, yes. But that's not unusual for simulations. The 12 year old Simcity 4 does the same (a 32-bit engine, but you need a 4GB patch or turn that on yourself to be able to run the NAM traffic mod). Load times were also similar.

I doubt his difference was just because. It sounds like resource management shittiness, which seems to be endemic for Unity or anyway used to be. That may have been fixed either by new unity version or by the application programmers taking steps to manually purge stuff and/or keep from doing stuff in scripts that makes the memory bloat.

 

[Davaris]

Yet another pro opinion.

That's why I chose to go with an experienced Unity programmer.

Don't go all Unity faboi on us. lol

 

[Turjan]

I doubt his difference was just because. It sounds like resource management shittiness, which seems to be endemic for Unity or anyway used to be. That may have been fixed either by new unity version or by the application programmers taking steps to manually purge stuff and/or keep from doing stuff in scripts that makes the memory bloat.

May well be, as the game obviously needs some custom coding. Just to prove I'm not talking out of my ass, a pic I just took:

However, a programmer once told me that every simulation, by its very nature, will at some point grab all the resources it gets. No idea whether that's true, as I cannot pretend to have any professional insight into this.

 

[Burning Bridges]

However, a programmer once told me that every simulation, by its very nature, will at some point grab all the resources it gets. No idea whether that's true, as I cannot pretend to have any professional insight into this.

Normally containers like lists, collections etc are unbounded, so in principle any modern applications grabs the resources it gets. You could of course limit it but tbh I have hardly ever seen it done.

So many gigabytes for a city model seems excessive. 1st, I have worked in city models, and I have never seen them get to such size (imagine Google Earth sending KML files of several gigabytes, it would take hours before it is finished). 2nd, they should still be able to swap out most from memory, and use some LOD system. My guess is they have a huge 3d scene in memory with all possible LODs, because Unity handles all that stuff.

 

[Turjan]

So many gigabytes for a city model seems excessive. 1st, I have worked in city models, and I have never seen them get to such size (imagine Google Earth sending KML files of several gigabytes, it would take hours before it is finished). 2nd, they should still be able to swap out most from memory, and use some LOD system. My guess is they have a huge 3d scene in memory with all possible LODs, because Unity handles all that stuff.

Coming from Simcity 4, I'm rather surprised it's that little memory for hundreds of building models. I'm sure they let Unity handle the LODs, given how shitty those are for their larger buildings. This game you see in the screenshot contains more than 32,000 buildings ("buildings" also contains some stuff like bridge pillars etc., but it's mostly what you would assume). Some of their buildings are poorly optimized, but they admitted they don't have the manpower to put more time into this and rather fix issues with the simulation.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

May well be, as the game obviously needs some custom coding. Just to prove I'm not talking out of my ass, a pic I just took:

However, a programmer once told me that every simulation, by its very nature, will at some point grab all the resources it gets. No idea whether that's true, as I cannot pretend to have any professional insight into this.

In general simulation should take up your CPU, not your memory. Even if you made data structures that big to speed up calculations it would be counterproductive because of how cache works.

I am pretty sure this is more of an engine issue that things get so large. That is very common for any kind of garbage collection system and if you are lazy about resource usage. Those cities don't have models with gigs and gigs of data. you should only need each model you currently use in memory with one copy. If your had so much model data you are actually using you would kill your graphics card anyway.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Coming from Simcity 4, I'm rather surprised it's that little memory for hundreds of building models. I'm sure they let Unity handle the LODs, given how shitty those are for their larger buildings. This game you see in the screenshot contains more than 32,000 buildings ("buildings" also contains some stuff like bridge pillars etc., but it's mostly what you would assume). Some of their buildings are poorly optimized, but they admitted they don't have the manpower to put more time into this and rather fix issues with the simulation.

If you divide 3 gigabyte by those 32,000 buildings, it means every building uses ca 100 kilobyte. That's imo pretty crazy, provided they are not CAD quality and most textures are shared. Also that implies they are all in memory at the same time, which is totally unnecessary once the city has more than one road.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

Also, I doubt you even need LODs for those. I am not sure there is really any point to LOD any more for most circumstances. Maybe for an RTS game with lots and lots of animated characters.

 

[Turjan]

In general simulation should take up your CPU, not your memory. Even if you made data structures that big to speed up calculations it would be counterproductive because of how cache works.

In principle, that matches what I said above. You can see that the simulation uses all cores to near full extent. It's running 16k agents at the moment. By the way, I let the game run in the background all the time. It's now at 516k inhabitants and a memory usage of 3.65 GB, and it seems to stay there.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Also, I doubt you even need LODs for those. I am not sure there is really any point to LOD any more for most circumstances. Maybe for an RTS game with lots and lots of animated characters.

From a certain distance it normally it is enough to render buildings as a simple boundary, even just a cube. There is a lot more detail in those geometries that you dont really need to render all the time.