Kind of surprised no one is talking about Unreal 5’s press release.
What’s everyone’s opinions so far?
I’m still favor Unity for their strong points (community, documentation, games to market, flexibility) but lets talk about Unreal, I guess.
I think that it just looks like Unreal doing Unreal. Extremely niche tech demos with multimillion dollar budgets, while the 5 means very little in terms of changes to the core engine. Just a new number to market, and some addons to pretend like its new. Please correct me if I’m wrong on that.
All the while it has extremely long loading times, is an absolute beast incapable of working on low end systems well, and every game distinctly looks like it is running on Unreal.
So that’s the bad (for me).
As for the good, their in engine level editor stuff is WAY better than Unity. WAY WAY WAY better. Like it’s not even close.
Unity’s terrain system is so bad it might as well not exist and probuilder is not nearly sufficient.
UE5 terrain system does not have something crazy like a one click solution (which we get on asset stores), but it has all the necessary and important tools which artists require to create all types world… I have no complain with the terrain in terms of sculpting, but placement wise, things not aligning to the slopes and terrain layers limited to just 8 textures is just a huge headache for me!!! And yes unity editor is slow as hell in bigger scenes… Unreal’s modelling tools are realy great and is way faster for prototyping then probuilder… Unity must take some notes from it
I keep an eye on 5’s press because the engine has a lot of adherents whom I respect. It also seems like confidence using Unreal would expand my contracting options in archviz and film. Every time I think, “maybe now is the time to learn,” however, I’m back to putting it off because of some dealbreaker. Currently, it’s the lack of Apple Silicon editor support, which Unity was really fast and competent at supporting, and because Nanite does not work on Metal at the moment. Maybe in 5.1, maybe then, maybe.
I’ve been watching vids of experienced users interacting with the engine as a stopgap. The prospect of reasoning about blueprints the way they do makes my eyes recede in their sockets, so I keep looking out for Unreal’s rumored new scripting language. That seems to be a much longer term prospect than I was originally expecting, though, and I’m not getting any younger. That’s tech for you.
Let’s be honest here, UE5 is a HUGE milestone.
Yesterday I installed the 5.0 release, new project-> VR Template->20 minutes to compile shaders, chose my Oculus 2 and “build and ran” the project, it automatically installed all Android libraries, all project settings for Oculus, compiled the file and pushed it to my head set, and it worked, first time, no errors.
Beautiful graphics, huge amounts of free stuff and a 1 million dollar threshold on profits and license…then there’s Nanite/Lumen/Metahuman… Unreal wants me to succeed in my projects, they put a lot of money/effort into helping Indie studios. The best part…1 shader pipeline…Oh it seems Unreal is moving towards industry standards in virtual production, the next Segway for aging game developers, like me ;-).
I can develop in both, Unity and Unreal at the same time, using each for the strengths on each platform.
It’s more or less how I think. An Engine needs to be functional and stable. I find Unreal very unstable - maybe not for big studios that have their own engineers (they produce patches, extra engine tools). For small companies, indies, Unreal is something - in my opinion - very bad.
I need a stable, comfortable system to produce something and learn from. Individual developers can do very little with the rare tools that exist today and they are still limited. Is there a barrier to be overcome or several…
I know it would be a ‘side game’ that still generates fabulous profits for the company or its executives… (I doubt they will revert to developers’ salaries - as USUAL in this ‘midle’ - games).
To clarify, what I think is happening with CD project red is unreal came up to them and Cut a deal to have a third-party team use unreal develop a Witcher game so they can put a feather in their cap.
Witcher 4 To the best of my knowledge is still using CD project red in-house engine.
and why wouldn’t they?
it would take just as much effort to teach everyone unreal as it would to patch up and improve their engine, While being able to maintain 100% profits.
Do you work at CD Project RED? I highly doubt you can speak for them. And they say they are working closely with EPIC to develop the next big open world game. So I choose to believe what the actual company is publicly saying. Bioware is also switching to Unreal for the next Mass Effect. These are not small side projects. These are one of the biggest names and games around.
My guess is that they are switching because their in-house engines, namely RED and Frostbite, are dumpster fires. Frostbite is well known to be a nightmare to work with unless you’re working on Battlefield. And the latest iteration of Battlefield still has massive technical problems, even to this day. Most people who developed and maintained the engine have since left DICE and EA. Same with CD Project RED, they have an incredibly high turnover between projects which does not create a good environment for in-house engine development. The never-ending technical issues with Cyberpunk, even to this day, signal that the engine is in a poor state.
Apples to oranges comparison. Bethesda’s engine does many things no other engine on the market can handle. It’s why no true Skyrim killer exists. And just because historically AAA industry has not gone from in-house to mass market engines doesn’t mean it can’t happen now. RED and Frostbite don’t do anything Unreal can’t do. In fact, Unreal is likely to be a better fit with Tencent and Fortnite billions bolstering up its feature set and general usability. And in a world of shareholders demanding ever-increasing profits, outsourcing engine development and developer training entirely can make sense. It’s much easier to hire with Unreal in mind, too.
Some sources in the studio please, because you’re claiming the exact opposite of what CD Project RED are communicating:
Big companys. They can pay for work with UE5. For large companies, in my opinion, it’s an excellent engine. They can abuse its advanced technological features. Something more rare and difficult to see in small companies (AAA games, with complex mechanics, etc). UE5 is great for these big companies. For indies, small companies, I think Unity is superior for stability with good rendering performance.
It is sitting on my hdd and I haven’t touched it yet. Oh, wait. It is sitting on my SSD actually. Insane install size like usual, and trying to install it onto HDD didn’t go well. It stuck and after a half an hour, I terminated the install process.
IN my experience, Unreal has awful programming api (and always had awful programming api), and anything else they offer does not change that. One good example of that is that one of the local unreal prophets could not tell how to implement AssetPostProcessor which is a trivial thing in unity. Their fascination with Blueprints doesn’t help either.
Plus, you can write all sorts of asset utilities to batch process any assets/maps. In C++ or blueprints.
And in C++ you prepare commandlets (process without opening editor) to mass import/export/process thousands of assets automatically, i.e. Voice Over with associated facial animation.
If that doesn’t help, could you share details? I know Unity’s thing only from description
The impressive thing about unreal 5 is that it isn’t just graphics. They got amazing improvements and new features to animation, audio, world streaming, AI, and to a lesser extent improvements to compression, pathfinding, game size, and a new physics solution.
Animation and audio got a lot of love.
I do believe unity (HDRP in particular) lost the archviz/artists competition with unreal engine. There’s very few reasons to pick HDRP over unreal for environment art. (ignoring games)
There’s a reason the far majority of artists on art station use unreal. If you search around there’s a ton of showcases/videos, where unity has very few.
From my experience (something strictly personal) I had it much easier in Unity. And I started with something difficult, but I’m studious, with creating character and control. I did my first ‘point and click’ using code (C#) not knowing what a variable was, if not in its broadest sense. Of course, I went ‘step by step’. But the engine helped a lot, my knowledge about 3d, something older, too.
Obviously I stopped here, that’s when I decided to take a lot of steps back and learn the basics of programming. But I decided to learn visual script, even to understand C#, VS is more instructive for me (it helps to understand the logic in practice).
UE uses those ‘blue prints’ - I’m not familiar with it, but it should look something like Unity’s VS (formerly Bolt). I decided to abandon Unreal when my system started to ‘crash’ when simply moving files between folders. This annoyed me a lot with Unreal, as it was a random problem (it happened randomly). I don’t intend to return to Unreal, I think Unity is better for new developers like me. Simple, clear interface - different from EU polluted version 4.27. But that’s a personal thing, a personal preference.
Never had a crash with Unity, nothing - nothing that stopped or made my system stop. Maximum are wrong codes accused in the console.
I will say that the editor crashes a lot more often in unreal for me. Even yesterday I downloaded Lyra (new sample game) and within few minutes editor crashed on me (while restarting the level, something went wrong I suppose)
