Unreal vs Unity the staredown!

[Illian.Amerond]

Just curious to the selection of the engine and development platform. Comparing costs and integration platforms I often find Unity 3d to be much more rooust for less cost overall. Just wondering about the selection process if it could be discussed. I have a great deal of experience with Unity and found Unreal to be a real hamfisted trial... perhaps it is taste.

 

[EviltwO]

fps/3d/online/high graphics/high optimization etc. -> never about Unity. It's mostly for lazy devs who won't / unable to program, for nasty managers trying to make project as fast/cheap as possible and for casual projects.
well.. there some examples of sweet games on unity but if you want make an online fps shooter with 3 dimensions of movement and you taking it serious - you will never pick up unity for that.

 

[Juno]

Unreal was pretty weird when I first started looking at it, though I was approaching it for 2D gamedev which there were components for in the engine but when I tried, documentation was nonexistent. I couldn't wrap my head around Blueprints, the logic chain felt like it was in a weird order, like if Yoda rewrote Shakespeare.

I've been using Godot for 2D work, and I've heard it described as 'Unity-like'. Neat that they have the engine free for personal development and learning there, too. Is it well-documented?

 

[Nunaden]

Well, i dunno which i would use. Unity is in my opinion pretty overused and there are many better alternatives. I also never used Unreal before. And after all, i would prefer one of the Cube engines (Cube engine, Cube 2: Sauerbraten engine, Cube 2: Tesseract engine (newest one, pre alpha), or even the engine of the Tesseract fork "Octaforge" (didn't even enter the alpha)) 'cause of the integrated script language (CubeScript) and the integrated (Coop) Edit mode. CubeScript get used to make config files for almost everything (maps, models, textures etc.) or to integrate new models, textures, animation, particles, sounds and more into maps or even games itself. But it would be good for a game like Ember (nor for the game idea i got).

 

[MattVid]

I am currently working on some projects in Unity, I have not had experience in Unreal engines as far as game development.

I think either could be a good choice, I have seen good and bad games in both. As far as if one is a better choice over the other? I would say that would entirely depend on the familiarity with either tool and the team using them.

Don't really want to start getting cynical quite yet, lol, so I will leave it at that

 

[Gdaps]

U4

 

[Joe Solo]

I did a test making a simple demo in unity, and the exact version in unreal. From scratch(By this I mean, I used out of the box unity. I didn't grab any scripts/mods beforehand.)

Unreal was superior imo. It was just easier to cruze through. Including importing a custom character basically on the fly. Unity is a great tool, it just has to many steps to do things that are very basic in standalone unreal.

 

[Grummz]

Unity doesn't have great 1st person or 3rd person camera and other conveniences off the bat. Also the streaming terrain system in UE4 is going to work much better for Ember's large map sizes.

 

[NimbusCloud]

Ember needs horsepower. UE4 has rockets.

 

[Smile]

UE4 Looks like real life

Unity5 I can tell its a game

While this isn't obviously what matters UE4 damn well is an impressive engine compared to others.

 

[Nunaden]

Well, with that what i experienced with unity i would say it would rather be good for platformers etc. Even when im playing a pretty good Unity shooter, i think it could have been far more better on UE and other engines. I think UE would have helped to let the game feel more the way it could have been, like working penetration mechanics (like that the .50 bullets of my tangfolio thor would pierce through the F***ing thin iron wall of a container...), better collusion detection, better lighting, better bullet tracers (you can barely see them, and when you join a running match it needs 30seconds till 1min to render them...) and a bullet dropoff.

 

[Zarkopafilis]

Hey guys I have about 1.5 year of experience with Unreal Engine, coming from Unity3D. You might find Unity's pricing to be better for games that make more money vs Unreal's 5% royalty after some income per Quarter, but Unreal packs a bigger punch. First of all, for games like these, it's pretty easy to alter the Engine's source code to add more feature easily. Also, I wouldn't believe that C++ would be a hard choice for such experienced programmers. Graphics are better, features get added in a much greater pace than Unity. One downside is that multiplayer support on massive scale is still something the company has to implement itself, but with such a background(Firefall), that would be easy .

Also, Unreal has higher lower system requirements but after you pass this stage, adding more stuff doesn't require much resources.

Overall, I'd choose the awesomeness of Unreal Engine.

 

[Hyperg]

Unity is great for small to med scale projects and deploys really well on mobile platforms. It's also a nice tool for fast prototyping, if you've got c# under control (to compensate for the lack of out of the box functionality that Unreal has with premade blueprints and free assets). But you hit the optimization wall really really fast if you project scales past the "medium" marker. My nemesis for the last 4 months was the dynamic loading system for our project, (loosely called streaming) and it has been a really rough ride with how Unity async loading and asset integration works.

@Grummz is absolutely right abt the Unreal streaming feature, which just tips the balance right from the start for what Ember intends to be.

Also, the material editing system, jeez. Try adding a new feature to the standard shader for Unity (if you still need PBR that is) xD. Unreal solved this ages ago.

 

[Zarkopafilis]

@Hyperg If only unreal could add some variables + logic flow (for loops and functions for example), it would be even better

 

[Chadders]

I cant really comment on the usefulness of UE4, but I know its rather easy to get the hang of Unity!

 

[sgghostrider]

I was doing small games in both, Unity5 and UE4, and i should say that UE4 is far superior in nearly any comparision that anyone might make.

Unity4 was very good for 2D and 2.5D games and very weak in the 3D part, with Unity5 they somewhat solved it, but it's still not good enough to be compared with UE4, because this last one was made specifically for High Quality games(normally 1st and 3rd person) with high complexity of volumetric light, high quality particles, hi-res textures and hi-poly meshes and it's very compatible with 3rd party file formats for the assets and easy method to import and export them.

Anyway the proof is out there, you only have to look at the games created with Unity and the games created with UE4, it's like making the comparision between Super Mario Galaxy and GTAV XD.

PS: I have access to the beta of LawBreakers and i can't be more impressed, the game is done with UE4 and looks so damn amazing, and looking at other games it's always the same, high quality everywhere.

 

[NeoUSMCVet]

Facts:
Unreal- C++ and plugins for JS, Visual coding (Blueprint) - payment model is based on product market performance. Dedicated Server is built in to the Engine and available as your game develops.

Unity - C#, JS, Boo, Lua, Native (tools for visual scripting are available at a price)
Payment model is based on Annual sales. you pay more as your product succeeds. No native Dedicated Server options use of Unity Networking is required unless you build your own dedicated server from scratch.(Unity currently working on this as a future feature)

Unreal would be the ideal platform simply for the shear size of the world. Since the max landscape size for unity (currently developing an open world shooter in Unreal and Unity as a comparison project) is 4097, and Unreal is 8000 you could create much larger land sizes in unreal by default. HOWEVER, Unreal has one advantage. Which is Tiled Landscapes. You could seamlessly import tiled landscape (height-map that is sliced into smaller sections) that is over 50000 X 50000 and stream them at runtime with absolutely no coding and optimal performance. Where as unity needs to be coded to do so. There are plugins and user created tools to do this but it is not native to unity and must be purchased if not developed by you.

Rigging and Animation mechanics in regards to shader support and movement are much smoother in Unreal. Unity has mechanim which is much much simpler to use than unreal. Also the SimpleMove functions of unity can hardcoded into your movement scripts. Animation morphing and masking with the use of blendspaces and blendstates in unreal is more ideal to Ember based on engine performance and the abundant gameplay styles.

As a level designer, I can say that unreal is much more versatile than Unity. Sculpting, texturing and material creation is far more advanced in terms of actual development.

Based on just this Unreal although more complex than unity would be the ideal Engine for Ember.

 

[Waspyeh]

Unreal engine for the win. Unity lacks a lot of development features. Ive played some unity games and it wasn't as great as games designed in Unreal 4

 

[Tominakc]

Also what's to my knowledge, unity is far less performance conservative, speaking for many things like RAM and graphics. You'll often find games which shouldn't be too costly in terms of hardware to barely work on even the best hardware because of this. But then again just make sure your garbage collection is spot on and not to make textures and models too complex and you'll have an easy time optimizing a game for lower end hardware. Also probably the worst part about unity is that it claims it's free when it acctually isn't, to get the tool for diagnosis and debugging you need to pay...

 

[Zarkopafilis]

Facts:
Unreal- C++ and plugins for JS, Visual coding (Blueprint) - payment model is based on product market performance. Dedicated Server is built in to the Engine and available as your game develops.

Unity - C#, JS, Boo, Lua, Native (tools for visual scripting are available at a price)
Payment model is based on Annual sales. you pay more as your product succeeds. No native Dedicated Server options use of Unity Networking is required unless you build your own dedicated server from scratch.(Unity currently working on this as a future feature)

Unreal would be the ideal platform simply for the shear size of the world. Since the max landscape size for unity (currently developing an open world shooter in Unreal and Unity as a comparison project) is 4097, and Unreal is 8000 you could create much larger land sizes in unreal by default. HOWEVER, Unreal has one advantage. Which is Tiled Landscapes. You could seamlessly import tiled landscape (height-map that is sliced into smaller sections) that is over 50000 X 50000 and stream them at runtime with absolutely no coding and optimal performance. Where as unity needs to be coded to do so. There are plugins and user created tools to do this but it is not native to unity and must be purchased if not developed by you.

Rigging and Animation mechanics in regards to shader support and movement are much smoother in Unreal. Unity has mechanim which is much much simpler to use than unreal. Also the SimpleMove functions of unity can hardcoded into your movement scripts. Animation morphing and masking with the use of blendspaces and blendstates in unreal is more ideal to Ember based on engine performance and the abundant gameplay styles.

As a level designer, I can say that unreal is much more versatile than Unity. Sculpting, texturing and material creation is far more advanced in terms of actual development.

Based on just this Unreal although more complex than unity would be the ideal Engine for Ember.

The Js plugin of UE sucks...seriously. Also, on a game on such size, blueprints aint going to be used for nothing. Level streaming is indeed a kickass feature but when you add multiplayer and seamless travel into the mix, stuff gets hard (and require code) . I still await support for origin shifting in order to fight the inaccuracy of float points issue with Unreal Units (centimeters in world space) when away from origin.

Regarding animations, unreal is powerful but missing some features that are going to be soon implemented on the following verisions (4.13-4.14+), with ART (Animation and Rigging Toolset) v2. One downside is that ART is only compatible with Maya (not even the LT version - which doesnt support python scripting).

I still vouch for Unreal though.