What do you think about unity's new plan to destroy them self? I am learning unity now since few months do you recommend to switch to unreal, i have a bad feeling with unity to be honest, i don't think they will change now because of little bit shitstorm?
The initial announcement was a complete mess and that broke a lot of trust (especially by trying to charge for installs of existing games after 2024 and proposing their own non-transparent way of tracking "initial engagements"), so they deserved every bit of the massive backlash for that. But I think people, especially on youtube, are blowing this stuff completely out of the water. The Godot community in particular seems to be extremely condescending towards Unity users at this point. And while Unity's management can't be trusted, I do still trust Unity's community (even more so now) and it honestly just showed how much power the community still has (btw, Godot's "management" apparently doesn't seem to be so great either, judging by several videos and threads on their subreddit - the same only different in my opinion). The time spent learning Unity and developing systems isn't lost either and can be transfered to most other engines very well. And I think transitioning from Unity to any other big engines is also way easier than jumping from Godot to Unreal for example. It always takes some time to get used to new concepts, syntax/APIs and tools, or rebuild your own tools in a new language, but people's claims on this matter are often a comical overexaggeration in my opinion. Like, I just saw one person comment that their "14 years of game development experience went down the drain".. If this is true then I don't know what that person did for the last 14 years. Unity as a product hasn't changed and I think the new pricing model is actually still very fair (even fairer now for small indies and hobbyists btw). And even if it becomes a completely unusable mess in the future I don't think the time was wasted at all and you can always switch to another engine then. Also keep in mind that an engine is just a tool. Use the tool that fits your own priorities, use case/requirements, etc best and don't make it your personality.
I'm a 70 year old retiree, whose last job was building Windows apps in C#. I get bored nowadays and want to continue doing something to keep my brain happy, so I decided to look into gaming engines, and see if that would be fun. I got Unreal first and it looked cool and easy, but the C++ requirement kind of bothered me. I coded in C back in the late 70's, so I have thoroughly enjoyed C# and not having to manage memory, etc. Then I got Unity and saw the C# instead of C++ and that was a big plus. So after playing with the interface a bit, I have definitely decided to go with Unity now. This video was the first I have watched of yours, and I wanted to commend you for a very instructional video without a lot of rambling or repetition. I like your style, and subscribed after watching this one. I will be checking out a lot more as time permits, and look forward to learning more of Unity from you. Thanks!
Unreal Engine doesn't really require you to manage memory. it does use pointers and references, which is a lot more accurate and flexible than Unity, but it does its own garbage collection.
Wait, how can you be 70 years old and not know that C doesn't require memory management for game programming? 😆 You predate ALGOL! You're one of the lucky few who remembers back when software was actually fast and simple. You can allocate all the memory your game needs right at the beginning and just take what you need off the top for anything that lasts the lifetime of the game. Let the OS clean it up, or deallocate the entire block at shutdown if you're feeling particularly thorough. For the per frame stuff, use a bump allocator to grab what you need, and just reset the pointer at the end of the frame in the main loop (so it isn't physically possible to forget). This covers over 90% of all memory needs and you almost never have to worry about memory management. For the other 10% you can either redesign it to use the bump allocator, or make a simple general purpose allocator that works custom for your engine. Although my engine is about half complete and I have never needed anything beyond the bump allocator. It's much more maintainable and never has memory leaks because there isn't any to leak! Any objections I've ever heard to this method (so far) have all been dodging the actual issues/flame war type distractions. My entire engine runs using it, I've never had any memory leaks, and it's dead simple to use. I didn't invent it, but it works, and it's better than garbage collection for sure. With garbage collection there is way more memory management going on in the background, pointlessly allocating and deallocating because the language runtime obfuscates the fact that memory is a finite resource which takes time and space. Code becomes slower because it was designed to be sloppy enough to run on a garbage collected system, rather than the programmer thinking about only what the game needs to run in a performant manner. Anyway, I learned all this from your generation of superior programming practices. It just makes me sad that software has gone so far downhill ever since I was born at the dawn of C++ and all the orientation craze... 😟
@@totheknee well said and if you already know that, it's no problem using it. Devils advocate point#1: learning anything you don't already know that you can avoid is good because ... when you are 70 the list of things you want to learn that are more important than that by about 200 items. So learn those first. 2nd of all the GC cost is there, but it's about 1% unless you screw up major, so optimizing elsewhere will be what needs to be done, the GC work would have been a big deal on a 90s system, not today at all. And the payoff not having to worry about it, if there is just one allocation bug you are already money behind. That's I guess the intuition you get after 40-50 years in IT!! In any case, any GC perf problems you can easy fix with an object pool with is about the same complexity as the old malloc/free without the risks. BTW: if you are ever forced to use DotNet with GC, don't overlook the free "microsoft CLR profiler" - it literally wipes away the obfuscation that GC abstracts. You would love it (but you probably won't need it either!)
@@sps014 I didnt use c++ ver much tbh. if i got into programming earlier in life i would want to work with c++. At least spend enough time to have some experience. But i think it's too late right now. I have used some c and c++ in college though and i think it's enough time for me to able to use this quote :D
@@Chris_t0 It's not that easy for most to go from C# to C++. C# does not have memory management and pointers. Which is what most typically struggle with understanding and then applying.
Maximum performance would probably still be using C or C++. Doing better than compilers that have been fine tuned for decades to produce optimized assembly is very VERY hard! Portability is also better.
Coming from enterprise software background (with C# being my main dayjob language) I found out that Unreal seems to fit me much better. Compared to Unity, Unreal puts you on rails with how you work and how you organize the project, and to do anything weird or unusual you have to actively fight against the engine - while it can be problem at times (when you know what you're doing), it's also a feedback to stop and thing twice if there's no better way of getting same result. Also, documentation, where Unreal might be lacking in tutorials, it does catch up in engine documentation (both docs and sources availability/comments) - lack of exhaustive detailed docs was my main issue trying to get stuff working in Unity, especially when experimenting with DOTS. In the end - matter of personal preference, expectations and what anyone finds comfortable. Whole Unity vs Unreal debate looks awfully similar to React vs Angular in web world - both are great, both have their own strenghts, and both differ mainly in philosophy of giving creator full freedom vs giving creator well designed, polished framework to build in.
@@rubenpartono from how I understand it ("Compared to Unity, Unreal puts you on rails") they refer to Unity having full freedom. In which case I would agree. I haven't used Unreal since UE4 but tried to get into Godot recently and there is usually 1 concept to grasp for virtually everything (e.g. the node/scene system) and 1 "true" way of doing something, while every other way you try will direct you back on the intended tracks via warnings. Super useful if you have no idea what you are doing and it makes it sound really good/easy on paper but, to me at least, Godot feels rather limiting because of this and it makes the workflow cumbersome, especially when it comes to programming.
I see the same attitude across all of my hobbies; motorcycles, mountain bikes, game programming... There's always a group that thinks you HAVE to use the highest performance "thing" no matter what and everything else is garbage. For 99.99% of us out there Unity and C# is never going to hold us back. We're talking 1 or 2-man (and woman) indie games here... we're not breaking new ground. It's about having the right tool for the job. It's not a pissing contest.
@@La0bouchere once it has been years into development and you find out that you cant achieve a modicum of performance for the game you set up to do because of systematic issues in your engine that are beyond you ability to change because you neither have time, money or the ability to do ... is a bit too late tough believe me, i read postmortems of quite few games where this exact thing has happened, i would love to point you to those but i left game making for almost a decade now and i really don't remember, but one i do recall that went somewhat like this i think was Mortal Kombat 9 where they set up to use unreal engine 3 and midway thru development realized that the engine just couldn't give the things that a fighting game needed. and had to dive into the engine code and rewrite large parts of it.
Except you're wasting resources of the end user not to mention all the bloat that comes with Unity. Your attitude is why we have simple indie games with far worse performance than AAA games. Lazy, incompetent programmers using bloated middleware. That's also why, any time i see the Made with Unity logo, it's a hard pass on buying the game
lemme add something. if you making games as a hobby and to have fun, then that's fine. keep doing it however you want. power to you! but if you think "1 or 2-man (and woman) indie games here... we're not breaking new ground." will be commercially successful... well, i have to tell you that if you game is similar to something that already exists, then the odds are that people will keep playing what already exists, even if your game is better. your little retro game will be checked up by the people who like that stuff, they will play it once, and then go back to whatever 90's arcade/console/pc game you based it on. i seen it too many times: -did you guys seen that new beat 'em up -yeah it is very good **goes back to play some 90's arcade beat em up that was not good even back then** same with RPGs, action games, sim, and so... the era where you could just pull a shovel knight are over. steam is filled to the brim and ripping at the seams with games that are good but not "breaking new ground" that are no one will ever hear about. and don't get me started on all the bad ones. because guess what? IT IS a pissing contest! the "right tool for the job" will get you something that anyone else could have done it. and unless you doing something no one ever seen before, no one will give any fuck
@@jn2002dk lol what, several classic games have been made with Unity that run just fine and you're missing out hard. Have fun missing out on Hollow Knight and Return of the Obra Dinn because of some preconceived notion.
I've worked with both. Honestly the advice I have given in the past is: which engine to use depends on the scope of your game. The closer your project is to being some small smart phone game with only one level/scene, the better Unity will be for your project. The closer your project is to being a big AAA game with millions of dollars spent just on marketing, the better Unreal will be for your project. Both engines are completely capable of delivering both of those projects, but the way the editors are structured and set up shows that Unity is more focused on smaller projects while Unreal is more focused on larger ones. The more complex systems are more time-consuming to set up within Unity, while simple ones can be set up much faster. A character with two or three animations is faster to set up in Unity, but if that grows to a larger complex system with dozens of different states and twice as many transitions, Unity's default interface becomes harder to read/follow/change and you'll wish for Unreal's animation tree. With Unity you have to add each scene to a list of scenes the game can load, which just becomes an extra step you have to go through with every level in your game. But you can also build a completely standalone game within a single scene without having to ever set anything up or even giving that level a special name so the engine knows to start there. Unity works better for people who are just starting, solo developers, and rapid prototyping. If you just want to make games for fun or work in a small studio, choose Unity. But if you want to work for a big AAA company, you might want to practice using Unreal. But even saying that, there is a LOT of carryover between the two. That's my take on it.
Nice to see someone with actual experience state their opinion. The only thing I would contest a bit, is that I think Unity is fine for up to medium-sized projects. But you're right, for large or massive projects that have a large studio support system, Unreal takes the helm. It's what it was designed for. So many beginners only understand how pretty those particle shaders look, and how Unreal makes their favorite AAA games, so they fall into the trap without realizing how horrible Unreal is for learning, solo devs, and small teams. I'd further highlight your statement about crossover, as it's incredibly important. For any beginner out there, learning Unity will NOT be a waste of your time. You can always switch later, and you'll be better armed to face the nightmare of usability that is Unreal.
@@Deadener I agree that Unity is easier to learn than UE but, at the same time, I think that once you get the basic concepts in UE, it is not much harder than Unity. Have in mind that UE has a lot more functions than Unity has not and that makes the engine more complex. But with Unity you end up buying or developing yourself a lot of assets to compensate the fact that important things are missing or are too basic. So with Unity, you have learn Unity + n assets which you have to integrate yourself.
@@trueh "Have in mind that UE have more feature than Unity": Which ? They both offer the same product, or more so, they both fill the same needs: a physical and rendering engine scriptable through their APIs and editors. Physics, lighting, networking, animation, etc... are not engine-specific. The only difference between the two is how much they expose their APIs (e.g: level), how they design interactions within their respective engines and what scripting languages they choose to support. Now speaking about performances: It doesn't matter that UE is a C++ scriptable. You're not running C++ code, the engine is, and the engine's performances depends on how optimized it is. Unity is not using traditional C#, they use the Mono project implementation of it. And they even transpile it too ! Never thought it was weird you could compile your project cross platform and even into JavaScript from a .NET codebase ? Realistically it's a matter of preferences. I personally use Godot for its licensing and community drive.
@@charlesm.2604 Do not missunderstand me. I'm using Unity most of the time because as a solo developer it is more convenient. I have not used Unreal for a while, but more than extra high-level features it provides more options to choose from when it comes to use each feature. If we stay at a high level, you could say that there is no difference between Unreal and let's say LibGDX which is not really true. For instance, both systems have animation based on state machines, but Unreal has also Animation Blueprints, Morph Targets, Animation Budget Allocations, ... Every of them could be replicated in Unity by implementing your own code, but you have to do it yourself. Unreal provides a full framework to create your games and manage their state, including multiplayer which Unity does not. The shader editor in Unity is very basic compared to the material editor in Unreal. Integration with USD and Alembic in Unreal is much more complete that in Unity. Volumentric clouds and stmospheric effects are not available in Unity by default. Unreal's terrain tools are also a little bit better than Unity's. Unreal has a water system included which Unity does not. UDIM support and Virtual Texturing in Unity is basically unfinished. Runtime GI in Unity is deprecated without a viable replacement in their roadmap. Advanced shading models (subsurface scattering, skin, hair, ...) are not available in Unity by default. Unity does not have a destruction system. Unity does not have behaviour trees to handle IA by default. Pixel streaming is not available in Unity. Using C++ can make a slight difference, but let's be realistic. Most of the optimisation problems are going to arise in the GPU and not in the CPU, so it is not a big difference between using C++ and C#. Transpilation in Unity using IL2CPP is equivalent to transpilation in Unreal when you are using Blueprints and it is not as effective as developing your code in C++. You can see the C++ code produced by IL2CPP and, as expected, it is clear that it is not as optimized as hand-made code. When it comes to rendering quality, it depends on what you are trying to do. If the look of your game is realistic, the implementation of lightning in Unreal is actually better. Low.poly games or stylized games will not probably benefit from it. I will not enter in the new features of UE5 regarding lightning, world streaming, and the general asset management workflow, which look really nice but I have not tested myself. The thing is: are you really going to use all advanced features that Unreal provides in your game? I not, Unity, or Godot are very good options to avoid the extra complexity of Unreal. If the answer if yes, you can save time by using Unreal and having all of them integrated and tested instead of developing or integrations third-party assets into your development.
Let's face it, it boils down to "we like it more". The tools don't make the game, you can do anything with any tool these days. It always boils down to your own personal preference.
i tried to switch from unreal to unity thinking it would be easier, but almost every tutorial i found was slightly incompatible with the latest unity, and then the different systems like HDRP/URP...
@Erol Demirci Auto generated lods will never be half as efficient as making your own. :P Seems like you have a chip on your shoulder about unity and that's fine.. i guess. A lot of the issues you describe I ran into as well. 12 years ago when I was learning how to use it. Unreal has a stronger out of the box UX, I'll give you that but the problem with that is 90% of the indy games that come out with it are horribly unoptimized. If you are actually making games for money you need to start on the low end of physics and graphics and tweak your way up. I've also been using Unreal since the original Unreal game came out. If you are simply training to be a cog in the AAA wheel then by all means go for Unreal. AAA and Epic has a loooong history that was decades in the making and it has little to do with the quality of the engine and more to do with "it's what our pipeline is already built to handle. and those tech demos make our board of directors cool with giving us a giant budget." Similar to autodesk dominating the CG industry overall. Modo or Houdini can run circles around pretty much anything Autodesk but maya is still the core in most CG pipelines...changing and re-training would be far too costly. More and more new studios are adopting Unity for a massive list of reasons. Thousands of physics based games have been made with Unity so the physics is on you. If you want to have a graphics pissing match then Escape From Tarkov, Trinity, Firewatch and Hollow Knight would like to have a word. A few devs even offer a virtual texturing solution for unity that makes unreal's texture streaming look downright archaic. Unity is good enough to make bad games by inexperienced devs and good enough to make widely regarded masterpieces by small independent teams. The editor functionality is open enough as well that if you need a tool and it doesn't already exist you can probably make it yourself. And with that.. Unreal DOESNT suck. It's not for me and I have enough extensions for Unity that i'm years ahead of Unreal for tech. Engine wars don't have to be a zero sum game. The more engines you are experienced with the better designer you will be even if you only stick to one. It never hurts to know multiple solutions to the same problem. Unreal is a carefully built Italian luxury car with automatic transmission. Unity is the scrappy manually controlled frankenstein, that you aren't afraid to take out in a snow storm or a dirt rally... .and it can go just as fast as the lambo.
@@pogo575 Good balanced view. Also worth mentioning UE4 has a very specific workflow and not all game genres work well with it. You will probably end up working against the grain of the engine if its not in a FPS fashion. After all Unreal Engine was built on a history of shooters. CryEngine had a very similar complaint. I'm not sure if I hear of such workflow problems with Unity. Unity is transitioning to Havok I believe so that might clear up physics issues. UE4 does amazing stuff out of the box, but personally I don't know if i'd use it for my own project if I don't enjoy the workflow. C++ in UE4 gets even more complex because it does have a GC. But yeah at the end of the day people use what they like. Engine wars should be about really delving into the fine details of how engines work and what they offer, not make an ego battle trying to make the other person submit to an opinion of what is better.
These 'went from Unreal to Unity and won't go back' vids are almost always from a programmer perspective. As a art-centric developer (game/cinematics/level design and VFX) for the last 20+ years myself using both Unreal and Unity on a daily basis, and from a content creator standpoint, there's no way I'd pick Unity over Unreal. As a non-programmer I have made entire games myself in blueprints. I can create and iterate on game mechanics myself easily. I have so many native tools (UMG, material editor, cascade/niagara, matinee/sequencer, animation (esp with Control Rig now), blueprints, etc. etc.) that I don't have to rely on engineers for, it frees up my coders to work on the backend stuff and higher level graphics and mechanics. Then after I'm happy with a given mechanic we decide whether to use it as-is, nativize it, or recreate in C++, but we have lots of options. And the better I've gotten with blueprints the more we just use that stuff. Meanwhile on my Unity projects, we have to rely on the traditional methods (like back in the Unreal 1/2/3 days), and there's always a bottleneck. Sure, I've gotten better at using Unity, but I'm limited by not knowing C#, and I just don't have the brain to be a coder (though blueprints as a visual interface has completely changed the game for me... I can -think- in blueprints when I'm away from the PC). That said, sure, Unity should be considered for smaller projects that need mobile support. It's fine for stuff like that.
Weird if you can program a game in blueprints you should be able to handle coding. But I agree with you Unity is just not the way to go, the workflow is not unified like Unreal. Unreal has a much higher learning curve though.
@@TheReferrer72 I feel like it's the visual component that really clicked for me in blueprints. That said, I can now understand written code a LOT better when I'm looking at it. Also, I have been working with Unreal since 1.0, the very beginning, so have some built-in familiarity with it. But the shift from 3 to 4 was massive for me and took a while (still is really) for me to be able to really express myself in it. And, to be fair, Epic had an almost 20 year head-start on Unity. Also I know Unity has some plugins that imitate blueprint or object-oriented scripting, so at some point I'm sure I'll give them a crack. I do actually like their VFX Graph system, as it reminds me a bit of Niagara. The key for me is being able to help out my Unity projects more like what I can do when it's UE4, and I'm not there yet.
@@DavidWKimber Unity recently bought Bolt, a visual script editor and made it free. So technically, Unity now has a free blueprint system. It just might require a separate download, and that's it.
I also made the jump from Unreal to Unity after about 10 years. No regrets, the openness of Unity is unmatched. The majority of my time spent in Unreal was spent fighting with their proprietary systems to work the way I want. Unity makes no assumptions and allows you to control almost everything right from the start. Being a fan of procedural generation, Unreal really lacks the tools for generating meshes/collision/navigation at runtime. Literally spent years trying to do in Unreal what I did in months in Unity.
I get asked this question sometimes and depending on who's asking, it can be tough to give them a satisfying answer. Sidenote: I'm starting to dive into more intermediate programming in Unity and your channel has been very helpful for me to understand intermediate concepts. Thanks for this!
I really love your videos because we seem to have a very similar career experience, even tangentially working on the same games in the past. You're an inspiration for someone like me who is an industry veteran but has been (in my case) perpetually interested in exploring independent projects.
@@Rehd66 If you think that "tangentially" is one a' them fancy-talk words, I suggest you reevaluate your life. I hope "reevaluate" wasn't too fancy of a word, either.
@@Rehd66 Either you're a teenager, which would make your idiocy understandable, or you're an adult, which reflects more poorly on society. Let's hope it's the former. (As always, if there are any words that caused confusion in this comment, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll break them down for you.)
Nice video man. I haven't used other game engines yet. Unity is my first pick when I decided to make a game. I agreed that Unity can speed the iteration process. Thanks for sharing. :)
I like your take on this. Its interesting and I actually started out with Unity 4/5. It offers easier and faster access to game development and I still dabble in it. Recently however I've focused on UE4 and the online community is pretty amazing, weekly live broadcasts and yes, C++ is tougher but I've not actually needed C++ for the last year because I can use Blueprint for what I need. I happen to like C++ which challenged me and is pretty much what I use daily except when doing Web development using c# which feels rote.(I bounce around from VR to Web to databases to native desktop applications) Both are excellent products but to me Unreal Engine feels more professional and intuitive. For mobile development however, Unity all the way.
@Spencer Parkin there's nothing lazy about using BP other than on the surface it does seem easier, but yes you are right. BP can be a pain but it's also great for basic things too like input. If you find a balance between C++ and BP, then it can really speed up development. It really is down to personal preference.
C# was the first language I learned because of Unity. No other language I've learned since compares to it for me. I love how it is all set up, I love how safe everything is, how smoothly everything connects together, and how I'm never just blindly entering in things hoping I don't misspell words. If anything C# in Unity probably spoiled me because I got so used to the absolutely immediate feedback of typing anything wrong or trying to do anything that wouldn't work.
Same here. I first started with a book on Unity a long time, obviously way outdated now. But the book taught both C# and JavaScript in its examples. And knowing absolutely nothing about programing, C# just looked "better" to me, made more sense. And there's not a single thing I haven't been able to accomplish with it and Unity in my time since.
Gotdot is ridiculouis for any SERIOUS landscape based game,,,2d ya maybe....I see no reason to learn yet another engine when unity or unreal has you covered from head to toe.
@@IamNeighborlee That what people used to said about blender3d in 3d Modeling and animation stuff 12 years ago, as i recall. Godot is not ready for now, but the development is quite good.
comments like these make it feels like godot fans became a joke. love the engine but worst thing is it has a worse cult culture like blender. It is lightyears away from unity, and unity is levels below ue4.
Having fresh experience with newest versions of both engine I'd say his comments are still valid. Especially the build time; blueprints and the likes does not change the fact that for any feature that is not in Fortenite you'll have to mod the engine and pray for the it to compiler not to return an error. Even simple things like custom shaders you'll have to either hack in a new material node that does the job or you'll have to put your dirty fingers on the 3d engine and likely break it. Not to speak at all about multi threading or compute on the GPU. Disclaimer: I'm from Denmark.
I've been learning front end web dev stuff for almost a year and was thinking about starting C++ as I'm not a total beginner to coding, and I wanted the higher framerate, but your video has convinced me to do otherwise. Thanks!
@@jonjon3829 Coding reshapes your brain. Our brains are not logic engines, coding requires logical reasoning AND demands no intuition. When you think you know your start point say 1. You know the outcome needs to be 4. intuitively. However in coding you need to know the steps of HOW to get from 1-> 4 and you are unused to working these steps out having relied upon intuition from pattern recognition (how our brains actually work) to provide the answer By learning to code, no matter how painful, you will reshape your brain for the better. On a plus side you will stop voting democrats and supporting Socialism as you will become sentient.
@@TheBelrick I do mechanical engineering, but I almost failed the coding part and the electrical part. I tried picking coding up many times to no avail. I kinda understand things when I follow some basic arduino tutorials, but writing anything myself? nah. Never voted democrats, I ain't crazy, yet.
I switched to Unreal for the entire reason of "free Megascans." I prefer the workflow in Unity but Megascans are a godsend. And let's not forget about Metahumans.
- Why I switched from Unreal to Unity - Why I switched from Unity to GoDot - Why I switched from GoDot to Gamemaker studio - Why I switched from Gamemaker studio to Scratch - Why I switched from Scratch to making deserts
I upgraded a Unity project from Unity 4 to Unity 2019. It took me a couple weeks of my spare time to get everything working properly, but it was possible. That being said, the whole reason I made such a huge jump was because much earlier I had tried to update it from Unity 4 to Unity 5.3 and I ran into odd issues that no one could help me with, so I abandoned trying to update it.
something a lot of these videos are missing is Unreal Engine Blueprint. the unreal engine's take on visual scripting in Blueprints is so amazing, that not only you could do nearly everything you want in it (especially if your game is not AAA), but also it teaches you a lot of Programming concept in ways you could have wasted so much time in coding. and It's much easier and faster to do something in it, rather than code. Honestly I've been developing small games, VR projects in Unreal for 2 years, and only was forced to write one page of C++ code.
I'm wondering... with all of the changes over the past couple of years is this still true for you? I would love to see this video revisited with all of the pricing changes, royalty changes, UE5, etc. :)
You should check out UE4 Jason, your title is quite misleading. Personally I think the royalty business model is more preferable, because this motivates the company to make their users succeed. For instance by giving out grants and providing free stuff for developers. Doing livestreams, hosting gamejams.. etc One of the issues I have with Unity at the moment is that all new features seem half baked, LWRP is great, but srp batching is broken on all new versions, no dynamic point light shadows, no ambient occlusion, camera layering.... Even tough they call it production ready. Aside from that, one of the bigger differences in terms of tech is that Epic Games actually develops games, and not demos. This means the tech they develop is battle-tested. Don't get me wrong, Unity is currently my main engine since I'm working on a lightweight project as my main project. But I've developed a love-hate relationship with it.
@@why7893 My point is developers are more likely going to run into issues then the engine devs. This is because they don't make games themselves. This also means they will not see any shortages of the tooling outside of the scope of the projects they do in-house. Unless they get feedback and actually act on the feedback, which is more likely a slower process.
@@why7893 Also results don't really tell you much about the process of getting to that result. One can make a beautiful painting by just using MS Paint, but that doesn't mean painting it was a pleasing experience for the painter. It mainly tells you it can be done. For clarity I'm not saying Unity is like Ms Paint, it's just a metaphor to say that results don't really tell you much about the process.
@@AlexMeesters I don't think the title is misleading, but those are some valid concerns. I don't use the newest features for games I want to have more stable/production ready. I like that Unity introduces so many new and great features, but some of them are not quite there yet and it might still take a while. Having checked out UE4 and Unity, I probably wouldn't go back to UE4 though.
@@fmproductions913 The title is misleading. There is a huge and massive different between UE4 and previous versions such as UE3 or UE2. UE4 is way better and stable. Unreal engine 4 and Epic provide a lot of features and functionality. They also give away millions of dollars in game assets and just recently purchased Quixel and there products such as Megascans, giving UE4 users thousands of free triple a quality textures.
I've used both Unity and UE4, my preference is UE4 but they're both great and it's awesome to live in a time when getting your hands on a game engine is so easy and low cost. I like that the source code for UE4 is available, that was kind of the biggest thing for me.
In unreal engine. You can create a C++ class very easily and then interface that to blueprints so that 95% of your code is blueprints with almost no performance loss which is incredibly easy for beginners and removes the "tick bottleneck" that blueprints have. And you can also create interactive displays in Unreal in the same way you can with Unity. Although its probably a bit easier to do a lot of web type things in Unity but I only say that because I haven't found a nice way to quickly build or import interfaces in Unreal (I have also not tried looking very hard either). Unreal engine has web socket communication to blueprints and python plus pixel streaming so I don't think there is going to be a huge amount that Unity can do better than Unreal or vice versa in that space.
Interesting... we're considering switching to Unreal for our next project (mainly because the artists have a strong preference for Unreal, but also because many core features in Unity (like lightmapping) are buggy and just not production quality). Iteration times are killer with our current Unity project. 20 seconds to recompile, 10 seconds to "play", minutes to compile a shader. I had heard Unreal was better in this regard, but maybe not?
Lighting is buggy, there's no questions about it, but you can get really good results both in Unity and UE4. In terms of recompiles a bare minimum project in UE is already slow when it comes to moving assets around, modifying materials and so on. Maybe as a project grows bigger the times get similar, haven't yet reached that size to get the speed as bad as UE4.
My company started with Unity and left for UE4 pretty early on because the artists loved it (I'm a programmer) and I would never touch Unity again. It takes ~10 seconds to compile a C++ project, if you are using blueprints it takes under a second. Compiling shaders is done when you open a project for the very first time which can take a few minutes but after that it only compiles changed or new shaders. When "playing" it can take a few seconds if it's a complex scene but mostly 1-2 seconds to start. Overall UE4 is a heavier engine but the productivity and performance you get out of it in return far exceeds what Unity offers. Jason is talking about Unreal from UE2/UE3 and not UE4 so more than half of the problems mentioned haven't been relevant since 2015.
When it comes to choosing a game engine for indie game development, it's about two things - what is accessible, and what platform it ships to. In your own case, originally only Unity could ship to the platform (mobile) that you needed it to. Now that most game engines can ship to most major platforms, I think in 2020 it is about accessibility - which engine is the most accessible (price/barrier to entry) and has the most accessible community/support/tutorials. When I was developing using UE4 in 2017 it felt like pulling teeth - I couldn't find the right documentation for what I needed and all of the questions on forums online were orphans. Looking for help felt like shouting into a black void - unless you were lucky enough to be working alongside someone who had used UE4 before (I was not), it felt like I was developing in the dark in isolation. I decided last year to make the jump to Unity for a new project I wanted to work on. It was daunting, as I'd only ever dabbled with it before in contrast to having developed a full working game demo over the course of a year in UE4. It has been so much better for my development though, I can't describe how different the experience has been. My husband and I just work on the project ourselves, so to have such an active community in Unity with thousands of tutorials online has been indispensable. I know there are always caveats and compromises, and when looking at a AAA game with next-gen graphics and physics engines, UE4 may be a better tool for the job. It handles memory better (IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, I'm guilty of memory leaks oops), and already has an incredible reputation for handling graphics and shaders. However, I know for a fact that if I'd have started my new project in UE4 again, I wouldn't have made it as far as I have with Unity. I only have a handful of hours I can work on game development these days when I have a full-time job and family commitments, so I don't want to spend that precious time hitting my head against the wall with constant development blockers because of a lack of widely available information or a community that sometimes feels a bit gatekeepy to beginners. (as of 2017, it may be different now) Working in C# is also easier than C++ for newcomers. For advanced users, It's easier to write clean code in C# because you can focus less on memory management and more on your architecture. It's also object-oriented so anyone with experience working in other object-oriented languages (like Java) can pretty much transfer their knowledge directly and start development immediately - my husband uses Java for his day job so this is exactly what happened for him. TLDR - better to have a finished game which is slightly less optimised than to have a dozen started projects, or to have been discouraged and to have dropped development altogether because of the number of barriers you face when starting development alone in a new game engine.
Same here, I've been put off of UE due to the lack of information, documentation and tutorials that go a bit deeper. It didn't help that I only ever worked with Java and tiny amounts of Python / C. Unity for me was the bestest choice for the stuff I want/-ed to do.
Just wanted to say, whenever I want to learn something unity related I make you my first point of call. Something about the way you explain things click with me, usually I'm more of a do-to-learn guy, takes me a while to understand things but I find that listening to you gives me more understanding before I do something, I go into my next idea with a better overall idea of how I want to approach things
Hey, Jason! Just wanted to let you know I watched a lot of your "Unity3Dcollege" channel tutorials while I was attending the Game Design Bachelor's degree for Full Sail University (very helpful, especially the "health bars quick clean and simple" ). I graduated on 26th of November 2019. Thank you for the free tutorial videos, they're easy to follow along with and understand. You explain clearly what you need to do in Visual Studios and in Unity. Hopefully you continue to keep making these easy to follow videos for current and upcoming coders!
You should preface this is a decition made long ago, and doesn't really stack up to todays options. Recompile times are better these days. UE4 have blueprints which doesn't require recompile at all, and I think most mainstream titles could probably stick to them with minimal C++ needed. And then theres source code. Now I'm not the kinda guy who gonna roll with his own branch, but I'd gladly offer all the tutorials in the world for the ability to actually see whats going on within the engine itself. I still use Unity for my small mobile project, as I haven't been able to reach the same performance on lower end devices in UE. Its a great engine, but its not hard to see why some people are pining for something else.
I enjoy watching all of your videos. They're very realistic and real world and I learn a lot from each of them in regards to the game development world and programming too. Thanks for the help!
If you re strictly speaking about learning experience from a beginners perspective I would say unity teaches you more. Most unreal engine users never touch a line of c++ and use blueprints for their projects which is mostly a black box, however I feel like unity teaches you more about making robust and scalable systems for your games. Blueprint can get really messy especially with arithmetic operations. However, i also think unity is very confusing with multiple render pipelines and some features not seemingly finished.
@Jason.... still not wanting to go back to Unreal? I switched the other way and will be finishing my first game with Unreal.... curious if this is still your position.
@@markcooke4866 I will say the build times aren't ideal. I'll be offloading builds to other machines while I do stuff so it's not the end all decision maker for me. I moved over for features like Nanite and the new lighting system. Was simply curious if the "wont go back" still stands.
As an environment artist, I remember trying out Unity in 2014 and it just wasn't up to par with the expectations. My sentiments were that it seemed like an engine that's easy start games in but lacked the feature set at the time to efficiently manage a more robust game. No idea where it's at now but Unreal has always been my go-to, at least for art work.
This isn't really related to the video but I'm slowly realising I just play Unity games without any inherent bias going into it, it seems like whenever I get a AAA game, whether it's in Unreal or FrostBite, I get bored of them very quickly, and these are the games I played the most in the past year which I really enjoyed: - Rimworld (Unity) - Disco Elysium (Unity) - Escape from Tarkov (Unity) - Outer Wilds (Unity) - Due Process (Unity) - Intruder (Unity) - Valheim (Unity) - Onwards (Unity) - Boneworks (Unity) - Deep Rock Galactic (UE4) - Half Life Alyx (Source2) Just so happens almost all of them are Unity games... the latest UE5 demo looks absolutely incredible, yet I'm not at all excited for it mostly because they just don't seem to have any content that interests me, maybe people behind Squad can take advantage of it? That's the only other UE game I've played recently that I enjoyed.
For me, at least back in 2010, it was that UDK was loaded by FPS stuff that you had to build your game around, and was too heavy for my PC. Unity on the other hand was a blank canvas, just a camera and the skybox is your limit. I'd still prefer Unity 2.6 over Unreal 4.24.
This makes sense. You wouldn't use an FPS/TPS engine if you didn't need it. But with UE4, its so modular, a lot of that stuff can be removed. Also, if you are using 4.24, you are using a broken engine. It's in preview.
@@tehf00n I used UE4 again some time ago, I noticed it's still require you to work around the same FPS and Network stuff and recompiles the whole engine if you work with cpp source files and of course still very demanding on dev CPU and GPU, don't know about the latest update though.
I remembered back then when I was young and was a little interested in game development, I looked at Unity then I remembered that the crappiest flash games i played were made in Unity, so I didn't touch it. But here I am now, actually trying to make my very first game after experimenting with a bunch of 2D mechanics on a junk project.
Good video, I will not be leaving Unreal but you have made me take another look at Unity. I have them both and from this video it seems it is just a matter of preference for you and I appreciate your honesty. I can see both Unity and Unreal have their advantages.
Welcome to team Unreal jason! papa EPIC will take care of you. Before when I started using Unreal, I fell in love with the engine on how user friendly it is. I've been using Unreal for 3 years now, and what's so beneficial when you are using Unreal is they give assets every month! and hear out the dev community
I started learning Unity several years back. Reasons being i knew C# and everyone said it was so much easier and faster to develop in than the other front runner UE. I was/am in no way an expert in C#, as i came from pascal/delphi R.I.P., but i know it well enough for it to be easy to get started. Everywhere i went everyone said that UE had such a steep learning curve and C++ was such pain. I ended up learning unity. The "dream game" i have is still not started, but a game i made as an exercise in Unity really stuck with me and its a game i will release as a product some day. The one i will release is not the same one as the first exercise as i have remade the game from scratch more than once as i'm getting better. But then came the Unity package mayhem that put me off the whole thing for a while. Then i started UE to see what the big issue with C++ is. I used blueprints as an entry point and then learned C++ parallel and later C++ specifically for UE. I must say that i don't get what the problem with C++ is. I really enjoy it a lot. Much of the memory leakage is fixed when handling engine specific classes, the blueprint-C++ interface works like a charm, and the build times are basically the same as in Unity nowdays. Most of the mentioned issues here are old and not valid anymore. Now comes the issue. I like them both. For the game im doing atm UE is a better choice in some aspects but... With how they have made UE (UE 5 is amazing to work with imo) easy to work with and fixed much of the package issues in Unity and the new features in them both is giving me such a hard time to chose which to use. Imo C++ and C# are as easy and have just as many pros and cons. Atm im developing the same game in them both... pulling my hair out.
I don't see mobile game lasting too much longer. Companies have just ruined it. It's a cesspool of low-quality cash-grabs and the most popular crappy cash-grabs overshadow any of the very few good games. The market is just ruined and I don't personally know anyone who plays mobile games minus one or two here and there. History is repeating itself, we had a video crash in the 80's because everyone and their pet dog was making video games and most of them sucked and they overshadowed any of the good games. Now, today, the same is happening but more prominently in mobile.
I worked with Unity and Unreal Engine. So if you wanna choose between these two, I recommend Unity. Unreal is so powerful nowadays, but it's made for more powerful PCs. That's only my opinion, you should choose whatever you comfortable work with.
Ex-Unreal developer here, having switched back to Unity. Unity is SO much more professional. The API is much more full-service, it's well documented, code is half the size is C#, editor doesn't crash from the hot reloading, and no digging through the engine source to answer basic questions. We had gone to Unreal for a while because the grass seemed greener, but Unity has their act much more together as a game engine. I'm more than twice as productive in Unity, and it's not the just the language, it's that the whole thing is MEANT to be used, where it's like Unreal is really developer hostile.
@@legendgames128 I really only used the amount of blueprint that I was forced to (slots for animation mixing). I don't want to code visually, it turns into spaghetti in two seconds. And I won't be using Bolt in Unity. Simply not interested. Clean code is much easier to understand. Visual scripting doesn't scale.
@King Yacine OK, genius, Unity has DOCUMENTATION! Unreal has for the most part a scrape of the function headers, which isn't documentation, so you have to dig through the source to understand how anything is supposed to be used. Have you ever used any of these engines? This is common knowledge, and the primary complaint even Unreal fanboys have of Unreal.
The one truly saving grace in Unreal is that it's mostly quite intuitively programmed, and Unreal's implementations are instructive of how to use the APIs. But the time I personally spend finding out how to call a function is about 95% lower in Unity. because of DOCS. Oh, the docs.
SO MUCH THIS :) I have been a hobbyist game developer for most of my life. I experimented with game making on the C64, in DOS, Visual Basic, Android and for a long time I knew about Unity and Unreal Engine but stayed away from them as it seemed too much to take on. I finally went with Unity as the Android devkit I used kept making breaking changes in the source code. Unity does so as well, but then helps fix them, and often automatically. I have tried working with UE4 a few times, it has a lot of things going for it... but omg. recompling, redoing shaders, compiling the full engine to add in a few features... I thought I was just bad at Unreal Engine and just getting used to it... but nope. That does seem to be the standard and in Unity the iteration process is overall so very much faster on... as far as I know, all aspects. Lighting rendering is a background process, shader rendering is pretty much a background process. Recompiling code usually takes seconds rather than minutes. Compiling a full game rarely takes even 30 minutes for me... with my projects it usually takes less than 10 minutes. My biggest projects that end up having more than 10gb of assets, I do not remember it ever taking an hour to compile a full game build. Especially as a solo developer, you just do not have that much time to waste on trying out ideas. With Unreal Engine it often seems you can end up spending half your time or more on... waiting.
You make some excellent points, however may I make some counter arguments? 1. Unity has a few glaring holes if aiming to make higher quality games. You’ll need an asset for AI, such as Behavior Designer. You’ll need Aura 2 for decent lighting. For visual scripting you’ll need either Playmaker or Bolt. (I know Unity are introducing their own visual scripting soon, which is great). Shader graph takes care of shader/material creation, whereas previously you needed Amplify Shader Editor. Even creating height fog requires purchasing an asset. Bakery also seems to be a necessity in order to get high quality lighting baked efficiently. These are ALL present in the Unreal engine. 2. Not all of these assets are compatible with HDRP or LWRP (soon to be URP). For example, my studio’s current title is made with LWRP, but we can’t use Aura 2 because they haven’t updated it. 3. To match Unreal graphics, you’ll need to use HDRP. However this is fresh out of the oven, only just coming out of preview. It’s not production tested with any major games made with it, to my knowledge (please correct me if wrong). It’s a big bet to take, especially when comparing to an engine like Unreal which has been tried and tested with many many AAA titles over many years. You can of course use the standard Unity3D - which seems to be fine to be honest. An excellent example of a AAA title in Unity is Subnautica - it’s absolute gold. But is noticeably one of few AAA games in a sea of Unreal titles. 4. Even though HDRP can match Unreal in terms of graphic fidelity, whereas frame rate is concerned I am skeptical. Many comparisons on TH-cam show Unity matching Unreal, in terms of quality (lighting, post processing, etc). However on closer inspection the frame rate on Unreal is far higher, and noticeably more stable. Frame rate stability is crucial, since it is the determining factor on how high the graphics can be set. It’s quite noticeable especially on older machines - I noticed in general I can run Unreal games smoother with higher settings than Unity it on my 2013 machine. This is of course dependant on the developer’s skill and commitment to quality. 5. I think you need to mention Unreal Blueprints - they can replace C++ IF used correctly and organised cleanly, and can be used in conjunction with C++. Even more valuable is that Blueprints are compatible with every part of Unreal (to my knowledge), whereas something like playmaker is not. (Eg. Playmaker doesn’t seem to be able to be used with the new Unity Input system). 6. The Asset Store being far bigger than the Unreal marketplace may be a symptom of there being more holes to fill in Unity. All the the mentioned assets above are native features of Unreal, which is a huge advantage. 7. Unreal have made a huge push towards 2D games and also mobile games. Kudos to Unity who definitely got there first though! I’m not bashing Unity - I love Unity for its speed and simplicity, which is why we use it. I am considering using Unreal for our next project however because everything is so integrated and feature rich, and the graphics are just plain awesome. I just wanted to illustrate that although you make many excellent and correct points, there are more factors to consider when choosing a game engine. Thanks for reading :) Edit: Unreal introduced Live Coding C++ with 4.22, so that should help out with the iteration / compiling time issues with Unreal.
Дмитрий Азнауров I do wonder, how much is the developers not optimising their game properly, and how much is it Unity not being as optimised as it could be?
Since you’re not talking about Unreal Engine 4, Could you please rename this video to reflect that? Most new comers who watch this video will think you’re talking about unreal and will be misinformed. Edit : you’re comparing Unreal 2.5 to current unity versions?
@@RossYlitalo But he still didn't state that he's talking about UDK (Unreal Engine 3) and not Unreal Engine 4. Most people when they hear Unreal, think of UE4. His comparisons are too outdated to be uploaded on the end of 2019. My point is he's is not talking about Unreal, he's talking about UDK and that's completely misleading.
I'd be interested in your take on Godot, since it's kind of taken the meme-spot of "this is the uber-cool hip engine that'll beat all the big boys" lately. I've been frustrated lately with Unity due to its lack of classic spritesheet support, requiring you to ignore its animator system entirely if you want to animate good old-fashioned spritesheets (at least if you want something that can be modular and reusable, instead of wasting countless hours copying the same animator setup a million times), so I've been tempted to at least move onto something with a more dedicated 2D area like Godot rather than Unity's more '2D placed over 3D' system
Look into the AnimatorOverrideController you point it at an animator controller, and just replace the clips, and it reuses the controllers logic with the new clips.
Right now I'm working on a sprite sheet / 2D animator that works in a similar way and UI to unity's. This however easily allows for multiple colliders interactions / events and simple frame time modification. Hopefully the beta will be out within the next couple months.
@@Archimagus Is that going to accomplish what I'm after though? That still sounds like every animation needs to be setup again and again, whereas I'm talking like having a template of a spritesheet (e.g. all the animations a human could do in a top-down final-fantasy-like RPG), and knowing on every template the right frames are in the right place and then just inserting the spritesheets for it to know to just read frame 1 frame 2 etc and be modular. I've accomplished it with a tidbit of code, I just don't get how to accomplish that with the animator itself.
Godot is really solid for 2D! I've been working on an engine comparison video and I've worked with all 4 major engines (CE, UE, Unity, Godot) and while Godot can't really match the others in terms of 3D power, it is the best 2D engine out there.
Love your work Jason. I’m a bit caught up now but I’ve already liked the video and will watch later of course and also overall great content from the channel! Always inspiring.
That is what I don't like about it. I love having tools and systems written by other people, that solve my problems. For that reason, I have to use a lot of third party plugins. And those plugins don't always play well with each other.
@@000Gua000 I personally try to keep other ppls plugins off Up until I know how they work. Im a very my-path/my-errors programmer that, even when copying code, Ill type It down myself instead of ctrl+c/v
Agreed. I must know how everything works. Unreal may give you a character controller but its bloated and hard to work with. I made my own in Unity with Hybrid ECS and Its great.
This is actually true only since extremely recently. It has plenty of bloat in there. And it's not that much fun to completely depend on the updates of whatever plugins made by others you're using.
This seems like a list of reasons why someone would want to use unity over unreal, but not why YOU wanted to, or why you refuse to switch back. 1. Mobile development - Yeah, unity is probably the engine to pick when you're looking to develop for mobile. How often do you develop for mobile? 2. C# vs C++ - You said you know both so I'm not sure why this comparison is relevant for you switching engines. There are tradeoffs to the languages, but there's a reason why AAA games are written in C++ 3. Long Build times - Fair enough. 4. Amount of resources - After being experienced in Unreal and other proprietary engines, was the amount of tutorials and resources really relevant to you at that point? Also, I find that a significant amount of the tutorials are very surface level, don't really explain anything, and overall just targeted at beginners. It's hard to pick up good habits from these types of resources. 5. Unity is free - No longer the case and they have pretty similar pricing structures so it's not a reason to not switch back 6. So many unity developers - I would venture to guess that there are more unreal devs in the AAA space than unity devs (which would be the area for an MMORPG). It being easy to pick up isn't really a reason for you to stay with it, having already picked it up. 7. Constant updates - Unreal engine updates quite often as well. I'm not sure if it's more or less often, but you can similarly upgrade your project from version to version pretty easily, even going through a major version (4 to 5). Also, their updates are kinda... better. Unity has so many half baked and deprecated systems it's frustrating. 8. Good to build non-game apps - Sure, it is. But are you? An MMORPG certainly isn't a non-game app. And even if you are working on a non-game app, I don't see why you need to tie yourself down to one engine. You could use unreal for your 3D high-fidelity games and unity for your mobile or non-games 9. More resources on architecting projects for C# - I'm not sure if this is true. Anecdotally, "Game Programming Patterns" by Robert Nystrom is a really good book that I learned this kind of stuff from and is demonstrated in C++
Hey J, could you please make a video on skybox? I need a pitch black sky, neon signs, and keep having occlusion flares wipe out my screen. I think occlusion is the right word. Like the camera ISO is set way too high, and when using physically based volume, my screen just turns purple. I'm still using 2019.4 LTS, they may have addressed this in more recent builds, but theyve removed the simplicity of just dragging and dropping skyboxes. Please please please help. Black sky, a plane of 300-500 meters, big neon signs. Thank you Jason.
@@robbie_ what i meant with hours is the total time per day wasted waiting for compiles. A single save and compile took an average of 20 mins as far as I can remember. It is so annoying when a new programmer like me who is still learning, should wait this much every single time he wants to try adding a variable here or make a minor change there, and keep testing to see what might happen.
@@adammed8667 With my experience, that 20 mins compile is only really for the first compile of the day since UE4 tends to do a full recompile after several hours of no compiling (not sure if there is a way to disable this, since the old binaries are still there, in theory they could just be reused). Every compile after that takes several seconds.
@@fat-freeoliveoil6553 what I meant by "many hours" is the combination of all compile times per day. I was a beginner in UE and in C++ and I had to program in trial and error way, which means I had to compile every time I add a new statement or every several statements and see how that works (as part of the learning process). In C#/Unity, I can learn a thousand times faster.
For me these are the reasons I use UE5 2022 release UE 5 = Nanite and Lumen the best engine (the engine with guinness world record for the most successful) With C++ you can have bugs but it's unlimited. You can even develop your own plugins for those who are engineers in an easy and powerful way. The lowest royalties and in Epic's own store also has a plus of help Regarding the crash, you can do some light programming in another project or in Blueprints and then pass it to C++. Or just leave it with Blueprints. There are things you can program in C++ and continue in Blueprints. And if there are engineers on the team, you can extend or modify the editor thanks to C++. So many designers may be more comfortable with the editor and the tools they can get. PS: I agree with the video, Unity is powerful, I'm not saying it's not. This is just sharing ideas and I like your opinions, even if they are different. I know that Unity is great for mobile but I haven't tried it yet
At Nanite and Lumen: - First: It sounds nice, but if you are indie, do you actually need these features? - Second: You cut off most of the audience as most people won't have the hardware to run those features well. So in reality, it actually doesn't sound that exciting.
@@SnakeEngine The two points you say have no basis in time. The RTX and RX are here to stay. So it may be a bit futuristic but the longer they take to update, the more opportunity they lose to be the first game developers. A golden rule is to make a game before there are already thousands of the same one, which is not going to be very profitable. Using new technologies helps a lot in this opportunity. You speak of indie, I understand that Stray was made by indie developers. They commented that they used Blueprints, which is from Unreal
Enjoyed the insight! I always hear debates about user ability (ease of use) and the difference In UI functionality between the two... often hearing the same each has something the other would benefit if they had those little functions on the other.
As someone who love Unity and is starting a Job that uses Unreal and Unity for VR projects I find these opinions of yours very interesting. I'll also be interested if those I'm going to work with feel similarly.
You know, I have actually warmed to Unreal a little, but I also find that they have some infuriating quirks that seem to make no sense. In the meantime I'm loving Unity more, ha ha. However, I'm still open to the possibility that my opinion may change in the future. But for now, I'm still definitely pro Unity
@@nitroclips96 still leaning towards Unity. None of our projects require UE5 investigation, so cant speak to those features. However, rather happy with 2021 and previous updates - XR updates to include SteamVR, Unity Input system, parallel import, loads of features added to URP and HDRP etc. Still waiting on DOTS 1.0, but happy with Unity right now.
Epic Games charges 5% of gross revenue if your game succeeds USD 3000 per quarter-year - once it drops below that you don't pay anything ("If you succeed, we succeed"). Also, if you use the engine for ArchViz, film rendering or other non-game-purposes you don't pay any royalties. I'd say that's a small price to pay for such a fantastic piece of software. Also, using UE4 grants free access to Quixel Megascans which atm costs USD 199/month (for commercial use) if you use it outside UE4.
@@clamum If you read attentively, you'll see that's exactly what I wrote ;) (...except for the general pricing which has changed quite recently, after I wrote previous comment half a year ago)
Now Im curious, With this new merger, and the potential of risking privacy with unity. That people state that the CEO is just looking to squeeze as much money as possible. Is unity still the choice or has time changed the tide? People say unreal is better since it has more popular games than unity.
I switched from UE to Unity because the software just seems much easier to use for a single dev. Another reason would be the community. I've never had any luck finding a good UE discord or anything but I'm in a few Unity discords that help you from modeling to code. It honestly comes down to personal preference. They both get the job done.
UnrealSlackers is on discord and has 30k members and ~10k online. Bummed you missed it, it's amazing. Epic also sponsors meetups. There's one in Portland, Oregon, and another in Seattle. You can probably find one in the nearest major city. Epic provides food+drinks and sends staff to do talks about once a quarter. Anyway, best of luck out there! Just letting you know about these resources in case you are interested. :)
Insanely good and underrated tool! It's fucking sad that we didn't learn about this in school. Teachers should use this as a tool (of course, every classroom should have a PC + video projector).
There are college courses that teach Unity, you just have to look. I'm assisting in one this term, and the students pick it up very quickly (CompSci 3rd/4th years).
@Kyles Isler School = education + experience + credential (degree). Education is worthwhile just for the sake of learning new things, bonus value when those things can be leveraged into a career/job path. Self-learning is great, but most folks don't push outside their comfort zone - school forces you to work in areas/ways that you don't normally. Group education also is a better match for how most software is actually made in the real world - you are part of a team, often part of a larger company/entity, not just coding for your own amusement. And of course a credential sure doesn't hurt when you're trying to get past HR gatekeepers. I've definitely learned that lesson from both sides.
I’m a huge Unity fan, but every single job now sees my resume / portfolio and say “that’s cool but what’s hour experience level with Unreal”? It’s crazy haha. My current contract work is In Unity thankfully but all the artists are from an Unreal background. It’s fun to teach them and have them go “ohhhh… nice!”
I would say, these days... Its not really a matter of speeds or tools any more. Both engines can do roughly the same, but they do certainly shine in different ways. My team just switched from Unity to Unreal, mainly because that our game will depend mainly on cutscene sequencing. And Unity's Timelines is not offering much in comparison as of yet. After making the switch, we experienced that the engine itself offers a lot more out of the box than Unity does. In Unity, you have to make a lot more of the systems and core functionality yourself. And iteration times I found is much quicker in Unreal as well. This is mainly when working in the blueprint aspect though, c++ classes still takes roughly the same time as C# to compile.
Alright I'll update it, and highlight the important point. In terms of ease of use, Unreal is still a dumpster fire. I honestly can't believe some of the crap their users let them get away with. Sure, Unity isn't perfect, and is definitely making some poor decisions, but their engine is still far easier to use. Let's do a couple examples. - Trying out some demos and your ears are bleeding because of how loud they are? That's fine, I'll just click the mute audio button for play mode right up... oh. There isn't one. Looks like I have to find the master audio class, and mute it manually for the entire game. If I want a button to mute the audio in play mode, I have to build a tool for it. - Making an FPS in this awesome engine designed around FPS games? Have you ever tried making it so your gun doesn't clip through the environment? I tried on my own for a while, and got close to a few solutions, but I wasn't too happy with them. After 30-40 min I decided to look up tutorials. Hmm.. they're just using a raycast to trigger an animation, or scaling down the gun to fit in the capsule. The Epic Games demos do this too. What's going on here? Turns out... UE4 REMOVED RENDERING LAYERS. What the hell? - Delete a project from the project manager? BOOM. Obliterated from the universe. Doesn't even go into the recycle bin. Hope you didn't accidentally export a sample in the wrong location. I did once, and it deleted my entire Unreal Projects folder. - Scripting choices? As Jason said, a mangled mess of C++ that still has the iteration of a snail crawling backwards despite the improvements. Or you could use the best visual scripting tool in the world. The only problem is, it's still visual scripting. - Prefabbing objects? Must create them as a blueprint. No fast way to quickly throw something together in the editor and convert it without getting inconsistent results. - Level geometry? Sorry, Unreal hasn't updated this tool since 1995. You remember BSP, right? - Made a Blueprint project, but want to write a C++ class or use a C++ demo? I hope you like errors, and not seeing your C++ classes in the Content window. By the way, conversion is a black magic ritual that no one even knows completely how to do, and you're better of just deleting the whole damn thing and starting over, wondering why on earth Unreal ever separated them like that to begin with. - Need a tool that isn't in the engine or one that's actually usable? Sorry, creating tools in this engine is difficult to the point that most people can't finish them or maintain them. So your options are and always will be limited. The list goes on and on. These are just some of the things I ran into.
@@Deadener thank you, that speaks what i have in mind perfectly. I switched to unity because of those reasons. I really like using c++ for game development, i really do but ue4 c++ is basically hell. Unreal also has ton of features but a lot of them are somewhat abandoned. It's really sad because i want to like it but it's not likeable
@@Deadener I can't say about the rest, however you can mute Play Mode pretty easily. If you go into the Play Mode drop down menu > Advanced Settings > Play in Editor > Uncheck Enable Game Sound and that should mute the Play Mode.
This ended up on my recommendation list as I look in TH-cam for UE4 video's. Thumbs down.... Here's why You speak of switching off of "Unreal" to Unity around the time of Vanguard & also around the time when the Iphone was first taking off. That would date this experience around 2007. Now, correct me if I am wrong, when people say "Unreal" they think of Unreal Engine 4. and Unreal Engine 4 was not released until 2014. So what you are really referring to is "UDK," it's predecessor and not "Unreal." I have to point this out because your comparison is comparing a bus to a car and why you hate cars for the one time you rode on a bus. Regarding your comparisons, practically none of them hold true as for why Unity is better than Unreal. I say "practically" because when Unreal was first released it was a paid subscription program. You also had to pay royalty for when your game released (though I am not sure if this is still a thing.) Every reason you said why you like Unity is something Unreal can do as well. As for who did it first I am not sure. Point is.... Your miss-comparing two programs and confusing the people who watch this.
*A good game made in either engine should be indistinguishable from one another.* The level of fidelity and performance of either is only limited by the Development teams abilities and assets -- from what I can tell Ureal is easier to achieve a better visual result out of the box, but with experience Unity can match or beat that fidelity in my opinion. I use Unity because it's work flow fits my development style and coding background.
@@Donnirononon There is some good stuff on Stack Overflow about working with that. If anyone is interested: stackoverflow.com/questions/41330771/use-unity-api-from-another-thread-or-call-a-function-in-the-main-thread/41333540#41333540
@@WelshGuitarDude Idk if i mentioned but newer versions of unity go into the 100% right direction and as always its up to the dev but as always too with Unity ECS is not 100% complete (Thats why i froze my project), JObs not 100% complete last time i was in the engines, lot of stuff not complete or simply bugged. Thats why i simpy choose unreal, waaay less glueing and undesired behaviour but also a bit more complicated. Also that said as far as i know the multithreaded code in the jobs system can'T use unityapi as its not thread safe? Idk if that still holds true but it was one of the reasons i left it for projects that exceed very simplistic structures.
I appreciate the video but this being a game dev channel it unfortunately doesn't touch much on my use case: essentially I use UE4 just for 3D animation/film VFX. So if anyone can help me out: I have gotten some beautiful renders out of Unreal but am very dissatisfied with the interface and workflow, and strongly considering moving to Unity. The consensus seems to be that you can get the same render quality out of either, but in Unity it'll take more fidgeting. If that's the only difference, then I'll still switch because although in Unreal it might be easy to get a good look, EVERYTHING ELSE is fidgety. It's shocking how much it gets away with while staying an industry standard, I guess its user base just got used to things that are trivial in any other 3D software taking 4x the number of steps in Unreal. You can't make a procedural color ramp or procedurally color correct a texture without a bunch of channel splitting and trigonometry, you can't import an MP3 file and have it read as an audio file, you inexplicably can't import a LUT as a LUT and instead have to first export it as a PNG, there are sooo many little gotchas like that. The engine constantly feels like it's mocking you when you finally get something to work and then, when you get something else to work, the previous thing has stopped working, it's like a Rubik's cube from hell. There's no intuitive way to do version control, if you duplicate a map to make a new version and accidentally delete an asset because you don't want it in that particular version, say goodbye to the asset. There's just so much foundational stuff that feels half-baked, like they implemented the basic functionality and called it a day so they could move on to something that will look more exciting in the feature reel. I was also disappointed by the much-promoted community aspect: yeah they have a lot of users, but what good does it do when you're trying to do something basic and all the forum responses you find sound equally confused about it, or worse, say "Oh yeah that's a bug, we've been asking for a fix for three years"? The fact that even their official tutorials are 2 hours long while teaching very little seems to be another reflection of how needlessly complex they make everything. So again: if Unity will take me a bit more knob-turning to get something to look photorealistic but will not drive me completely insane trying to get basic things in place, then I will definitely switch. If anybody who has a similar use case to mine can comment on whether it's a good idea, I'm grateful.
he is talking about unreal that was made literally 19 years ago, in modern unreal you are in the editor watching your game all the time. i really don't know what he going on about with this weird comparison
I switched from Unity to UE4 and it is very worth it. Code compilation isn't as good as Unity's but it doesn't take long either. The first time you compile in that day, UE4 will do a full compile, which can take.... a long time. (There's probably a way to turn this off and just use older binaries but I haven't looked). Other than that, compiling really doesn't take more than several seconds. In my experience, not sure if this is a bug, 9/10 times after compiling, any Blueprints you have that are linked to your C++ code will just be dereferenced ("HOTRELOADED") and you have to restart the Editor to get it working again (only takes several seconds but is annoying). For this reason, I mainly do prototyping in BP then once I can confirm everything is working, I migrate it to C++. Finally, unlike Unity where if you have a bug in your code, you just get a red error in Unity. In UE4, if your code has a bug in it, it will just crash - sometimes with an indescriptive message, leaving you to figure it out on your own. But with much experience, you eventually start to know what causes these indescriptive errors.
@@fat-freeoliveoil6553 if you have a good PC , compilation time is less than 3 or 4 seconds and it is just for the first compilation, for next times , will be compiled immediately
Sounds like you should give UE4 a look. Because I'm not sure if you looked at it or not it does support mobile development. However, given the time your friend was starting to look into developing a mobile game Unreal was still a game engine for console and PC yet, mobile was still a very new thing. It's scripting language was UnrealScript. If you look at the time frame UE2 and UE2.5 were out at the time. It wasn't until UE3 that Epic started tinkering with the idea of mobile game development. UE3 had very basic support for it. Now though, UE3 is used for Mortal Kombat Mobile and Injustice Mobile but NetherRealm had to change UE3 drastically in order for it to work with mobile (I researched this and heard it on a live stream) I'm not being biased because a game engine is a game engine they all do the same thing, workflows are different and they will cater to individual people and companies. Going outside of Unity and Unreal, there are a lot of game engines out there that support mobile development now.
I tried to like UE4 as much as I could, but in the end it's not feasible. Build times for 10 ~ 30 seconds are too much if you need to explore the engine on your own because the documentation often says nothing about the purpose of methods and objects. The documentation in Unity is miles ahead, giving actual code samples for common use cases. Next problem is C++. While I think it's nicer to work with than C#, the tooling around it - particularly IDE support for UE4's C++ - is atrocious. I tried using Visual Studio, QtCreator and CLion, the result is always that you need to disable almost all code intel tools just for it to understand your code and not mark everything as error, autocomplete is really bad (and often wrong), syntax highlighting is extremely slow. Again this is particularly a problem because the documentation is also quite bad, so as a learner I rely on these features. Another big issue is engine stability - Unity freezes / crashes if I fabricate an infinity loop - I think that's bad enough. Unreal on the other hand crashes on every tiny occasion. Called two methods in wrong order? Crash. Null pointer? Crash. Division by zero? Crash. Extremely frustrating. The probably biggest issue I had with UE4 however is that it's just super complex. There's a million features in it, and you need to know all of them in order to understand one of them. I used GetRotation on my object, and this caused the collision detection for the object to break. I posted it as a bug report and got a reply that it was intentional. I don't know if that makes any sense because I don't know every little detail about the engine. The thing with Unity is that a gameobject with no components attached is really bland. In UE4 it has 10000000 settings that you need to be careful about, but in Unity, you only have Rotation, Scale and Position and all components you add are similarly simple. The modularity of the system may not be the most performant solution, but guess what, if I wanted a specialized engine, I'd just write my own. For anything else that Unity can handle (prototyping, small games) I'll use Unity.
@@Luxalpa My biggest issue with both Unity and Unreal both is they tend to over complicate things in their own way. So I use something else that doesn't take a million years to learn. About the UE4 Documentation, you may want to look deeper because there is quite a bit explained. Perhaps the frustration is causing you to refuse to learn it and look deeper? In any case, no game engine is perfect and they all have their own problems. Look at EA's Frostbite Engine. If developers wanted to make something other than a shooter, they would have to retool everything and basically bend the engine to a new will which has rendered nothing but problems. Looking at Anthem and Andromeda. There were plenty of developers for those games who complained about how hard Frostbite is to use and it can be frustrating.
Hey Jason, I have a question that drives me crazy and i couldn't find an answer in internet. How to change color of the collapsed XML doc comment ? Like it is saying Returns the number of lives remaining When it is collapsed i cannot change color of comment. Please help me.
From the time I spend with Unity, it's fun and and quick to prototype, but I feel it can get very messy as the project scales up. I also hate how the logic get split up into chunks attached to objects here and there. Like Flash scripts, or UE's blueprints. On the other hand, you've very right on the benefits of C#. It's super fast to write and compile, and is lovely. In the past few years I've been using it with XNA/FNA/MonoGame, and it works really well. I recommend it, especially for 2D games!
I checked it out not so long ago and his points still apply, which doesn't change your point, but if you have to constantly change engines because "the other now has this" then you probably should just focus on what that engine is good at (unreal seems to be better for fps and action based games while unity is better at puzzle, mobile and horror games)
You can expect some less performance in bigger pc projects, and you may have to put more work to make the rendering look good. Other than that, Unity's architecture is cleaner and much easier to understand.
Let me say something for a man who used both of two engine server years. 1.Unity is easy to deploy on mobile platform. 2.C# is easier and clear to C++. 3.UE4 4.24 had speed up the code compile. 4.There are much more people to use unity than ue4, and you can solve problem faster. 5. unreal is free now. The last but not least, I use ue4 now for the higher salary and greater game.
Pin me, this was a mistake, you regret it now dontcha?
Sorry, I hope I didn't upset you, f unity I'm sorry they did this to you
Nope. Plenty of things I regret, but using unity for the last 10yrs isn't one of them.
@@Unity3dCollege ok love you I hope you're ok
What do you think about unity's new plan to destroy them self?
I am learning unity now since few months do you recommend to switch to unreal, i have a bad feeling with unity to be honest, i don't think they will change now because of little bit shitstorm?
The initial announcement was a complete mess and that broke a lot of trust (especially by trying to charge for installs of existing games after 2024 and proposing their own non-transparent way of tracking "initial engagements"), so they deserved every bit of the massive backlash for that.
But I think people, especially on youtube, are blowing this stuff completely out of the water. The Godot community in particular seems to be extremely condescending towards Unity users at this point. And while Unity's management can't be trusted, I do still trust Unity's community (even more so now) and it honestly just showed how much power the community still has (btw, Godot's "management" apparently doesn't seem to be so great either, judging by several videos and threads on their subreddit - the same only different in my opinion).
The time spent learning Unity and developing systems isn't lost either and can be transfered to most other engines very well. And I think transitioning from Unity to any other big engines is also way easier than jumping from Godot to Unreal for example. It always takes some time to get used to new concepts, syntax/APIs and tools, or rebuild your own tools in a new language, but people's claims on this matter are often a comical overexaggeration in my opinion. Like, I just saw one person comment that their "14 years of game development experience went down the drain".. If this is true then I don't know what that person did for the last 14 years.
Unity as a product hasn't changed and I think the new pricing model is actually still very fair (even fairer now for small indies and hobbyists btw).
And even if it becomes a completely unusable mess in the future I don't think the time was wasted at all and you can always switch to another engine then.
Also keep in mind that an engine is just a tool. Use the tool that fits your own priorities, use case/requirements, etc best and don't make it your personality.
I'm a 70 year old retiree, whose last job was building Windows apps in C#. I get bored nowadays and want to continue doing something to keep my brain happy, so I decided to look into gaming engines, and see if that would be fun. I got Unreal first and it looked cool and easy, but the C++ requirement kind of bothered me. I coded in C back in the late 70's, so I have thoroughly enjoyed C# and not having to manage memory, etc. Then I got Unity and saw the C# instead of C++ and that was a big plus. So after playing with the interface a bit, I have definitely decided to go with Unity now. This video was the first I have watched of yours, and I wanted to commend you for a very instructional video without a lot of rambling or repetition. I like your style, and subscribed after watching this one. I will be checking out a lot more as time permits, and look forward to learning more of Unity from you. Thanks!
Unreal Engine doesn't really require you to manage memory. it does use pointers and references, which is a lot more accurate and flexible than Unity, but it does its own garbage collection.
Wait, how can you be 70 years old and not know that C doesn't require memory management for game programming? 😆 You predate ALGOL! You're one of the lucky few who remembers back when software was actually fast and simple.
You can allocate all the memory your game needs right at the beginning and just take what you need off the top for anything that lasts the lifetime of the game. Let the OS clean it up, or deallocate the entire block at shutdown if you're feeling particularly thorough. For the per frame stuff, use a bump allocator to grab what you need, and just reset the pointer at the end of the frame in the main loop (so it isn't physically possible to forget). This covers over 90% of all memory needs and you almost never have to worry about memory management. For the other 10% you can either redesign it to use the bump allocator, or make a simple general purpose allocator that works custom for your engine. Although my engine is about half complete and I have never needed anything beyond the bump allocator. It's much more maintainable and never has memory leaks because there isn't any to leak!
Any objections I've ever heard to this method (so far) have all been dodging the actual issues/flame war type distractions. My entire engine runs using it, I've never had any memory leaks, and it's dead simple to use. I didn't invent it, but it works, and it's better than garbage collection for sure. With garbage collection there is way more memory management going on in the background, pointlessly allocating and deallocating because the language runtime obfuscates the fact that memory is a finite resource which takes time and space. Code becomes slower because it was designed to be sloppy enough to run on a garbage collected system, rather than the programmer thinking about only what the game needs to run in a performant manner.
Anyway, I learned all this from your generation of superior programming practices. It just makes me sad that software has gone so far downhill ever since I was born at the dawn of C++ and all the orientation craze... 😟
Awesome John, hope your game development journey is going well!
@@totheknee now this makes me want to learn C lol
@@totheknee well said and if you already know that, it's no problem using it. Devils advocate point#1: learning anything you don't already know that you can avoid is good because ... when you are 70 the list of things you want to learn that are more important than that by about 200 items. So learn those first. 2nd of all the GC cost is there, but it's about 1% unless you screw up major, so optimizing elsewhere will be what needs to be done, the GC work would have been a big deal on a 90s system, not today at all. And the payoff not having to worry about it, if there is just one allocation bug you are already money behind. That's I guess the intuition you get after 40-50 years in IT!! In any case, any GC perf problems you can easy fix with an object pool with is about the same complexity as the old malloc/free without the risks. BTW: if you are ever forced to use DotNet with GC, don't overlook the free "microsoft CLR profiler" - it literally wipes away the obfuscation that GC abstracts. You would love it (but you probably won't need it either!)
your chair makes you look like a medieval priest with a hood on!
Yo you are right
How do I unsee this comment?
He looks like Palpatine. There's also the Death Star on the wall behind him.
@@Gbuljba how do I unsee THIS comment?!!! I can't take him seriously now.
Lol lol lol
"When C++ is your hammer, every problem looks like a thumb."
C++ is not that bad , i will choose c++ over c# , i care about performance but , if you want ease of use then c# is the right option.
@@sps014 I didnt use c++ ver much tbh. if i got into programming earlier in life i would want to work with c++. At least spend enough time to have some experience. But i think it's too late right now. I have used some c and c++ in college though and i think it's enough time for me to able to use this quote :D
@@justaguy7532 it's not even that different to c# it's pretty easy to go from c# to c++
@@Chris_t0 It's not that easy for most to go from C# to C++. C# does not have memory management and pointers. Which is what most typically struggle with understanding and then applying.
Don't forget that the Unity engine is written in C++
Given today's announcement of Unity's pricing model update, this aged well 🤣
Unity is cool and all, but have you tried making your games in assembly? MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE
true, if you don't write games in assembly, you're just a poser anyway
But the problem with assembly is portability. Perhaps a LLVM-engine?
Maximum performance would probably still be using C or C++. Doing better than compilers that have been fine tuned for decades to produce optimized assembly is very VERY hard!
Portability is also better.
@@KilgoreOnDrugs spoken like a true noob
@@Salmontres lol, you almost had me :D
Coming from enterprise software background (with C# being my main dayjob language) I found out that Unreal seems to fit me much better. Compared to Unity, Unreal puts you on rails with how you work and how you organize the project, and to do anything weird or unusual you have to actively fight against the engine - while it can be problem at times (when you know what you're doing), it's also a feedback to stop and thing twice if there's no better way of getting same result. Also, documentation, where Unreal might be lacking in tutorials, it does catch up in engine documentation (both docs and sources availability/comments) - lack of exhaustive detailed docs was my main issue trying to get stuff working in Unity, especially when experimenting with DOTS.
In the end - matter of personal preference, expectations and what anyone finds comfortable. Whole Unity vs Unreal debate looks awfully similar to React vs Angular in web world - both are great, both have their own strenghts, and both differ mainly in philosophy of giving creator full freedom vs giving creator well designed, polished framework to build in.
What's an example of fighting against the engine? And were you referring to Unity or Unreal about having full freedom?
@@rubenpartono from how I understand it ("Compared to Unity, Unreal puts you on rails") they refer to Unity having full freedom. In which case I would agree.
I haven't used Unreal since UE4 but tried to get into Godot recently and there is usually 1 concept to grasp for virtually everything (e.g. the node/scene system) and 1 "true" way of doing something, while every other way you try will direct you back on the intended tracks via warnings. Super useful if you have no idea what you are doing and it makes it sound really good/easy on paper but, to me at least, Godot feels rather limiting because of this and it makes the workflow cumbersome, especially when it comes to programming.
I see the same attitude across all of my hobbies; motorcycles, mountain bikes, game programming... There's always a group that thinks you HAVE to use the highest performance "thing" no matter what and everything else is garbage. For 99.99% of us out there Unity and C# is never going to hold us back. We're talking 1 or 2-man (and woman) indie games here... we're not breaking new ground. It's about having the right tool for the job. It's not a pissing contest.
This, you don't get to worry about performance issues until you can ship a game.
@@La0bouchere once it has been years into development and you find out that you cant achieve a modicum of performance for the game you set up to do because of systematic issues in your engine that are beyond you ability to change because you neither have time, money or the ability to do ... is a bit too late tough
believe me, i read postmortems of quite few games where this exact thing has happened, i would love to point you to those but i left game making for almost a decade now and i really don't remember, but one i do recall that went somewhat like this i think was Mortal Kombat 9 where they set up to use unreal engine 3 and midway thru development realized that the engine just couldn't give the things that a fighting game needed. and had to dive into the engine code and rewrite large parts of it.
Except you're wasting resources of the end user not to mention all the bloat that comes with Unity. Your attitude is why we have simple indie games with far worse performance than AAA games. Lazy, incompetent programmers using bloated middleware. That's also why, any time i see the Made with Unity logo, it's a hard pass on buying the game
lemme add something.
if you making games as a hobby and to have fun, then that's fine. keep doing it however you want. power to you!
but if you think "1 or 2-man (and woman) indie games here... we're not breaking new ground." will be commercially successful...
well, i have to tell you that if you game is similar to something that already exists, then the odds are that people will keep playing what already exists, even if your game is better. your little retro game will be checked up by the people who like that stuff, they will play it once, and then go back to whatever 90's arcade/console/pc game you based it on.
i seen it too many times:
-did you guys seen that new beat 'em up
-yeah it is very good
**goes back to play some 90's arcade beat em up that was not good even back then**
same with RPGs, action games, sim, and so...
the era where you could just pull a shovel knight are over. steam is filled to the brim and ripping at the seams with games that are good but not "breaking new ground" that are no one will ever hear about. and don't get me started on all the bad ones.
because guess what? IT IS a pissing contest!
the "right tool for the job" will get you something that anyone else could have done it.
and unless you doing something no one ever seen before, no one will give any fuck
@@jn2002dk lol what, several classic games have been made with Unity that run just fine and you're missing out hard. Have fun missing out on Hollow Knight and Return of the Obra Dinn because of some preconceived notion.
I've worked with both. Honestly the advice I have given in the past is: which engine to use depends on the scope of your game. The closer your project is to being some small smart phone game with only one level/scene, the better Unity will be for your project. The closer your project is to being a big AAA game with millions of dollars spent just on marketing, the better Unreal will be for your project. Both engines are completely capable of delivering both of those projects, but the way the editors are structured and set up shows that Unity is more focused on smaller projects while Unreal is more focused on larger ones.
The more complex systems are more time-consuming to set up within Unity, while simple ones can be set up much faster. A character with two or three animations is faster to set up in Unity, but if that grows to a larger complex system with dozens of different states and twice as many transitions, Unity's default interface becomes harder to read/follow/change and you'll wish for Unreal's animation tree.
With Unity you have to add each scene to a list of scenes the game can load, which just becomes an extra step you have to go through with every level in your game. But you can also build a completely standalone game within a single scene without having to ever set anything up or even giving that level a special name so the engine knows to start there.
Unity works better for people who are just starting, solo developers, and rapid prototyping. If you just want to make games for fun or work in a small studio, choose Unity. But if you want to work for a big AAA company, you might want to practice using Unreal. But even saying that, there is a LOT of carryover between the two.
That's my take on it.
Nice to see someone with actual experience state their opinion. The only thing I would contest a bit, is that I think Unity is fine for up to medium-sized projects. But you're right, for large or massive projects that have a large studio support system, Unreal takes the helm. It's what it was designed for.
So many beginners only understand how pretty those particle shaders look, and how Unreal makes their favorite AAA games, so they fall into the trap without realizing how horrible Unreal is for learning, solo devs, and small teams. I'd further highlight your statement about crossover, as it's incredibly important. For any beginner out there, learning Unity will NOT be a waste of your time. You can always switch later, and you'll be better armed to face the nightmare of usability that is Unreal.
Beautifully stated.
@@Deadener I agree that Unity is easier to learn than UE but, at the same time, I think that once you get the basic concepts in UE, it is not much harder than Unity. Have in mind that UE has a lot more functions than Unity has not and that makes the engine more complex. But with Unity you end up buying or developing yourself a lot of assets to compensate the fact that important things are missing or are too basic. So with Unity, you have learn Unity + n assets which you have to integrate yourself.
@@trueh "Have in mind that UE have more feature than Unity":
Which ? They both offer the same product, or more so, they both fill the same needs: a physical and rendering engine scriptable through their APIs and editors.
Physics, lighting, networking, animation, etc... are not engine-specific.
The only difference between the two is how much they expose their APIs (e.g: level), how they design interactions within their respective engines and what scripting languages they choose to support.
Now speaking about performances:
It doesn't matter that UE is a C++ scriptable. You're not running C++ code, the engine is, and the engine's performances depends on how optimized it is.
Unity is not using traditional C#, they use the Mono project implementation of it. And they even transpile it too ! Never thought it was weird you could compile your project cross platform and even into JavaScript from a .NET codebase ?
Realistically it's a matter of preferences. I personally use Godot for its licensing and community drive.
@@charlesm.2604 Do not missunderstand me. I'm using Unity most of the time because as a solo developer it is more convenient. I have not used Unreal for a while, but more than extra high-level features it provides more options to choose from when it comes to use each feature. If we stay at a high level, you could say that there is no difference between Unreal and let's say LibGDX which is not really true. For instance, both systems have animation based on state machines, but Unreal has also Animation Blueprints, Morph Targets, Animation Budget Allocations, ... Every of them could be replicated in Unity by implementing your own code, but you have to do it yourself. Unreal provides a full framework to create your games and manage their state, including multiplayer which Unity does not. The shader editor in Unity is very basic compared to the material editor in Unreal. Integration with USD and Alembic in Unreal is much more complete that in Unity. Volumentric clouds and stmospheric effects are not available in Unity by default. Unreal's terrain tools are also a little bit better than Unity's. Unreal has a water system included which Unity does not. UDIM support and Virtual Texturing in Unity is basically unfinished. Runtime GI in Unity is deprecated without a viable replacement in their roadmap. Advanced shading models (subsurface scattering, skin, hair, ...) are not available in Unity by default. Unity does not have a destruction system. Unity does not have behaviour trees to handle IA by default. Pixel streaming is not available in Unity. Using C++ can make a slight difference, but let's be realistic. Most of the optimisation problems are going to arise in the GPU and not in the CPU, so it is not a big difference between using C++ and C#. Transpilation in Unity using IL2CPP is equivalent to transpilation in Unreal when you are using Blueprints and it is not as effective as developing your code in C++. You can see the C++ code produced by IL2CPP and, as expected, it is clear that it is not as optimized as hand-made code. When it comes to rendering quality, it depends on what you are trying to do. If the look of your game is realistic, the implementation of lightning in Unreal is actually better. Low.poly games or stylized games will not probably benefit from it. I will not enter in the new features of UE5 regarding lightning, world streaming, and the general asset management workflow, which look really nice but I have not tested myself. The thing is: are you really going to use all advanced features that Unreal provides in your game? I not, Unity, or Godot are very good options to avoid the extra complexity of Unreal. If the answer if yes, you can save time by using Unreal and having all of them integrated and tested instead of developing or integrations third-party assets into your development.
Let's face it, it boils down to "we like it more". The tools don't make the game, you can do anything with any tool these days. It always boils down to your own personal preference.
i tried to switch from unreal to unity thinking it would be easier, but almost every tutorial i found was slightly incompatible with the latest unity, and then the different systems like HDRP/URP...
@Erol Demirci couldn't agree more
@Erol Demirci Incredible point. Unity does not make games, Epic does, using their own engine. Why hasn't Unity made a game themselves?
@Erol Demirci Auto generated lods will never be half as efficient as making your own. :P Seems like you have a chip on your shoulder about unity and that's fine.. i guess. A lot of the issues you describe I ran into as well. 12 years ago when I was learning how to use it. Unreal has a stronger out of the box UX, I'll give you that but the problem with that is 90% of the indy games that come out with it are horribly unoptimized. If you are actually making games for money you need to start on the low end of physics and graphics and tweak your way up.
I've also been using Unreal since the original Unreal game came out. If you are simply training to be a cog in the AAA wheel then by all means go for Unreal. AAA and Epic has a loooong history that was decades in the making and it has little to do with the quality of the engine and more to do with "it's what our pipeline is already built to handle. and those tech demos make our board of directors cool with giving us a giant budget." Similar to autodesk dominating the CG industry overall. Modo or Houdini can run circles around pretty much anything Autodesk but maya is still the core in most CG pipelines...changing and re-training would be far too costly.
More and more new studios are adopting Unity for a massive list of reasons.
Thousands of physics based games have been made with Unity so the physics is on you. If you want to have a graphics pissing match then Escape From Tarkov, Trinity, Firewatch and Hollow Knight would like to have a word. A few devs even offer a virtual texturing solution for unity that makes unreal's texture streaming look downright archaic.
Unity is good enough to make bad games by inexperienced devs and good enough to make widely regarded masterpieces by small independent teams. The editor functionality is open enough as well that if you need a tool and it doesn't already exist you can probably make it yourself.
And with that.. Unreal DOESNT suck. It's not for me and I have enough extensions for Unity that i'm years ahead of Unreal for tech. Engine wars don't have to be a zero sum game. The more engines you are experienced with the better designer you will be even if you only stick to one. It never hurts to know multiple solutions to the same problem.
Unreal is a carefully built Italian luxury car with automatic transmission. Unity is the scrappy manually controlled frankenstein, that you aren't afraid to take out in a snow storm or a dirt rally... .and it can go just as fast as the lambo.
@@pogo575 Good balanced view. Also worth mentioning UE4 has a very specific workflow and not all game genres work well with it. You will probably end up working against the grain of the engine if its not in a FPS fashion. After all Unreal Engine was built on a history of shooters. CryEngine had a very similar complaint. I'm not sure if I hear of such workflow problems with Unity.
Unity is transitioning to Havok I believe so that might clear up physics issues.
UE4 does amazing stuff out of the box, but personally I don't know if i'd use it for my own project if I don't enjoy the workflow. C++ in UE4 gets even more complex because it does have a GC.
But yeah at the end of the day people use what they like. Engine wars should be about really delving into the fine details of how engines work and what they offer, not make an ego battle trying to make the other person submit to an opinion of what is better.
These 'went from Unreal to Unity and won't go back' vids are almost always from a programmer perspective. As a art-centric developer (game/cinematics/level design and VFX) for the last 20+ years myself using both Unreal and Unity on a daily basis, and from a content creator standpoint, there's no way I'd pick Unity over Unreal. As a non-programmer I have made entire games myself in blueprints. I can create and iterate on game mechanics myself easily. I have so many native tools (UMG, material editor, cascade/niagara, matinee/sequencer, animation (esp with Control Rig now), blueprints, etc. etc.) that I don't have to rely on engineers for, it frees up my coders to work on the backend stuff and higher level graphics and mechanics. Then after I'm happy with a given mechanic we decide whether to use it as-is, nativize it, or recreate in C++, but we have lots of options. And the better I've gotten with blueprints the more we just use that stuff.
Meanwhile on my Unity projects, we have to rely on the traditional methods (like back in the Unreal 1/2/3 days), and there's always a bottleneck. Sure, I've gotten better at using Unity, but I'm limited by not knowing C#, and I just don't have the brain to be a coder (though blueprints as a visual interface has completely changed the game for me... I can -think- in blueprints when I'm away from the PC).
That said, sure, Unity should be considered for smaller projects that need mobile support. It's fine for stuff like that.
Weird if you can program a game in blueprints you should be able to handle coding.
But I agree with you Unity is just not the way to go, the workflow is not unified like Unreal.
Unreal has a much higher learning curve though.
@@TheReferrer72 I feel like it's the visual component that really clicked for me in blueprints. That said, I can now understand written code a LOT better when I'm looking at it. Also, I have been working with Unreal since 1.0, the very beginning, so have some built-in familiarity with it. But the shift from 3 to 4 was massive for me and took a while (still is really) for me to be able to really express myself in it. And, to be fair, Epic had an almost 20 year head-start on Unity.
Also I know Unity has some plugins that imitate blueprint or object-oriented scripting, so at some point I'm sure I'll give them a crack. I do actually like their VFX Graph system, as it reminds me a bit of Niagara. The key for me is being able to help out my Unity projects more like what I can do when it's UE4, and I'm not there yet.
@@DavidWKimber Unity recently bought Bolt, a visual script editor and made it free. So technically, Unity now has a free blueprint system. It just might require a separate download, and that's it.
@@onurereren That's another gripe I have about Unity, these additions seem just an after thought.
@@TheReferrer72 I see them as adapting to their environment and competitors' solutions, which is better than nothing.
I also made the jump from Unreal to Unity after about 10 years. No regrets, the openness of Unity is unmatched. The majority of my time spent in Unreal was spent fighting with their proprietary systems to work the way I want. Unity makes no assumptions and allows you to control almost everything right from the start. Being a fan of procedural generation, Unreal really lacks the tools for generating meshes/collision/navigation at runtime. Literally spent years trying to do in Unreal what I did in months in Unity.
I get asked this question sometimes and depending on who's asking, it can be tough to give them a satisfying answer. Sidenote: I'm starting to dive into more intermediate programming in Unity and your channel has been very helpful for me to understand intermediate concepts. Thanks for this!
I really love your videos because we seem to have a very similar career experience, even tangentially working on the same games in the past. You're an inspiration for someone like me who is an industry veteran but has been (in my case) perpetually interested in exploring independent projects.
I love Richard Feynman
Why don't you throw a few more $5 words in there. We might all think you're smart.
Tangentially...lulz
@@Rehd66 If you think that "tangentially" is one a' them fancy-talk words, I suggest you reevaluate your life. I hope "reevaluate" wasn't too fancy of a word, either.
@@vargonian This was the exact answer I expected from someone who uses words like tangentially on TH-cam comments. Thanks.
@@Rehd66 Either you're a teenager, which would make your idiocy understandable, or you're an adult, which reflects more poorly on society. Let's hope it's the former.
(As always, if there are any words that caused confusion in this comment, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll break them down for you.)
Nice video man. I haven't used other game engines yet. Unity is my first pick when I decided to make a game. I agreed that Unity can speed the iteration process. Thanks for sharing. :)
I like your take on this. Its interesting and I actually started out with Unity 4/5. It offers easier and faster access to game development and I still dabble in it. Recently however I've focused on UE4 and the online community is pretty amazing, weekly live broadcasts and yes, C++ is tougher but I've not actually needed C++ for the last year because I can use Blueprint for what I need.
I happen to like C++ which challenged me and is pretty much what I use daily except when doing Web development using c# which feels rote.(I bounce around from VR to Web to databases to native desktop applications)
Both are excellent products but to me Unreal Engine feels more professional and intuitive. For mobile development however, Unity all the way.
@Spencer Parkin there's nothing lazy about using BP other than on the surface it does seem easier, but yes you are right. BP can be a pain but it's also great for basic things too like input. If you find a balance between C++ and BP, then it can really speed up development. It really is down to personal preference.
C# was the first language I learned because of Unity. No other language I've learned since compares to it for me. I love how it is all set up, I love how safe everything is, how smoothly everything connects together, and how I'm never just blindly entering in things hoping I don't misspell words.
If anything C# in Unity probably spoiled me because I got so used to the absolutely immediate feedback of typing anything wrong or trying to do anything that wouldn't work.
Try C++ you will forget everything
Same here. I first started with a book on Unity a long time, obviously way outdated now. But the book taught both C# and JavaScript in its examples. And knowing absolutely nothing about programing, C# just looked "better" to me, made more sense. And there's not a single thing I haven't been able to accomplish with it and Unity in my time since.
2019: Why I switched from unreal to unity and won't go back
2020: Why I switched from unity to Godot and won't go back
why I switched TH-cam comments off
Gotdot is ridiculouis for any SERIOUS landscape based game,,,2d ya maybe....I see no reason to learn yet another engine when unity or unreal has you covered from head to toe.
@@IamNeighborlee That what people used to said about blender3d in 3d Modeling and animation stuff 12 years ago, as i recall. Godot is not ready for now, but the development is quite good.
@@milanstevic8424 lolol
comments like these make it feels like godot fans became a joke. love the engine but worst thing is it has a worse cult culture like blender. It is lightyears away from unity, and unity is levels below ue4.
Having fresh experience with newest versions of both engine I'd say his comments are still valid.
Especially the build time; blueprints and the likes does not change the fact that for any feature that is not in Fortenite you'll have to mod the engine and pray for the it to compiler not to return an error. Even simple things like custom shaders you'll have to either hack in a new material node that does the job or you'll have to put your dirty fingers on the 3d engine and likely break it. Not to speak at all about multi threading or compute on the GPU.
Disclaimer: I'm from Denmark.
Wow this video aged poorly
Get ready to be bankrupt
It was the exact other way around in my case, interesting to hear your opinion.
Same
^This
I've been learning front end web dev stuff for almost a year and was thinking about starting C++ as I'm not a total beginner to coding, and I wanted the higher framerate, but your video has convinced me to do otherwise. Thanks!
C# would def be more appropriate then because it also gives you an edge if you eventually want to do native iOS development!
I love c++ and blueprints in UE4. And c# in Unity too. Blueprints is ingenuis, easy and comfortable. C++ is awesome. C# is practical and fast.
exactly
c++ blows .
so if i get a headache from blueprints i shouldn't try learning to code at all should I?
@@jonjon3829 Coding reshapes your brain. Our brains are not logic engines, coding requires logical reasoning AND demands no intuition.
When you think you know your start point say 1. You know the outcome needs to be 4. intuitively. However in coding you need to know the steps of HOW to get from 1-> 4 and you are unused to working these steps out having relied upon intuition from pattern recognition (how our brains actually work) to provide the answer
By learning to code, no matter how painful, you will reshape your brain for the better. On a plus side you will stop voting democrats and supporting Socialism as you will become sentient.
@@TheBelrick I do mechanical engineering, but I almost failed the coding part and the electrical part. I tried picking coding up many times to no avail. I kinda understand things when I follow some basic arduino tutorials, but writing anything myself? nah.
Never voted democrats, I ain't crazy, yet.
I switched to Unreal for the entire reason of "free Megascans."
I prefer the workflow in Unity but Megascans are a godsend.
And let's not forget about Metahumans.
You like realism !
- Why I switched from Unreal to Unity
- Why I switched from Unity to GoDot
- Why I switched from GoDot to Gamemaker studio
- Why I switched from Gamemaker studio to Scratch
- Why I switched from Scratch to making deserts
Why I switched from Desserts to Chips Manufacturing and won't go back(Even for Pringles)
You forgot Dreams.
Glad you got a chance to work on Vanguard. I miss that game, also great to hear that you working on Pantheon too!
The dark hoody against the chair occasionally makes it look like you’re wearing a Sith Lord hooded cloak
I upgraded a Unity project from Unity 4 to Unity 2019. It took me a couple weeks of my spare time to get everything working properly, but it was possible.
That being said, the whole reason I made such a huge jump was because much earlier I had tried to update it from Unity 4 to Unity 5.3 and I ran into odd issues that no one could help me with, so I abandoned trying to update it.
something a lot of these videos are missing is Unreal Engine Blueprint. the unreal engine's take on visual scripting in Blueprints is so amazing, that not only you could do nearly everything you want in it (especially if your game is not AAA), but also it teaches you a lot of Programming concept in ways you could have wasted so much time in coding. and It's much easier and faster to do something in it, rather than code. Honestly I've been developing small games, VR projects in Unreal for 2 years, and only was forced to write one page of C++ code.
is there a big performance impact with Blueprints instead of c++?
Ho Lee shit Einstein like you just invented a way to make AAA shit w/o coding omfg i just need BLUEPRINTS omfg why oh why didnt anyone just say so
I'm wondering... with all of the changes over the past couple of years is this still true for you? I would love to see this video revisited with all of the pricing changes, royalty changes, UE5, etc. :)
You should check out UE4 Jason, your title is quite misleading.
Personally I think the royalty business model is more preferable, because this motivates the company to
make their users succeed. For instance by giving out grants and providing free stuff for developers. Doing livestreams, hosting gamejams.. etc
One of the issues I have with Unity at the moment is that all new features seem half baked,
LWRP is great, but srp batching is broken on all new versions, no dynamic point light shadows, no ambient occlusion, camera layering.... Even tough they call it production ready.
Aside from that, one of the bigger differences in terms of tech is that Epic Games actually develops games, and not demos. This means the tech they develop is battle-tested.
Don't get me wrong, Unity is currently my main engine since I'm working on a lightweight project as my main project.
But I've developed a love-hate relationship with it.
There's plenty of high quality games made with Unity, so I fail to see why compare it like that to what you say is a more battle tested engine
@@why7893 My point is developers are more likely going to run into issues then the engine devs.
This is because they don't make games themselves. This also means they will not see any shortages of the tooling outside of the
scope of the projects they do in-house. Unless they get feedback and actually act on the feedback, which is more likely a slower process.
@@why7893 Also results don't really tell you much about the process of getting to that result. One can make a beautiful painting by just using MS Paint,
but that doesn't mean painting it was a pleasing experience for the painter. It mainly tells you it can be done.
For clarity I'm not saying Unity is like Ms Paint, it's just a metaphor to say that results don't really tell you much about the process.
@@AlexMeesters I don't think the title is misleading, but those are some valid concerns. I don't use the newest features for games I want to have more stable/production ready. I like that Unity introduces so many new and great features, but some of them are not quite there yet and it might still take a while. Having checked out UE4 and Unity, I probably wouldn't go back to UE4 though.
@@fmproductions913 The title is misleading. There is a huge and massive different between UE4 and previous versions such as UE3 or UE2. UE4 is way better and stable. Unreal engine 4 and Epic provide a lot of features and functionality. They also give away millions of dollars in game assets and just recently purchased Quixel and there products such as Megascans, giving UE4 users thousands of free triple a quality textures.
I love EQ2. It's by far my favorite MMORPG. I'm playing it at the moment and really excited for the upcoming expansion.
I've used both Unity and UE4, my preference is UE4 but they're both great and it's awesome to live in a time when getting your hands on a game engine is so easy and low cost. I like that the source code for UE4 is available, that was kind of the biggest thing for me.
In unreal engine. You can create a C++ class very easily and then interface that to blueprints so that 95% of your code is blueprints with almost no performance loss which is incredibly easy for beginners and removes the "tick bottleneck" that blueprints have. And you can also create interactive displays in Unreal in the same way you can with Unity. Although its probably a bit easier to do a lot of web type things in Unity but I only say that because I haven't found a nice way to quickly build or import interfaces in Unreal (I have also not tried looking very hard either). Unreal engine has web socket communication to blueprints and python plus pixel streaming so I don't think there is going to be a huge amount that Unity can do better than Unreal or vice versa in that space.
Interesting... we're considering switching to Unreal for our next project (mainly because the artists have a strong preference for Unreal, but also because many core features in Unity (like lightmapping) are buggy and just not production quality).
Iteration times are killer with our current Unity project. 20 seconds to recompile, 10 seconds to "play", minutes to compile a shader. I had heard Unreal was better in this regard, but maybe not?
Lighting is buggy, there's no questions about it, but you can get really good results both in Unity and UE4. In terms of recompiles a bare minimum project in UE is already slow when it comes to moving assets around, modifying materials and so on. Maybe as a project grows bigger the times get similar, haven't yet reached that size to get the speed as bad as UE4.
For my project those numbers are even worse.
My company started with Unity and left for UE4 pretty early on because the artists loved it (I'm a programmer) and I would never touch Unity again. It takes ~10 seconds to compile a C++ project, if you are using blueprints it takes under a second. Compiling shaders is done when you open a project for the very first time which can take a few minutes but after that it only compiles changed or new shaders. When "playing" it can take a few seconds if it's a complex scene but mostly 1-2 seconds to start. Overall UE4 is a heavier engine but the productivity and performance you get out of it in return far exceeds what Unity offers.
Jason is talking about Unreal from UE2/UE3 and not UE4 so more than half of the problems mentioned haven't been relevant since 2015.
@Kyles Isler The Problem is the FILE SIZES when it comes to textures... The file sizes are too big. UE4 creates too many files.
When it comes to choosing a game engine for indie game development, it's about two things - what is accessible, and what platform it ships to. In your own case, originally only Unity could ship to the platform (mobile) that you needed it to.
Now that most game engines can ship to most major platforms, I think in 2020 it is about accessibility - which engine is the most accessible (price/barrier to entry) and has the most accessible community/support/tutorials.
When I was developing using UE4 in 2017 it felt like pulling teeth - I couldn't find the right documentation for what I needed and all of the questions on forums online were orphans. Looking for help felt like shouting into a black void - unless you were lucky enough to be working alongside someone who had used UE4 before (I was not), it felt like I was developing in the dark in isolation.
I decided last year to make the jump to Unity for a new project I wanted to work on. It was daunting, as I'd only ever dabbled with it before in contrast to having developed a full working game demo over the course of a year in UE4. It has been so much better for my development though, I can't describe how different the experience has been. My husband and I just work on the project ourselves, so to have such an active community in Unity with thousands of tutorials online has been indispensable.
I know there are always caveats and compromises, and when looking at a AAA game with next-gen graphics and physics engines, UE4 may be a better tool for the job. It handles memory better (IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING, I'm guilty of memory leaks oops), and already has an incredible reputation for handling graphics and shaders.
However, I know for a fact that if I'd have started my new project in UE4 again, I wouldn't have made it as far as I have with Unity. I only have a handful of hours I can work on game development these days when I have a full-time job and family commitments, so I don't want to spend that precious time hitting my head against the wall with constant development blockers because of a lack of widely available information or a community that sometimes feels a bit gatekeepy to beginners. (as of 2017, it may be different now)
Working in C# is also easier than C++ for newcomers. For advanced users, It's easier to write clean code in C# because you can focus less on memory management and more on your architecture. It's also object-oriented so anyone with experience working in other object-oriented languages (like Java) can pretty much transfer their knowledge directly and start development immediately - my husband uses Java for his day job so this is exactly what happened for him.
TLDR - better to have a finished game which is slightly less optimised than to have a dozen started projects, or to have been discouraged and to have dropped development altogether because of the number of barriers you face when starting development alone in a new game engine.
Same here, I've been put off of UE due to the lack of information, documentation and tutorials that go a bit deeper.
It didn't help that I only ever worked with Java and tiny amounts of Python / C. Unity for me was the bestest choice for the stuff I want/-ed to do.
Very useful comment. Where I can find your games?
Just wanted to say, whenever I want to learn something unity related I make you my first point of call. Something about the way you explain things click with me, usually I'm more of a do-to-learn guy, takes me a while to understand things but I find that listening to you gives me more understanding before I do something, I go into my next idea with a better overall idea of how I want to approach things
I agree, my day job is C++, and switching to C# for my games helps keep my hobby fun.
Hey, Jason! Just wanted to let you know I watched a lot of your "Unity3Dcollege" channel tutorials while I was attending the Game Design Bachelor's degree for Full Sail University (very helpful, especially the "health bars quick clean and simple" ). I graduated on 26th of November 2019. Thank you for the free tutorial videos, they're easy to follow along with and understand. You explain clearly what you need to do in Visual Studios and in Unity. Hopefully you continue to keep making these easy to follow videos for current and upcoming coders!
You should preface this is a decition made long ago, and doesn't really stack up to todays options.
Recompile times are better these days. UE4 have blueprints which doesn't require recompile at all, and I think most mainstream titles could probably stick to them with minimal C++ needed.
And then theres source code. Now I'm not the kinda guy who gonna roll with his own branch, but I'd gladly offer all the tutorials in the world for the ability to actually see whats going on within the engine itself.
I still use Unity for my small mobile project, as I haven't been able to reach the same performance on lower end devices in UE. Its a great engine, but its not hard to see why some people are pining for something else.
I enjoy watching all of your videos. They're very realistic and real world and I learn a lot from each of them in regards to the game development world and programming too. Thanks for the help!
If you re strictly speaking about learning experience from a beginners perspective I would say unity teaches you more. Most unreal engine users never touch a line of c++ and use blueprints for their projects which is mostly a black box, however I feel like unity teaches you more about making robust and scalable systems for your games. Blueprint can get really messy especially with arithmetic operations. However, i also think unity is very confusing with multiple render pipelines and some features not seemingly finished.
@Jason.... still not wanting to go back to Unreal? I switched the other way and will be finishing my first game with Unreal.... curious if this is still your position.
I love the new features in UE5 but I doubt the build times for code has improved much.
@@markcooke4866 I will say the build times aren't ideal. I'll be offloading builds to other machines while I do stuff so it's not the end all decision maker for me. I moved over for features like Nanite and the new lighting system. Was simply curious if the "wont go back" still stands.
2021 why i’m Switching from cocos2Dx to pygame and won’t go back(even for mmo’s)
For game environment design which is best unity or unreal engine advance thanks for your reply
well well well
well well well
As an environment artist, I remember trying out Unity in 2014 and it just wasn't up to par with the expectations. My sentiments were that it seemed like an engine that's easy start games in but lacked the feature set at the time to efficiently manage a more robust game. No idea where it's at now but Unreal has always been my go-to, at least for art work.
This is secretly dan Harmon.
This isn't really related to the video but I'm slowly realising I just play Unity games without any inherent bias going into it, it seems like whenever I get a AAA game, whether it's in Unreal or FrostBite, I get bored of them very quickly, and these are the games I played the most in the past year which I really enjoyed:
- Rimworld (Unity)
- Disco Elysium (Unity)
- Escape from Tarkov (Unity)
- Outer Wilds (Unity)
- Due Process (Unity)
- Intruder (Unity)
- Valheim (Unity)
- Onwards (Unity)
- Boneworks (Unity)
- Deep Rock Galactic (UE4)
- Half Life Alyx (Source2)
Just so happens almost all of them are Unity games... the latest UE5 demo looks absolutely incredible, yet I'm not at all excited for it mostly because they just don't seem to have any content that interests me, maybe people behind Squad can take advantage of it? That's the only other UE game I've played recently that I enjoyed.
For me, at least back in 2010, it was that UDK was loaded by FPS stuff that you had to build your game around, and was too heavy for my PC.
Unity on the other hand was a blank canvas, just a camera and the skybox is your limit.
I'd still prefer Unity 2.6 over Unreal 4.24.
This makes sense. You wouldn't use an FPS/TPS engine if you didn't need it. But with UE4, its so modular, a lot of that stuff can be removed. Also, if you are using 4.24, you are using a broken engine. It's in preview.
@@tehf00n I used UE4 again some time ago, I noticed it's still require you to work around the same FPS and Network stuff and recompiles the whole engine if you work with cpp source files and of course still very demanding on dev CPU and GPU, don't know about the latest update though.
your bg is really beautiful, a great way to keep viewers interested
I remembered back then when I was young and was a little interested in game development, I looked at Unity then I remembered that the crappiest flash games i played were made in Unity, so I didn't touch it.
But here I am now, actually trying to make my very first game after experimenting with a bunch of 2D mechanics on a junk project.
I had the same thoughts when I first looked at it back in the unity 2.0 days :)
because everyone uses unity thats why
Good video, I will not be leaving Unreal but you have made me take another look at Unity. I have them both and from this video it seems it is just a matter of preference for you and I appreciate your honesty. I can see both Unity and Unreal have their advantages.
Welcome to team Unreal jason! papa EPIC will take care of you. Before when I started using Unreal, I fell in love with the engine on how user friendly it is. I've been using Unreal for 3 years now, and what's so beneficial when you are using Unreal is they give assets every month! and hear out the dev community
and quixel provides high-quality textures for free.
I started learning Unity several years back. Reasons being i knew C# and everyone said it was so much easier and faster to develop in than the other front runner UE. I was/am in no way an expert in C#, as i came from pascal/delphi R.I.P., but i know it well enough for it to be easy to get started. Everywhere i went everyone said that UE had such a steep learning curve and C++ was such pain. I ended up learning unity. The "dream game" i have is still not started, but a game i made as an exercise in Unity really stuck with me and its a game i will release as a product some day. The one i will release is not the same one as the first exercise as i have remade the game from scratch more than once as i'm getting better.
But then came the Unity package mayhem that put me off the whole thing for a while.
Then i started UE to see what the big issue with C++ is. I used blueprints as an entry point and then learned C++ parallel and later C++ specifically for UE. I must say that i don't get what the problem with C++ is. I really enjoy it a lot. Much of the memory leakage is fixed when handling engine specific classes, the blueprint-C++ interface works like a charm, and the build times are basically the same as in Unity nowdays. Most of the mentioned issues here are old and not valid anymore.
Now comes the issue. I like them both. For the game im doing atm UE is a better choice in some aspects but... With how they have made UE (UE 5 is amazing to work with imo) easy to work with and fixed much of the package issues in Unity and the new features in them both is giving me such a hard time to chose which to use. Imo C++ and C# are as easy and have just as many pros and cons. Atm im developing the same game in them both... pulling my hair out.
Boom in Mobile gaming post 2010 really pushed Unity to heights since they were at the time more focused on mobile
I don't see mobile game lasting too much longer. Companies have just ruined it. It's a cesspool of low-quality cash-grabs and the most popular crappy cash-grabs overshadow any of the very few good games. The market is just ruined and I don't personally know anyone who plays mobile games minus one or two here and there. History is repeating itself, we had a video crash in the 80's because everyone and their pet dog was making video games and most of them sucked and they overshadowed any of the good games. Now, today, the same is happening but more prominently in mobile.
Is unity good even for someone that has a low end PC? My computer has a:
820m GTX
I5 4200u
8GB RAM
512 HDD
I worked with Unity and Unreal Engine. So if you wanna choose between these two, I recommend Unity. Unreal is so powerful nowadays, but it's made for more powerful PCs.
That's only my opinion, you should choose whatever you comfortable work with.
If you have a Commodore Vic 20 - you can do Godot
Ex-Unreal developer here, having switched back to Unity. Unity is SO much more professional. The API is much more full-service, it's well documented, code is half the size is C#, editor doesn't crash from the hot reloading, and no digging through the engine source to answer basic questions. We had gone to Unreal for a while because the grass seemed greener, but Unity has their act much more together as a game engine. I'm more than twice as productive in Unity, and it's not the just the language, it's that the whole thing is MEANT to be used, where it's like Unreal is really developer hostile.
???
If I see one more person not remember to mention blueprint I am going to cry and I cry 12 times a year.
@@legendgames128 I really only used the amount of blueprint that I was forced to (slots for animation mixing). I don't want to code visually, it turns into spaghetti in two seconds. And I won't be using Bolt in Unity. Simply not interested. Clean code is much easier to understand. Visual scripting doesn't scale.
@King Yacine OK, genius, Unity has DOCUMENTATION! Unreal has for the most part a scrape of the function headers, which isn't documentation, so you have to dig through the source to understand how anything is supposed to be used. Have you ever used any of these engines? This is common knowledge, and the primary complaint even Unreal fanboys have of Unreal.
The one truly saving grace in Unreal is that it's mostly quite intuitively programmed, and Unreal's implementations are instructive of how to use the APIs. But the time I personally spend finding out how to call a function is about 95% lower in Unity. because of DOCS. Oh, the docs.
SO MUCH THIS :) I have been a hobbyist game developer for most of my life. I experimented with game making on the C64, in DOS, Visual Basic, Android and for a long time I knew about Unity and Unreal Engine but stayed away from them as it seemed too much to take on.
I finally went with Unity as the Android devkit I used kept making breaking changes in the source code. Unity does so as well, but then helps fix them, and often automatically. I have tried working with UE4 a few times, it has a lot of things going for it... but omg. recompling, redoing shaders, compiling the full engine to add in a few features... I thought I was just bad at Unreal Engine and just getting used to it... but nope. That does seem to be the standard and in Unity the iteration process is overall so very much faster on... as far as I know, all aspects. Lighting rendering is a background process, shader rendering is pretty much a background process. Recompiling code usually takes seconds rather than minutes. Compiling a full game rarely takes even 30 minutes for me... with my projects it usually takes less than 10 minutes. My biggest projects that end up having more than 10gb of assets, I do not remember it ever taking an hour to compile a full game build.
Especially as a solo developer, you just do not have that much time to waste on trying out ideas. With Unreal Engine it often seems you can end up spending half your time or more on... waiting.
You make some excellent points, however may I make some counter arguments?
1. Unity has a few glaring holes if aiming to make higher quality games.
You’ll need an asset for AI, such as Behavior Designer. You’ll need Aura 2 for decent lighting. For visual scripting you’ll need either Playmaker or Bolt. (I know Unity are introducing their own visual scripting soon, which is great).
Shader graph takes care of shader/material creation, whereas previously you needed Amplify Shader Editor. Even creating height fog requires purchasing an asset. Bakery also seems to be a necessity in order to get high quality lighting baked efficiently.
These are ALL present in the Unreal engine.
2. Not all of these assets are compatible with HDRP or LWRP (soon to be URP). For example, my studio’s current title is made with LWRP, but we can’t use Aura 2 because they haven’t updated it.
3. To match Unreal graphics, you’ll need to use HDRP. However this is fresh out of the oven, only just coming out of preview. It’s not production tested with any major games made with it, to my knowledge (please correct me if wrong). It’s a big bet to take, especially when comparing to an engine like Unreal which has been tried and tested with many many AAA titles over many years. You can of course use the standard Unity3D - which seems to be fine to be honest. An excellent example of a AAA title in Unity is Subnautica - it’s absolute gold. But is noticeably one of few AAA games in a sea of Unreal titles.
4. Even though HDRP can match Unreal in terms of graphic fidelity, whereas frame rate is concerned I am skeptical. Many comparisons on TH-cam show Unity matching Unreal, in terms of quality (lighting, post processing, etc). However on closer inspection the frame rate on Unreal is far higher, and noticeably more stable. Frame rate stability is crucial, since it is the determining factor on how high the graphics can be set. It’s quite noticeable especially on older machines - I noticed in general I can run Unreal games smoother with higher settings than Unity it on my 2013 machine. This is of course dependant on the developer’s skill and commitment to quality.
5. I think you need to mention Unreal Blueprints - they can replace C++ IF used correctly and organised cleanly, and can be used in conjunction with C++. Even more valuable is that Blueprints are compatible with every part of Unreal (to my knowledge), whereas something like playmaker is not. (Eg. Playmaker doesn’t seem to be able to be used with the new Unity Input system).
6. The Asset Store being far bigger than the Unreal marketplace may be a symptom of there being more holes to fill in Unity. All the the mentioned assets above are native features of Unreal, which is a huge advantage.
7. Unreal have made a huge push towards 2D games and also mobile games. Kudos to Unity who definitely got there first though!
I’m not bashing Unity - I love Unity for its speed and simplicity, which is why we use it. I am considering using Unreal for our next project however because everything is so integrated and feature rich, and the graphics are just plain awesome.
I just wanted to illustrate that although you make many excellent and correct points, there are more factors to consider when choosing a game engine.
Thanks for reading :)
Edit: Unreal introduced Live Coding C++ with 4.22, so that should help out with the iteration / compiling time issues with Unreal.
Subnautica can easily stutter a beafy gaming PC on lowest settings. Desert of Kharak have insane frame drops. Made with Unity (tm).
Дмитрий Азнауров Man - Deserts Of Kharak looks amazing in stills, but nothing can kill a game quicker that an unstable frame rate!
@@joshpolman201 the thing is - best looking Unity games struggle with framerate even on lowest settings on quite beafy PC's.
Дмитрий Азнауров
I do wonder, how much is the developers not optimising their game properly, and how much is it Unity not being as optimised as it could be?
@@joshpolman201 just enough for almost all top looking Unity games to be extremely laggy on powerful gaming PC's.
Since you’re not talking about Unreal Engine 4, Could you please rename this video to reflect that?
Most new comers who watch this video will think you’re talking about unreal and will be misinformed.
Edit : you’re comparing Unreal 2.5 to current unity versions?
Jason did make it clear many times that his opinion of Unreal was formed a while ago, and that things change....
@@RossYlitalo But he still didn't state that he's talking about UDK (Unreal Engine 3) and not Unreal Engine 4. Most people when they hear Unreal, think of UE4. His comparisons are too outdated to be uploaded on the end of 2019.
My point is he's is not talking about Unreal, he's talking about UDK and that's completely misleading.
@@Extrone Absolutely Right. Waste of time.
UE 4.25 is the current version
I'd be interested in your take on Godot, since it's kind of taken the meme-spot of "this is the uber-cool hip engine that'll beat all the big boys" lately. I've been frustrated lately with Unity due to its lack of classic spritesheet support, requiring you to ignore its animator system entirely if you want to animate good old-fashioned spritesheets (at least if you want something that can be modular and reusable, instead of wasting countless hours copying the same animator setup a million times), so I've been tempted to at least move onto something with a more dedicated 2D area like Godot rather than Unity's more '2D placed over 3D' system
Look into the AnimatorOverrideController you point it at an animator controller, and just replace the clips, and it reuses the controllers logic with the new clips.
Right now I'm working on a sprite sheet / 2D animator that works in a similar way and UI to unity's. This however easily allows for multiple colliders interactions / events and simple frame time modification. Hopefully the beta will be out within the next couple months.
@@Archimagus Is that going to accomplish what I'm after though? That still sounds like every animation needs to be setup again and again, whereas I'm talking like having a template of a spritesheet (e.g. all the animations a human could do in a top-down final-fantasy-like RPG), and knowing on every template the right frames are in the right place and then just inserting the spritesheets for it to know to just read frame 1 frame 2 etc and be modular. I've accomplished it with a tidbit of code, I just don't get how to accomplish that with the animator itself.
Godot is really solid for 2D! I've been working on an engine comparison video and I've worked with all 4 major engines (CE, UE, Unity, Godot) and while Godot can't really match the others in terms of 3D power, it is the best 2D engine out there.
5 months after this comment and Godot has already faded into obscurity.
Love your work Jason. I’m a bit caught up now but I’ve already liked the video and will watch later of course and also overall great content from the channel! Always inspiring.
What I like about Unity id that you can start with a pseudo-naked engine
That is what I don't like about it. I love having tools and systems written by other people, that solve my problems. For that reason, I have to use a lot of third party plugins. And those plugins don't always play well with each other.
@@000Gua000 I personally try to keep other ppls plugins off Up until I know how they work. Im a very my-path/my-errors programmer that, even when copying code, Ill type It down myself instead of ctrl+c/v
Like me, i cant use what i cant understand.
Agreed. I must know how everything works. Unreal may give you a character controller but its bloated and hard to work with. I made my own in Unity with Hybrid ECS and Its great.
This is actually true only since extremely recently. It has plenty of bloat in there. And it's not that much fun to completely depend on the updates of whatever plugins made by others you're using.
This seems like a list of reasons why someone would want to use unity over unreal, but not why YOU wanted to, or why you refuse to switch back.
1. Mobile development - Yeah, unity is probably the engine to pick when you're looking to develop for mobile. How often do you develop for mobile?
2. C# vs C++ - You said you know both so I'm not sure why this comparison is relevant for you switching engines. There are tradeoffs to the languages, but there's a reason why AAA games are written in C++
3. Long Build times - Fair enough.
4. Amount of resources - After being experienced in Unreal and other proprietary engines, was the amount of tutorials and resources really relevant to you at that point? Also, I find that a significant amount of the tutorials are very surface level, don't really explain anything, and overall just targeted at beginners. It's hard to pick up good habits from these types of resources.
5. Unity is free - No longer the case and they have pretty similar pricing structures so it's not a reason to not switch back
6. So many unity developers - I would venture to guess that there are more unreal devs in the AAA space than unity devs (which would be the area for an MMORPG). It being easy to pick up isn't really a reason for you to stay with it, having already picked it up.
7. Constant updates - Unreal engine updates quite often as well. I'm not sure if it's more or less often, but you can similarly upgrade your project from version to version pretty easily, even going through a major version (4 to 5). Also, their updates are kinda... better. Unity has so many half baked and deprecated systems it's frustrating.
8. Good to build non-game apps - Sure, it is. But are you? An MMORPG certainly isn't a non-game app. And even if you are working on a non-game app, I don't see why you need to tie yourself down to one engine. You could use unreal for your 3D high-fidelity games and unity for your mobile or non-games
9. More resources on architecting projects for C# - I'm not sure if this is true. Anecdotally, "Game Programming Patterns" by Robert Nystrom is a really good book that I learned this kind of stuff from and is demonstrated in C++
Situations have seriously changed the past few weeks though.
Hey J, could you please make a video on skybox? I need a pitch black sky, neon signs, and keep having occlusion flares wipe out my screen. I think occlusion is the right word. Like the camera ISO is set way too high, and when using physically based volume, my screen just turns purple. I'm still using 2019.4 LTS, they may have addressed this in more recent builds, but theyve removed the simplicity of just dragging and dropping skyboxes. Please please please help. Black sky, a plane of 300-500 meters, big neon signs. Thank you Jason.
exactly, I have a very similar experience between unity and unreal. I couldn't wait so many hours to compile in UE.
I have no idea what you're doing that's taking hours to compile in Unreal.
@@robbie_ what i meant with hours is the total time per day wasted waiting for compiles. A single save and compile took an average of 20 mins as far as I can remember. It is so annoying when a new programmer like me who is still learning, should wait this much every single time he wants to try adding a variable here or make a minor change there, and keep testing to see what might happen.
@@adammed8667 With my experience, that 20 mins compile is only really for the first compile of the day since UE4 tends to do a full recompile after several hours of no compiling (not sure if there is a way to disable this, since the old binaries are still there, in theory they could just be reused). Every compile after that takes several seconds.
@@fat-freeoliveoil6553 what I meant by "many hours" is the combination of all compile times per day. I was a beginner in UE and in C++ and I had to program in trial and error way, which means I had to compile every time I add a new statement or every several statements and see how that works (as part of the learning process). In C#/Unity, I can learn a thousand times faster.
So many good points made!
For me these are the reasons I use UE5
2022 release UE 5 = Nanite and Lumen the best engine (the engine with guinness world record for the most successful)
With C++ you can have bugs but it's unlimited. You can even develop your own plugins for those who are engineers in an easy and powerful way.
The lowest royalties and in Epic's own store also has a plus of help
Regarding the crash, you can do some light programming in another project or in Blueprints and then pass it to C++. Or just leave it with Blueprints.
There are things you can program in C++ and continue in Blueprints. And if there are engineers on the team, you can extend or modify the editor thanks to C++. So many designers may be more comfortable with the editor and the tools they can get.
PS: I agree with the video, Unity is powerful, I'm not saying it's not. This is just sharing ideas and I like your opinions, even if they are different. I know that Unity is great for mobile but I haven't tried it yet
At Nanite and Lumen:
- First: It sounds nice, but if you are indie, do you actually need these features?
- Second: You cut off most of the audience as most people won't have the hardware to run those features well. So in reality, it actually doesn't sound that exciting.
@@SnakeEngine The two points you say have no basis in time. The RTX and RX are here to stay. So it may be a bit futuristic but the longer they take to update, the more opportunity they lose to be the first game developers. A golden rule is to make a game before there are already thousands of the same one, which is not going to be very profitable. Using new technologies helps a lot in this opportunity.
You speak of indie, I understand that Stray was made by indie developers. They commented that they used Blueprints, which is from Unreal
@@pabloa4672 Then hurry up, in few years the market will be flooded with streamlined Bright-Memory Infinite look alikes with lumen and nanite, haha.
Enjoyed the insight! I always hear debates about user ability (ease of use) and the difference In UI functionality between the two... often hearing the same each has something the other would benefit if they had those little functions on the other.
As someone who love Unity and is starting a Job that uses Unreal and Unity for VR projects I find these opinions of yours very interesting. I'll also be interested if those I'm going to work with feel similarly.
How are you feeling now that you’ve been working with both engines for a while?
You know, I have actually warmed to Unreal a little, but I also find that they have some infuriating quirks that seem to make no sense. In the meantime I'm loving Unity more, ha ha.
However, I'm still open to the possibility that my opinion may change in the future. But for now, I'm still definitely pro Unity
@@TsetTsyung how about now?
@@nitroclips96 still leaning towards Unity. None of our projects require UE5 investigation, so cant speak to those features. However, rather happy with 2021 and previous updates - XR updates to include SteamVR, Unity Input system, parallel import, loads of features added to URP and HDRP etc. Still waiting on DOTS 1.0, but happy with Unity right now.
HI JASON! Thank you for making videos. I been watching alot of your VR tutorials- they are so helpful to me
Can you do a machine learning tutorial?
soon :)
@@Unity3dCollege Yeah I will be waiting. Thank you.
Any updates on this? :D
Epic Games charges 5% of gross revenue if your game succeeds USD 3000 per quarter-year - once it drops below that you don't pay anything ("If you succeed, we succeed"). Also, if you use the engine for ArchViz, film rendering or other non-game-purposes you don't pay any royalties. I'd say that's a small price to pay for such a fantastic piece of software.
Also, using UE4 grants free access to Quixel Megascans which atm costs USD 199/month (for commercial use) if you use it outside UE4.
Really, you can use Megascans for free if you're using UE4 (which itself is free, right, ignoring the >$3000 thing)? That is killer.
@@clamum If you read attentively, you'll see that's exactly what I wrote ;) (...except for the general pricing which has changed quite recently, after I wrote previous comment half a year ago)
Now Im curious, With this new merger, and the potential of risking privacy with unity. That people state that the CEO is just looking to squeeze as much money as possible. Is unity still the choice or has time changed the tide? People say unreal is better since it has more popular games than unity.
I switched from UE to Unity because the software just seems much easier to use for a single dev. Another reason would be the community. I've never had any luck finding a good UE discord or anything but I'm in a few Unity discords that help you from modeling to code. It honestly comes down to personal preference. They both get the job done.
UnrealSlackers is on discord and has 30k members and ~10k online. Bummed you missed it, it's amazing. Epic also sponsors meetups. There's one in Portland, Oregon, and another in Seattle. You can probably find one in the nearest major city. Epic provides food+drinks and sends staff to do talks about once a quarter. Anyway, best of luck out there! Just letting you know about these resources in case you are interested. :)
I like the motto hanging on your wall. Such a good distillation of how to be successful.
Insanely good and underrated tool!
It's fucking sad that we didn't learn about this in school. Teachers should use this as a tool (of course, every classroom should have a PC + video projector).
There are college courses that teach Unity, you just have to look. I'm assisting in one this term, and the students pick it up very quickly (CompSci 3rd/4th years).
@Kyles Isler School = education + experience + credential (degree). Education is worthwhile just for the sake of learning new things, bonus value when those things can be leveraged into a career/job path. Self-learning is great, but most folks don't push outside their comfort zone - school forces you to work in areas/ways that you don't normally. Group education also is a better match for how most software is actually made in the real world - you are part of a team, often part of a larger company/entity, not just coding for your own amusement.
And of course a credential sure doesn't hurt when you're trying to get past HR gatekeepers. I've definitely learned that lesson from both sides.
I’m a huge Unity fan, but every single job now sees my resume / portfolio and say “that’s cool but what’s hour experience level with Unreal”? It’s crazy haha. My current contract work is In Unity thankfully but all the artists are from an Unreal background. It’s fun to teach them and have them go “ohhhh… nice!”
I would say, these days... Its not really a matter of speeds or tools any more. Both engines can do roughly the same, but they do certainly shine in different ways.
My team just switched from Unity to Unreal, mainly because that our game will depend mainly on cutscene sequencing. And Unity's Timelines is not offering much in comparison as of yet. After making the switch, we experienced that the engine itself offers a lot more out of the box than Unity does. In Unity, you have to make a lot more of the systems and core functionality yourself. And iteration times I found is much quicker in Unreal as well. This is mainly when working in the blueprint aspect though, c++ classes still takes roughly the same time as C# to compile.
Jason, great video man. Thank you for your overview. Helps to understand why and where to use it. Thank you.
Kinda misleading title, when you just write Unreal instead of Unreal 2 people will think that you're talking about UE4.
Alright I'll update it, and highlight the important point. In terms of ease of use, Unreal is still a dumpster fire. I honestly can't believe some of the crap their users let them get away with. Sure, Unity isn't perfect, and is definitely making some poor decisions, but their engine is still far easier to use. Let's do a couple examples.
- Trying out some demos and your ears are bleeding because of how loud they are? That's fine, I'll just click the mute audio button for play mode right up... oh. There isn't one. Looks like I have to find the master audio class, and mute it manually for the entire game. If I want a button to mute the audio in play mode, I have to build a tool for it.
- Making an FPS in this awesome engine designed around FPS games? Have you ever tried making it so your gun doesn't clip through the environment? I tried on my own for a while, and got close to a few solutions, but I wasn't too happy with them. After 30-40 min I decided to look up tutorials. Hmm.. they're just using a raycast to trigger an animation, or scaling down the gun to fit in the capsule. The Epic Games demos do this too. What's going on here? Turns out... UE4 REMOVED RENDERING LAYERS. What the hell?
- Delete a project from the project manager? BOOM. Obliterated from the universe. Doesn't even go into the recycle bin. Hope you didn't accidentally export a sample in the wrong location. I did once, and it deleted my entire Unreal Projects folder.
- Scripting choices? As Jason said, a mangled mess of C++ that still has the iteration of a snail crawling backwards despite the improvements. Or you could use the best visual scripting tool in the world. The only problem is, it's still visual scripting.
- Prefabbing objects? Must create them as a blueprint. No fast way to quickly throw something together in the editor and convert it without getting inconsistent results.
- Level geometry? Sorry, Unreal hasn't updated this tool since 1995. You remember BSP, right?
- Made a Blueprint project, but want to write a C++ class or use a C++ demo? I hope you like errors, and not seeing your C++ classes in the Content window. By the way, conversion is a black magic ritual that no one even knows completely how to do, and you're better of just deleting the whole damn thing and starting over, wondering why on earth Unreal ever separated them like that to begin with.
- Need a tool that isn't in the engine or one that's actually usable? Sorry, creating tools in this engine is difficult to the point that most people can't finish them or maintain them. So your options are and always will be limited.
The list goes on and on. These are just some of the things I ran into.
I thought exactly the same and my stomach rumbled a sec :O
@@Deadener thank you, that speaks what i have in mind perfectly. I switched to unity because of those reasons. I really like using c++ for game development, i really do but ue4 c++ is basically hell.
Unreal also has ton of features but a lot of them are somewhat abandoned. It's really sad because i want to like it but it's not likeable
@@Deadener I can't say about the rest, however you can mute Play Mode pretty easily. If you go into the Play Mode drop down menu > Advanced Settings > Play in Editor > Uncheck Enable Game Sound and that should mute the Play Mode.
@@dhgmrz17 Ah, so like everything else in Unreal, it's an extra four steps compared to Unity. Low speed, high drag development.
Is there a link for the free version? From what I found it's the paid annual plan. So all I found was a paid yearly or paid monthly for unity.
This ended up on my recommendation list as I look in TH-cam for UE4 video's.
Thumbs down.... Here's why
You speak of switching off of "Unreal" to Unity around the time of Vanguard & also around the time when the Iphone was first taking off. That would date this experience around 2007. Now, correct me if I am wrong, when people say "Unreal" they think of Unreal Engine 4. and Unreal Engine 4 was not released until 2014. So what you are really referring to is "UDK," it's predecessor and not "Unreal."
I have to point this out because your comparison is comparing a bus to a car and why you hate cars for the one time you rode on a bus.
Regarding your comparisons, practically none of them hold true as for why Unity is better than Unreal. I say "practically" because when Unreal was first released it was a paid subscription program. You also had to pay royalty for when your game released (though I am not sure if this is still a thing.)
Every reason you said why you like Unity is something Unreal can do as well. As for who did it first I am not sure.
Point is.... Your miss-comparing two programs and confusing the people who watch this.
*A good game made in either engine should be indistinguishable from one another.* The level of fidelity and performance of either is only limited by the Development teams abilities and assets -- from what I can tell Ureal is easier to achieve a better visual result out of the box, but with experience Unity can match or beat that fidelity in my opinion. I use Unity because it's work flow fits my development style and coding background.
@@zBones762 UnityAPI is not Threadsafe, dot.
@@Donnirononon There is some good stuff on Stack Overflow about working with that. If anyone is interested: stackoverflow.com/questions/41330771/use-unity-api-from-another-thread-or-call-a-function-in-the-main-thread/41333540#41333540
@@Donnirononon guess you have not heard of the job system which allows you to use threads safely, it won't even compile if you have a race condition
@@WelshGuitarDude Idk if i mentioned but newer versions of unity go into the 100% right direction and as always its up to the dev but as always too with Unity ECS is not 100% complete (Thats why i froze my project), JObs not 100% complete last time i was in the engines, lot of stuff not complete or simply bugged. Thats why i simpy choose unreal, waaay less glueing and undesired behaviour but also a bit more complicated.
Also that said as far as i know the multithreaded code in the jobs system can'T use unityapi as its not thread safe? Idk if that still holds true but it was one of the reasons i left it for projects that exceed very simplistic structures.
I appreciate the video but this being a game dev channel it unfortunately doesn't touch much on my use case: essentially I use UE4 just for 3D animation/film VFX. So if anyone can help me out: I have gotten some beautiful renders out of Unreal but am very dissatisfied with the interface and workflow, and strongly considering moving to Unity.
The consensus seems to be that you can get the same render quality out of either, but in Unity it'll take more fidgeting. If that's the only difference, then I'll still switch because although in Unreal it might be easy to get a good look, EVERYTHING ELSE is fidgety. It's shocking how much it gets away with while staying an industry standard, I guess its user base just got used to things that are trivial in any other 3D software taking 4x the number of steps in Unreal. You can't make a procedural color ramp or procedurally color correct a texture without a bunch of channel splitting and trigonometry, you can't import an MP3 file and have it read as an audio file, you inexplicably can't import a LUT as a LUT and instead have to first export it as a PNG, there are sooo many little gotchas like that.
The engine constantly feels like it's mocking you when you finally get something to work and then, when you get something else to work, the previous thing has stopped working, it's like a Rubik's cube from hell. There's no intuitive way to do version control, if you duplicate a map to make a new version and accidentally delete an asset because you don't want it in that particular version, say goodbye to the asset. There's just so much foundational stuff that feels half-baked, like they implemented the basic functionality and called it a day so they could move on to something that will look more exciting in the feature reel.
I was also disappointed by the much-promoted community aspect: yeah they have a lot of users, but what good does it do when you're trying to do something basic and all the forum responses you find sound equally confused about it, or worse, say "Oh yeah that's a bug, we've been asking for a fix for three years"? The fact that even their official tutorials are 2 hours long while teaching very little seems to be another reflection of how needlessly complex they make everything.
So again: if Unity will take me a bit more knob-turning to get something to look photorealistic but will not drive me completely insane trying to get basic things in place, then I will definitely switch. If anybody who has a similar use case to mine can comment on whether it's a good idea, I'm grateful.
I've never used Unreal, but I can't even imagine not being able to tab in and have Unity compile my code immediately.
he is talking about unreal that was made literally 19 years ago, in modern unreal you are in the editor watching your game all the time.
i really don't know what he going on about with this weird comparison
I switched from Unity to UE4 and it is very worth it. Code compilation isn't as good as Unity's but it doesn't take long either.
The first time you compile in that day, UE4 will do a full compile, which can take.... a long time. (There's probably a way to turn this off and just use older binaries but I haven't looked). Other than that, compiling really doesn't take more than several seconds.
In my experience, not sure if this is a bug, 9/10 times after compiling, any Blueprints you have that are linked to your C++ code will just be dereferenced ("HOTRELOADED") and you have to restart the Editor to get it working again (only takes several seconds but is annoying). For this reason, I mainly do prototyping in BP then once I can confirm everything is working, I migrate it to C++.
Finally, unlike Unity where if you have a bug in your code, you just get a red error in Unity. In UE4, if your code has a bug in it, it will just crash - sometimes with an indescriptive message, leaving you to figure it out on your own. But with much experience, you eventually start to know what causes these indescriptive errors.
@@fat-freeoliveoil6553 if you have a good PC , compilation time is less than 3 or 4 seconds and it is just for the first compilation, for next times , will be compiled immediately
@@darksilvergames5692 Is a Ryzen 5 5600X, 32GB RAM and an RTX 3070 Ti a good PC?
@@fat-freeoliveoil6553 Ugh... obviously not. I mean... do you even gamedev, bro ?
Which Unreal version are you talking about and when did you switch to Unity? It’s seems like it was a long time ago.
Sounds like you should give UE4 a look. Because I'm not sure if you looked at it or not it does support mobile development. However, given the time your friend was starting to look into developing a mobile game Unreal was still a game engine for console and PC yet, mobile was still a very new thing. It's scripting language was UnrealScript. If you look at the time frame UE2 and UE2.5 were out at the time. It wasn't until UE3 that Epic started tinkering with the idea of mobile game development. UE3 had very basic support for it. Now though, UE3 is used for Mortal Kombat Mobile and Injustice Mobile but NetherRealm had to change UE3 drastically in order for it to work with mobile (I researched this and heard it on a live stream) I'm not being biased because a game engine is a game engine they all do the same thing, workflows are different and they will cater to individual people and companies. Going outside of Unity and Unreal, there are a lot of game engines out there that support mobile development now.
I tried to like UE4 as much as I could, but in the end it's not feasible. Build times for 10 ~ 30 seconds are too much if you need to explore the engine on your own because the documentation often says nothing about the purpose of methods and objects. The documentation in Unity is miles ahead, giving actual code samples for common use cases. Next problem is C++. While I think it's nicer to work with than C#, the tooling around it - particularly IDE support for UE4's C++ - is atrocious. I tried using Visual Studio, QtCreator and CLion, the result is always that you need to disable almost all code intel tools just for it to understand your code and not mark everything as error, autocomplete is really bad (and often wrong), syntax highlighting is extremely slow. Again this is particularly a problem because the documentation is also quite bad, so as a learner I rely on these features.
Another big issue is engine stability - Unity freezes / crashes if I fabricate an infinity loop - I think that's bad enough. Unreal on the other hand crashes on every tiny occasion. Called two methods in wrong order? Crash. Null pointer? Crash. Division by zero? Crash. Extremely frustrating.
The probably biggest issue I had with UE4 however is that it's just super complex. There's a million features in it, and you need to know all of them in order to understand one of them. I used GetRotation on my object, and this caused the collision detection for the object to break. I posted it as a bug report and got a reply that it was intentional. I don't know if that makes any sense because I don't know every little detail about the engine. The thing with Unity is that a gameobject with no components attached is really bland. In UE4 it has 10000000 settings that you need to be careful about, but in Unity, you only have Rotation, Scale and Position and all components you add are similarly simple.
The modularity of the system may not be the most performant solution, but guess what, if I wanted a specialized engine, I'd just write my own. For anything else that Unity can handle (prototyping, small games) I'll use Unity.
@@Luxalpa Use what works for you.
@@Luxalpa My biggest issue with both Unity and Unreal both is they tend to over complicate things in their own way. So I use something else that doesn't take a million years to learn. About the UE4 Documentation, you may want to look deeper because there is quite a bit explained. Perhaps the frustration is causing you to refuse to learn it and look deeper? In any case, no game engine is perfect and they all have their own problems. Look at EA's Frostbite Engine. If developers wanted to make something other than a shooter, they would have to retool everything and basically bend the engine to a new will which has rendered nothing but problems. Looking at Anthem and Andromeda. There were plenty of developers for those games who complained about how hard Frostbite is to use and it can be frustrating.
hi, is this still the case even with the release of the new unreal?
Fast recompile time + Assembly definitions+ upcoming Enter play mode options = ~0 iteration time
Hi Jason. You have a very nice book on your shelf :)
Hey Jason, I have a question that drives me crazy and i couldn't find an answer in internet.
How to change color of the collapsed XML doc comment ?
Like it is saying
Returns the number of lives remaining
When it is collapsed i cannot change color of comment.
Please help me.
@Kyles Isler no i mean i couldnt find change xml comment color in visual studio 2019
Thank you for the video sir.
Love that Tupac Picture in the under right corner!❤
From the time I spend with Unity, it's fun and and quick to prototype, but I feel it can get very messy as the project scales up. I also hate how the logic get split up into chunks attached to objects here and there. Like Flash scripts, or UE's blueprints.
On the other hand, you've very right on the benefits of C#. It's super fast to write and compile, and is lovely. In the past few years I've been using it with XNA/FNA/MonoGame, and it works really well. I recommend it, especially for 2D games!
maybe you should go check out a current version of unreal because its probably a lot different from what you remember it
I checked it out not so long ago and his points still apply, which doesn't change your point, but if you have to constantly change engines because "the other now has this" then you probably should just focus on what that engine is good at (unreal seems to be better for fps and action based games while unity is better at puzzle, mobile and horror games)
Are there any sheer technical drawbacks in Unity comparing to Unreal?
You can expect some less performance in bigger pc projects, and you may have to put more work to make the rendering look good. Other than that, Unity's architecture is cleaner and much easier to understand.
Let me say something for a man who used both of two engine server years.
1.Unity is easy to deploy on mobile platform.
2.C# is easier and clear to C++.
3.UE4 4.24 had speed up the code compile.
4.There are much more people to use unity than ue4, and you can solve problem faster.
5. unreal is free now.
The last but not least, I use ue4 now for the higher salary and greater game.