We still love Unity (and team members continue to use for other projects and gigs)…but ExtroForge recently made the leap from Unity to Unreal and we’d thought we’d share some notes about our journey.
Hope some of you find this useful!
http://www.extroforge.com/the-switch-from-unity-3d-to-unreal-engine/
Nice write up. It’s always good to hear from people that have actually worked in both engines.
Not so interesting… I can also write a blog why we switched from Unreal to Unity, with solid reasons. See… works in both ways.
Have you made the switch? If you have, could you write a blog post about it?
Most proponents of either engine have only used one extensively. Or they are just parroting what they here on the internet.
The experience of those who have built in both engines is valuable.
I found it quite interesting, actually - given I’m also working with a voxel engine and was considering working on a game in Unreal. I won’t actually switch, but rather create a separate project in each. I really just want to broaden my skills since it’s mostly about learning for me at this point. (Need to get better at C++ for one).
One of the things scaring me away from trying Unreal was what I heard about procedural meshes - but your post helped clear some things up about that.
@casperjeff ,
thanks for sharing.
How long did it take to convert your project & get acquainted well enough with Unreal ?
It seems there’s an awful lot of annoying stuff on the way, so I’ll keep to Unity for now, though… 
Thanks for the write-up. Very detailed and it’s always good to hear a fresh perspective between the two.
We started experimenting with Unreal the first of July…and by the middle of the month, we were in full swing.
While we have made great inroads in converting long-finished features in Unity to Unreal, we still consider our Unreal work semi-prototype. Our biggest concerns have been that while we can get certain features to ‘work’, we are not sure we are doing things the ‘right’ way (or that those ways are scalable, performant and maintainable). With Unity, there was SO MUCH knowledge built up and information about the WRONG way to do things. For all I know, my C++ implementation of certain key features is leaking precious memory.every millisecond. 
That was one element I neglected to add to the writeup - memory and CPU/GPU usage. When I originally experimented with Unreal (long before july), I gave up quickly trying to run on my high-end macbook - it was sluggish and the fan sounded like it was going to spin right out of the machine!. I haven’t gone back to check later versions of Unreal (I understand it has become much more mac friendly). Some of our team members are getting concerned most recently about in-editor memory use…spiking up to 12 (or more?) gigabytes of use - although it spikes…can be a low as 2…or anywhere from 5-7 regularly. We haven’t quite pinned down what aspect of Unreal editor use causes this (blueprint editing? map editing?) - but we are keeping an eye on it. We have not done much analysis (yet) in standalone build memory consumption…but for the most part we follow the cardinal rule “Optimize Later”.
It is interesting. Their reasons for switching will apply to some people, while your reasons for switching will probably apply to different people. The more information there is available, the easier it is for anyone to find out which engine suits their particular case. The answer will not be the same for everyone.
I really enjoyed the write up. Hope Unity staff reads it.
Pretty much confirms my experiences and fears with Unreal - lacking C++ documentation, sketchy asset behavior and lacking procedural mesh functionality for the moment. Other than that, seems like a great engine.
We pretty much found the same thing across the board, using C++ / BP cross is powerful and efficient. After many moons of use if I want to create a char controller with camera / collision system for e.g. it doesn’t take me longer than 10 minutes including animation…
Although it was frustrating trying to figure out what it wanted you to do initially (in every aspect). Also the asset management thing is a pain, ref locators don’t work very well although they were discussing removing that (even if you remove them, had some odd side effects). I also find Unity’s .FBX import system much more accurate. But little things really…
You should really be running a 4790K / Hexacore system with SSD and 32GB of RAM for lightmass. The builds if done well can run on some pretty poor hardware, but the editor does eat away. So that’s a pro for Unity, ALTHOUGH when I had a large scene in editor with Unity the editor would grind nearly to a halt (even in Unity 5) even with a powerful machine then play fine in a build / game mode. Something I never experienced with UE…
I’m at the point now where I find it much quicker / simpler and efficient to use. Even though the initial learning curve was much steeper… With all the tools available, most likely the right move for your project.
P.S CryEngine does look sooo gorgeous, such a shame ain’t it?
The part on UNet really hits home, so much waiting for a below average solution, at least so far. I’m not sure why the timelines are so long for it but definitely a contributing factor to many looking at UE.
This is a very well written piece on a subject that is often colored by engine bias. The one thing I really like about it is that it’s the same project in both engines, which helps to figure out exactly which parts are suited and not suited for that kind of game.
On my own project, my team and I have constantly thrown the idea around of switching over. In concept it seems great, you look at that engine and expect everything to just work the same way. Unfortunately it turns out that there are a huge host of issues waiting for you that you don’t expect. The grass only looks greener from this side.
One of my main fears was the Blueprints vs C#(C++) issue, and your segment on that directly matched my original thoughts on the subject. I’m very thankful you were able to investigate this, as the question has always been in the back of my mind.
Great work!
I found at least on mac that the editor was just too slow to be useful, you would need a monster machine to run it
I found the writeup interesting too. Coincidentally I’m working on something with open world-ish features right now. I was pretty jealous of Unreal’s World Composition, but it looks like Unity 5.3 will give us multi-scene editing before I actually need those features. So that made me happy. Unity’s terrain is also something that is severely lacking. Your article definitely made me want to consider switching for this project. But then I remembered what a complete pain Unreal’s FBX import is to my workflow. I assemble all of my models in Blender, so everything is parented the way I want it. Unity happily plops the imported file in exactly as I assemble in Blender. Unreal unceremoniously dumps all of the meshes into their own objects and expects me to reassemble it. Unity also does a much better job of generating lightmap UVs. Unreal wasn’t happy with a lot of the models I tried unless I did that myself. For me at least, the extra shiny isn’t worth the massive headache that causes.
A reasonably priced gaming PC can easily handle it, but unfortunately an equivalent Mac is a couple thousand.
It performs a lot better with my new Mac with a dedicated GPU. It performed at a level that I could work with when I had only an integrated GPU, but it got the fans going a bit.
It sure can, unfortunately I’m impatient 
… If you have the power it definitely can use it. Most important part is probably the RAM for lightmass…
Import all meshes as separate objects, select them all then drag n’ drop… It’ll place everything where it should be.
Hell every time I update most of a city I ain’t placing by hand again jeez!. It’s all these little nuggets that get ya.
You have no idea how sad it was to put a windows box together to do development over the last few months. My mabook and thunderbolt display sit nearly idle. (REALLY sucks that there is no way to hook that thunderbolt display to my PC)