Yeah but you could probably afford to pay $19 right now for UE4, turn off the sub, and start making a game with it. Then in a few months you re-sub to UE4 once its further along to grab any updates you want. Realistically my guess would be bout $19-60 bucks but that is just a wild guess for an indie. Granted, there is Unity Free but you will have to probably buy some stuff from Asset Store. The ‘startup’ costs to get your game out the door is probably pretty close eh?
Good luck with your game. I am enjoying my Unity project
Can we see it? And what was your role in it? Something like placing objects in the scene? Programming? Other?
I see it differently. When you install unity - it is only the beginning. 80% of engine is in Assetstore (in my case - in my own code). Unity interested me with its extensibility. You do not have to write the renderer, the core part, it’s all there. All you lacking, you can (and should) write by yourself. Otherwise, you can hardly go far away from the standard demo scenes. It might be a problem for the designer-style development (perhaps even for AAA, I do not know it). But for me it’s good. And all that with the ability to build for many platforms ‘out of the box’. And it works very fast on them, if you know what you’re doing… Which platforms are you going to be released on?
So it’s actually: Unreal vs Unity+AssetStore
Shader editor? No. < Yes, but you have to pay * or code it yourself
Cinematics tool? No. < Yes, but you have to pay * or code it yourself
AI Tools? No. <Yes, but you have to pay * or code it yourself
Physically based lighting. Wait for 5! <Err… no. Lux (free), Skyshop, Alloy, Jove, Antonov Suit (free) * or code it yourself
UI. Wait for 4.6. Are you kidding me? Lol, patience young padawan. p.s: I’m freaking out waiting too!
Asset Store. Yes. But full of hacky and not integrated stuff. < … There is lots of high quality assets/scripts/tools/fameworks/etc that are very well supported. I agree though it could use a good cleanup to remove most unsupported/hacky messes that are rotting on the asset store.
Okay, let’s play this game. The only products I’ve listed here are ones that I’ve used myself and will 100% stand behind, are Unity Free compatible, and will allow you to commercially release a game.
RAIN is actually a very good AI kit that you can get for free.
Daikon Forge GUI Library - $75
I’m making a game now, not “at some point in the future.” I need a functional and well documented GUI system, which Unity doesn’t have and probably won’t have until at least one major update after the uGUI release, if Mechanim, Shuriken, and the 2D tools are any indication.
Playmaker - $95
One of UE4’s major selling points is having a visual scripting editor, so let’s not leave that out.
After adding all this up, we end up with $290 to append some of the major features from UE4 to Unity. Of course, now we end up with a serious problem. See, that’s actually $50 more than the cost of licensing UE4 for an entire year.
edit: For the sake of being fair, let’s not include DFGUI because UE4 doesn’t have full-native UI support yet (though it’s incredibly easy to make one using Blueprint) and compare that number too.
Now you end up with $215, which will get you 11 months of continuous UE4 licensing, provided you dig around in your couch for some change.
I’m going to add some defence to Unity here, spent the weekend with UE4. Created a 4KM terrain and set up all the shaders etc. with little fuss. Now firstly there is a couple of bugs here with terrains, one being it likes to add black marks when you paint and when you do add some paint to the terrain it fills out the whole quad. But fair enough I’m sure Epic will fix it. Also some lightbleeding going on with lightmass in places… Hmm!
Whilst I find Unreal easy to use and it has a mass of decent tools, I call UE4 the time succubus. I swear down if I have to bake lightmass whenever I tweak the lighting or keep compiling thousands of shader instructions with speedtree and that big wad of terrain every time I change a little thing I am going to throw my montior out of the window.
I find UE4 workflow PAINFULLY slow compared to Unity. Also I think it’s bad for your health, whenever I’m waiting for UE4 to do whatever it does I find myself making a coffee or nibbling food and at this rate I’ll end up a fat caffeine junkie.
I hear ya. Although, to be fair, you only have the wait for shaders to compile the first time you compile/bake a level after creating or editing a material. Those shaders tend to add quite a chunk of time. My preferred workflow is to get as much of a level done as possible, including material set up, before doing any serious baking and tweaking. But yeah, I would still love to see some speed improvements there.
Thing is Lightmass has such an impact on how things look, you’ll want to mess around with the enviro color and resolutions, swap out skylights etc… Also you swap out a texture on a material applied to the terrain and it takes ages, you need to tweak to get the best out of a scene.
I could be enticed into using Unity 5.0 still, that’s if I ever hear what’s going on with it.
You tried turning off Lightmass and going the LPV route (full dynamic lighting)? Lionhead’s Fable looks crazy good and they claim its all dynamic in the blog.
Hopefully will be done with my unity project in another few weeks. Will hop back to ue4 then to see how its improved. I’m waiting on their “animation retargeting to any skeleton”. Not terribly concerned bout the Lightmass thing- since I will just recruit some artists and let them deal with it. They should be used to all that
Maybe we’ll get a full blown LPV solution after Fable ships.
I like Unity because it’s incredibly easy. Once you learn: myGameObject.GetComponent() (That’s the bit that kept tripping me up. I mean it’s not very nice. Why not myGameObject.myComponent ? ) And the nightmare of figuring out for the first time how to get a list of child gameObjects. In Flash/Actionscript you can reference a child object just with a dot. But after you learn these things its farily straight forward.
Unreal on the other hand. I can’t even figure out how to paint a cube properly. Plus it’s really slow on my laptop. AND C++ is a horrible language to use. It needs a proper scripting language and NOT just blueprints.
Apparently the latest version (4.3) is better on slow computers but I’ll have to pay another $19 to try this update. Not just now.
As an indie I KNOW I’m not going to make AAA games so I don’t need a AAA engine.
hmm, for a beginner to game development or/and total newbee to UE/unity:
I would suggest to grab free copy of unity3d and start making games with it. When you have enough cash to lurk over newer technologies and can afford time, you can always try UE4 and Cryengine too then.
UE4 is an excellent engine for sure, any AAA super duper graphics targeted developer should look at UE4. But making a AAA is a big big and really big task. You need money, time and experience of years, trust me.
With some funky blueprints, you will make next angry bird or minecraft or temple run clone with next-gen graphics and consequently will make grand of $$$, Stop it. Its not going to work.
@Murgilod , UE4 can also do non-AAA games, but it takes time to learn another engine. New engine. new architecture. I don’t feel ok with blueprint based on what I saw on their youtube channel and official documentations. You need C++. So new language change specially from C# to C++. It is huge, specially for beginner in game development. Unity is meant for beginners/Newcomer. UE4 is a massive engine. I can bring it down within a month, but “me from two years ago” dare not!
I have both engines(Ue4 and Unity Pro). I use Ue4 with my friends we have a perforce server going for our project. I use Unity Pro for my own projects because its just what I like.
Blueprints aren’t for everyone. I like to code in C# many others out there do too.
You don’t “need” either Unity or Unreal. Just use what you like most.
