My take on this whole Unreal vs Unity.

News & General Discussion
1

First post.

Just created this account to express my views on this whole Unreal 4 vs Unity issue. I am about to decide on Unity or Unreal for my next project too so this info could be useful to others.

Quick intro:
I have worked on many AAA games and some of the biggest franchises in gaming for the past 15 years. I have used all kind of engines from propietary to open source since the 90s.

These are my general views:

UNITY
The Good:
Overall it’s a clean engine with good design. Great workflow. It has a Mac feel to it which I like.

The Bad:
It lacks many, many features that are standard in AAA games. The lack of features is enormous. I come from propietary engines with horrendous workflows but with amazing features. Unity seems to be the opposite. A nice little engine with a good heart but no power.

UNREAL
The Good:
Unreal 4 is much, much better than Unreal 3. I hated UE3 and used to make fun of it with my colleagues. UE4 is making me change my oppinion. It has all the AAA features you would expect and the ones that are not there seem to be coming at an insanely fast speed.

The Bad:
It’s ugly, clunky, big and dirty and “American”.

On a side note.
I see a lot of complaints from the community everytime Epic releases a demo. They complain about Unity not having all these features. One thing. Even if you had all those features, do you think you could make something similar? It would open your eyes to work at a big studio and see how much time and talent is needed to make the simplest demo.

Regarding the price.
It is worrying to read interviews with Unity’s management where they say things like “Unreal 4 is the most expensive engine, do the math”. Unity’s community seems to be based mostly of people with little money trying to hit it big. 19 dollars is all they see. If someone makes a million dollars they will be more than happy to pay Epic 50.000 dollars. Believe me! They would even send them a ton of beer and pizza. 19 is more attractive.

Didn’t Unity used to have a catchphrase that went like this: “The best engine this side of a million dollars”. It is funny how now everybody is complaining about Unity’s price.

My main fear with Unity is that investing my time in it could be a waste of my time. I don’t want to switch engines mid-project. I have played with it since it came out in 2005 but never felt it was ready for primetime. Maybe now it is but I still have some doubts. I know Unreal has most of the things I will need but I want to give Unity a chance.

Does Unity have what I need?
Shader editor? No.
Cinematics tool? No.
AI Tools? No.
Physically based lighting. Wait for 5!
UI. Wait for 4.6. Are you kidding me?
Asset Store. Yes. But full of hacky and not integrated stuff.

Am I on the right boat if I choose Unity? I am not sure. These things come to my mind:

  • Scalability, lack of key basic features, price, uncertainty about commitment to AAA and so on.
    I will wait and see until August for any announcements. But guess what. I am already paying 19 a month for Unreal because it’s nothing. Will I buy Unity? We will see.
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I’m pretty sure Unity already has an UI. Well, it’s not the best UI toolkit ever invented, but it’s definitely there and it’s definitely

I would love an immediate step between Unity Free and Unity Pro, maybe something like an Indie version where you get the features of Pro with the turnover limit of Free, for an indie-friendly price (something lower than, say, $100). But I’m not a business guy, so I can’t judge if that would work for Unity Technologies.

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I’m very new to game design, hell, I can’t even get a ball to roll properly on a 2D game I’m trying to create. Heck, I don’t even know how to properly program my game. I know my opinion won’t count much but here it goes:

I’ve realized Unity works for people like me, I’m broke, I work full time, go to school full time, and I have a family I need to take care of; I can’t find it in my budget to use an engine I have to shell out $19.00 a month just to use when I’m only a beginner.

So yes, you can say Unity is for poor people wanting to make it big. Even if you don’t make it big, Unity still will not charge you until your game makes atleast $100,000.

2 Likes
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It’s arguably one of the worse UI toolkits if you’re trying to make an interface for your game and not an editor extension.

5

Isn’t it wonderful then that you don’t have to stay subscribed? The primary benefit to staying subscribed is getting access to updates as they are released. You could just as easily subscribe for a single month every so often (ie every six months).

You do not need a subscription to sell your product, but you still have to deal with royalties (first $3,000 per quarter per game does not count towards royalties).

6

Can you explain the “American” part?

2 Likes
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Haha, I noticed that, but was wondering more about the “ugly, clunky, big and dirty” part. Compared to what? The interface has been getting pretty rave reviews overall, and it’s completely customizable.

Perhaps he meant some of the additional editors integrating better into the primary editor (like Cascade?). I know this is on their to do list.

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Ue4 is prettier…but a lot of things aren’t quite there yet
Like 2d
Ui
Mac platform support
iOS and android is not nearly as mature as unity
No asset store
Don’t get me wrong - give it time and they will give unity a run for the money.
4.3 is crazy filled with new stuff…and their pace of development is crazy.

My advice - learn both.
If you want to deliver in the next few months, use unity.

The competition between them is the best thing to happen for indie development ever.

2 Likes
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Unity didn’t even have native 2D support until 8 months ago. People kinda seem to forget that.

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Yes but now it has.
So what’s your point?

Umm, I gotta wonder, if you actually tried UE4. Because it’s certainly not “clunky”, nor is it “dirty”, or “ugly”

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My point is that people hold Unity’s 2D implementation (which is honestly not even that good) as some amazing thing that only Unity has. Even UE4’s basic 2D implementation already comes close to Unity’s.

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I think if Unity do not wake up will be game over for them soon. Are about 5 months since UE4, and Unity did not moved a finger in any direction, except asking us how to improve the product. Hilarious…

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They asked us how they could improve Unity, disappeared, and honestly it all feels like a play to keep us placated. ESPECIALLY when almost everything that was said in those threads has been covered in the feedback section multiple times by now.

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Totally agree with you here, right now, nothing beats 19+5% if you make less that 3k per quarter.

And I would like to add something that some peoples seems to miss. Full Unity is 5000 USD right? Well, for EU is 5000 Euro + 25VAT and thats 8125 USD. So for Eurozone UE4 is even much more attractive to start with.

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The UI in UE4 makes unity current UI look totally awesome as!

I am surprised there wasn’t better out of the box UI for blueprints.

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That’s not how it works. It’s 1,140 € or 1,425 € with VAT.

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(emphasis mine)

Ummm… you realize development takes time, right? The disappearance isn’t a conspiracy, it’s them getting to work.

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I think that Unity complicates the easiest tasks to become the hardest tasks. It needs easier ways to do the easier things.

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Firstly I’m sure they appreciate the thread on this OP, but we have quite a few “Freds” on ths already. (*Cough, excuse me).

Secondly, I was holding out for the world composition functionality in UE4. They said they were working on it and they’d aim for 4.3 to be released in X amount of time, two months later it’s in. It needs some work but I’m having fun with it and all the new features.

I couldn’t expect any more of them, that’s great communication!. Simple and effective, so exactly what is the difference here?

1 Like
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Yeah if I were a brand new indie startup choosing between the two would be a tough choice. Granted, you could get plugins to fill in those holes by catching them on sale. Like ShaderForge, FULL Ik, Daikon Forge (UI) or NGUI, etc. But yeah choosing between Unity Pro and UE4 on an indie budget, ouch!

Try buying the equivalents of these plugins on UE4 side. For now, for UI there is only Coherent UI til UMG is completed (knowing Epic probably in the master branch I’d bet its usable by now I havent checked). Anyway Coherent costs like $19 a month? Then there is that IK plugin on UE4 side that would cost ya another $19 a month or whatever they charge. But Epic does have built in IK and FABRIK now so in time (if not now) you could forego those options

My only guess he means the C++ architecture. Such as, how it uses ‘unity’ .cpp files to merge a bunch of Classes together. At least in UE3, I know some programmers have gotten ‘dirty’ and declared Classes in the cpp and relied on the unity-merger to combine the changes. Sometimes adding other files to the unity cpp could break some other hackery. [edit] Note, without the unity cpp method compiles would take way longer forcing users to look into Incredibuild. Also, last I checked, namespaces did not work. I have read putting your ue4 gameplay code in your Game DLL can mangle things. Havent tried it myself

But that would be my main guess.

Not sure why they made “fun” of UE3 at their office. Yeah, UnrealScript was probably something to be made fun of sure. But besides that it was really good. Granted, the version of UE3 we used at my office was heavily modified by a different studio. None of us actually bothered to look at a ‘stock’ UE3 (actually some of us did but not sure how it compared to the modified version I actually used). So no idea how bad that was. In the title we did with it UnrealScript was barely used beyond the bare bones required by Epic’s architecture at the time. This is all gone in UE4 of course

[edit] Added some extra detail to my post