Unity vs Unreal (I'm Seriously Considering Switching To Unreal)

[@thomasbrush]

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[@jadhajali2804]

Tradition/habit is the corpse of evolution/progress. 5 years of you learning ue5 can be the equivalent to you using unity for another 10 years, assuming ue5 is 50% more efficient and practical. keep that in mind. Good luck on your journey either ways.

[@DarthMerlin]

The best engine for 2D games is Godot in my opinion. With Unity, you have to jump through a ridiculous number of hoops just to make 2D work. Miziziziz has a video where he makes a basic platformer in less than ten minutes.

[@Meow-or-Never]

I am myself working on a small project to raise 1.5k to get a better build that can run unreal. Unity seems to bring up bugs and issues constantly, and it gives me the feeling that I am trying to fit a puzzle together just so I can have a chance at using the features you need. URP removed sun shafts effect, you now need an asset for it. Experimental terrain tools are not included in my unity version, folder structure becomes hard to navigate and could use a visibility improvement like colored folders(out of the box). It is sad because I grew up with Unity, and it seems that I might have to switch.

[@fatikalkathiri1393]

Unity is dieing

[@DarthMerlin]

@@fatikalkathiri1393 Doesn't matter to me. I've spent seven years learning it. I'm not starting over.

[@KhroMcKrakken]

I started in Unreal as a 3D Artist, and I'm more of an artist than a programmer. I remember you've said the same. When I've tried Unity, I struggled, because you do need to have a bit more of a programmer's mindset imo. If you're more logical than artsy, you will have an easier time with Unity. If you're more artsy, Unreal will be easier to understand. And despite what you say here, Unreal does look better out of the box. You can create amazing AAA looking graphics with Unreal out of the box without actually trying, especially now with nanite and lumen. And if you want to make an open world, Unreal already has out of the box open world levels with occlusion culling. Plus Epic works with Quixel to have a free megascans asset library for Unreal users (super useful) as well as offering Quixel Mixer for free for Unreal users (if you choose to use it, I don't but it's there). Does that mean Unreal is always better graphically? Absolutely not. Unity can 100% match Unreal's graphics, but you have to work a lot harder to get there. And the free monthly Unreal marketplace assets.... I have so many... Even if you stay with Unity, you should start collecting those free assets, just in case. Obviously there are way more Unity programmers than Unreal, but I'm sure that'll change soon. The devs I've spoken to who've switched to Unreal from Unity have said that if you already know how to make a game, it won't be too difficult to translate that to Blueprints. The most confusing hurdle from what I understand is the difference in naming conventions. Like GameObject vs Actors, PreFabs vs Blueprints, or Raycast vs Line Trace. But again, I started in Unreal. It's where I'm comfortable. And a lot of people stick with Unity for the same reason, it's where they're comfortable. I gotta say though that I do get excited at the idea of you learning Unreal and extending the FTGD program to include it. I do recommend though to stop seeing Unreal as a AAA game builder. It's not. It's made to be easy to use for devs of all levels to do more with less effort. I recommend after you finish your current game, when you get a bit of time for yourself, to play around with Unreal just see the differences. Make a tiny bite sized game. Understand where you might have challenges if you ever decide to switch to it. And if Unity remains where you're comfortable, then don't ever worry about switching. You'll make Unity work for you.

[@Malak-rb6vu]

Absolutely fantastic point of view 💯

[@knightingirl]

Hey, I'm also a 3D artist looking who wants to dive into game dev, I've decided to choose unreal as my game engine. Can you tell me how you started learning unreal and the steps you took, if you don't mind? What tutorials did you watch?

[@KhroMcKrakken]

​@@knightingirl I'm still learning. Programming doesn't stick in my brain very well so I'm always looking for tutorials and courses to look at things differently. I can recommend a few things. Most of the courses I look for though are ARPG based, since that's what my project is based around. I don't use KZbin super often for full courses, but I use it mostly for hunting for how to do specific things, or at least something close to what I'm going for and than try to work it towards my needs. But if you want to start with KZbin, a good start is "Blueprint Communications | Live Training" from the Unreal Engine channel. It's a long watch but it goes through the basics as well as some simple but important componants like doors and health systems. Another one that's a very simple ARPG course designed around setting up the bare bones prototype of an ARPG that does a good job of explaining things is the "Unreal Engine Tutorial RPG Series" playlist by Crystal Clear Game Studios. And aside from that a few channels to follow are UNF Games have decent tutorials, even some copies, like they recently covered making a hookshot from Zelda. Smart Poly has similar stuff. They also have an Unreal Engine 5 Blueprint for Beginners course that's similar to the one from Unreal Engine, but covers a few other components. Matthew Wadstein is good to explain specific parts of Blueprints. I didn't get much from his videos UNTIL I had somewhat of a grasp on Blueprints, and then he phrases it in a way that it's easier to understand. I always recommend And PrimaticaDev... I watch him mostly for his DevLogs. He makes things look easy and it's very inspiring. So I recommend him for gaining motivation. His Unreal animation series is really good though. The course that helped me the most though isn't on KZbin. It's $30. It used to be on Udemy, but the instructor got screwed over so I don't think it's there anymore. And after going through this course and learning a bit on my own, I now understand that the way he does things in his Blueprints isn't best practices. There are better ways for pretty much everything, so the components you learn to put together... don't get married to them. Learn other ways to do them on KZbin. But it's the way he taught it that helped me understand how blueprints, variables, enums, interfaces all work together. I'm gonna break the link up so KZbin doesn't get angry at me. It's unrealenginemastery . teachable . com / p / souls-like-action-rpg-game-with-multiplayer Also don't worry too much about the multiplayer. Multiplayer is complicated, as you'll learn there. I would find a different course for that. I haven't found one that makes it simple enough to understand yet. There's another one similar to this I just bought on Udemy that's "Unreal Engine 5 Soulslike Melee Combat System", which looks way more impressive, but I haven't gotten into it yet. And there's a bunch of good courses on Udemy. Just none that have helped me as much as the one above has. Also, if you need notes to remind yourself of everything like me, because I'm ADHD as heck, I recommend using workflowy. Game dev is super complicated, and workflowy let you put notes within notes within other notes. Sorry for the wall of text but hope it helps!

[@knightingirl]

@@KhroMcKrakken Yeah, it helps. Thanks.

[@evan.r3id]

Honestly it dosent matter which engine you pick out of the two both of them are just going to keep getting better than each other in certain aspects.

[@sealsharp]

Unitys problem is that for everything you want to do, there are two packages: * One that has some important things missing and is no longer developed since 2017 * The replacement which is in prerelease since 2017, still hasn't gotten all the features of the old system and will priobably slightly buggy until 2027 when it will de deprecated in favour of the next package that won't be production-ready until 2045.

[@DarthMerlin]

Having to wait ten minutes for an empty project to open up is another thing I'm not crazy about.

[@BeatleGeuse_]

FR

[@Domarius64]

Then stop using so many packages. I use one package- Rewired, it solves all cross platform gamepad issues. I make everything I need myself.

[@Domarius64]

@@DarthMerlin get an nvme ssd and install both Unity and your project to that. Starts in 30 seconds.

[@sealsharp]

I wouldn't complain about store assets. It's bothersome when it's essentials like RenderPipelines, UI, Network, Input.

[@TorQueMoD]

So I'll give you some personal insight into switching game engines. I started my game design journey with Half-Life 1 back in 1999 and eventually switched to Source when HL2 came out (2004). In this case, it was barely like switching engines, more of an upgrade because HL 1 and 2 both shared the same level design software. For years I didn't want to move away from the Source engine because I knew it so well and I was worried it would take me forever to learn a new engine. Eventually, in 2009 I decided to make the switch to UDK (Unreal 3), and to be honest, it wasn't really as difficult as I thought it would be. It took me about a year to feel really comfortable with UDK, but for the most part, it was really quite similar to Source and I learned the basics in about 2 months. So my advice; don't let your knowledge of one engine prevent you from trying another one, even if it's just for a week or two. You might be surprised by how much more you learn. I've actually been thinking of playing around with Unity for this exact reason. Maybe I think Unreal is the best engine, but I could be missing out on some amazing benefits of Unity. Never let fear drive your decisions.

[@bovineox1111]

Sure you can swap but leaving behind a lot of code potentially as well and yeah I'd say a year is fair, maybe less if full time. It then has to not have the same or different warts and all as to make the switch worth it.

[@IamDaveDev]

Wait, you worked on HL1 and 2? That’s freaking awesome!

[@gfujigo]

This is golden advice. Thank you.

[@FreeSpeechXtremist]

I've been a Dev for 20 years and I generally write as much code from scratch as possible. I started using unity about 6 years ago and it's a good tool but I have switched to unreal this year and it's superior in almost every way. A little bit of growing pains switching over but I would even say the interface is easier to learn.

[@SnrubSource]

My biggest pain going from mapping in Source 2 to mapping in Unreal and Unity is that their level editors are absolutely terrible compared to Source 2's

[@EricOlorunfemi]

I feel you don't need to switch. You could simply just add it to your tools and use it where appropriate. No harm in knowing both. It takes like a few weeks to know your way around the interface of unreal if you're not rushing. But the advancements of unreal simply can't be ignored. They've put the power of AAA studios in the hands of Indie devs... Ultimately, it's the creator that matters more than the tool. But the tool still makes a huge difference. Oh, and let's not forget Unreal's Animation features which are practically second to none when it comes to 3D games.

[@ZephrusPrime]

I've been using Unreal since Unreal 3. Seeing where it's at now is mind blowing. It's never been a better time to be into Game Dev.

[@fabiosarts]

me too, i've learned most of OOP and how game engine works thanks to UDK and UC, it has plenty of tools, yet it's more complicated at the same time

[@RELIM_RO]

Right now unreal is great for studios, but for an indie, I say this is the worst engine to use. Like literally I have experience with Unreal if you try to do almost anything the engine crashes, gives extremely low performance, unknown errors when building for no reason. (I have 50 fps in the base open world scene provided by unreal engine with a rtx 3070). In my 6 years of experience with Unity the engine never crashed (Except if I made an infinite loop)

[@fabiosarts]

@@RELIM_RO yes!, i remember having an index error that only happens when cooking the game, there was a reference of a resource that was deleted. There was no way to automatically find it xD

[@xanderxv16]

How much does Unreal Engine 3 cost

[@fabiosarts]

@@xanderxv16 The original engine is paid, but there's a free version called UDK, but i'd only suggest to use it as a curiosity only. You can still use engines like Unity/Unreal 4 and 5 for free

[@osmanerenkose6692]

I think Unreal Engine has a great future with lumen, nanite ,megascans and many other features. Edit after 8 months: I was using UE but I switched to Unity lol. It's better for indies

[@dreambadger]

Data layers is interesting too.

[@arcanep]

Yeah but bot for a small studio imo it’s overwhelmingly too much and just toooooo much

[@splitupgamesofficial]

@@kehath762 you mean screen space that has awful optimization? DX12 only for next gen consoles? Oh wait that only unity pro. Unity is too limited imo

[@NoName-dc5df]

@@splitupgamesofficial There's GI using ray marching, but also raytraced GI.

[@LukiGames0]

Yes but you can make use of it only if you have a big team to make assets that can look on pair with megascan assets. I am working with Unreal on my game but mostly on stylised artstyle due to workload on realistic graphic.

[@mattdehaven3382]

I have used UE for about 11 years. I have always toyed with learning Unity and about a year ago I took the plunge. My current project is in UE5, but my time in Unity made a significant difference in my development cycle, and made me look at a few workflows differently. This helped me a ton with efficiencies. I would recommend anyone serious about game development to learn both.

[@MurattiOmer]

Dude i agree with u %100!!! trying to learning new game engine, new techs, new features and most important for me doing a job differently from what you actually do or doing the same job in a different way gives people a different perspective in game dev. This could be blueprint,C++,C# etc etc.

[@lilgamedev]

As someone starting out game development in unreal, it’d be very interesting to follow someone else’s journey in unreal and the documentation of their workflow, especially from the perspective of a seasoned unity dev.

[@stickguy9109]

Check out pontypants

[@lilgamedev]

@@stickguy9109 Thx for the recommendation, his contents seems to be just what im looking for!

[@stickguy9109]

@@lilgamedev No problem. Ponty is great

[@coolraygaming]

@@stickguy9109a fellow pontypants fan!

[@aus10garc]

And now?

[@manoelBneto]

You're focusing on the wrong features. Open world games *need* proper streaming and underlying systems for keeping your runtime performance and memory budgets under control. Unity has very little of that. Prepare yourself to spend a large portion of your development time writing world streaming systems, figuring out via trial and error the countless gotchas you need to avoid in order to minimize async scene/prefab loading stutter, how to keep memory from ballooning without calling UnloadUnusedAssets, trying to write an efficient origin shifting system if your world gets larger than 4km², figuring out what to do about terrain. It's a lot, not to mention that certain Unity features like Enlighten and Umbra occlusion culling simply do not scale to really large worlds (take a million years to bake and need a PC with a ton of RAM). Meanwhile the features for large open worlds have been old news in Unreal for a while: proper async level streaming (including configurable time-sliced object initialization), world composition (which breaks the world in tiles and does all the bookkeeping of what needs to load/unload for you), in-editor traditional LOD creation, the HLOD system (which can create merged low poly versions of entire parts of the world to act as proxies for unloaded areas at a distance). Basically everything that Fortnite uses to make it's massive island with dynamic TOD and destructible everything work well even on low end platforms is already there as standard engine features. TL/DR: it's all peach and roses in Unity when you're making 2D or small scale 3D games, but when you try to scale up you'll spend a lot of time fighting the engine and reinventing the wheel.

[@Agent.Michael_Scarn]

Think Unity’s new policy has made this decision for you now

[@sabiplaypuzzles7332]

Yes, that's the only positive thing I can personally take from this.

[@imraanakollo-arenz1449]

I switched from Unity to Unreal for my end of year university project and it was pretty good. I'm definitely gonna keep with it going forward. Switching to Unreal for the next game can yield content as you can make devlogs about the game and videos about your Unreal journey. Epic also gives away free assets every month so if you just keep claiming you'll have a lot of stuff that can speed up development for you. As an indie I never really focused on Lumen and Nanite that much. You can use it for stylized stuff too. I mean, a lot of anime/anime aesthetic games are being made using UE. Your game dev know how doesn't magically disappear when switching engines. You just have readjust to the workflow and you can still apply what you learned when developing. They even have documentation for Unity refugees to help acclimate. I'd say try it out for a few mini games or a game and see how you feel. Generally I feel using both helps because then you can switch between which engine you think would be best for what you want to do.

[@sosasees]

i prefer Godot over Unity, because of these benefits: • it's made by an open-source community, so Godot is shaped to the needs of its users • it's much easier to preserve games made with it: every Godot stable version that they ever published can be downloaded from their website, so if you have your old game project backed up you can still open it • i find it much easier than Unity, because its editor makes sense and i don't feel like my whole project will break from just 1 wrong click • i don't have to fear toxic posts on Godot forums

[@imperfectgamedev7533]

After 10 years, I'm an Unreal fanboy, but the #1 rule of productivity is "go with what you know". I have used Unreal do make mobile games even though Unity would have been better. I got them done, and that's what counts. Most of the time, I work on 3D games, so Unreal is my bread and butter. Nothing wrong with just working within your limitations.

[@tiksman17]

This is indeed the best advice, work with what you know best.

[@ghostradiodelete]

I know Unity and Godot well, and I'm just now stepping into Unreal but I'm making 2D games like Thomas, and I've found that just doing that seems like a herculean effort, and I'm not sure the effort is justified. Now, if I ever wanna make a FPS, I might reconsider Unreal. Just for a point and click 2D adventure game though, Unreal is overkill. Hell, Unity might be overkill in some ways. I love Unity though, maybe not the company themselves, but the engine design works well for me. Anyway after making my same game's core functions in all three engines, I've concluded that Unity is the one that will be easiest with the most features for 2D games, and, like you said, it's the one I know best!

[@tiksman17]

@@ghostradiodelete For a 2D point and click, even Unity is an overkill imho. I'm using Visionaire Studio for this kind of games.

[@ghostradiodelete]

@@tiksman17 It might be, but my game is not just a point and click game and it would be a ton of work, if even possible at all, to make it in an engine like Visionaire or AGS. Besides having used all of those I can safely say, comparing the toolsets and such to those engines? Yuck. No thanks.

[@tiksman17]

@@ghostradiodelete Sure, if it's not a pure point and click, I guess Unity is your best bet.

[@PabloTheDolphin]

I personally feel like I've reached the peak of my career with unity as a senior game developer bar starting my own studio. And my previous role was at unity themselves. In terms of big name companies to work for, if I want more progression in my salary and seniority, I need to ditch C# and move diagonally with UE5 as my life boat to be that much more attractive to hiring managers.

[@deepelements]

I used Unity for over 10 years at my last job and once the studio switched to Unreal we never looked back. I've used most engines out there and Unreal has been a game changer for me it's just simply amazing.

[@gfujigo]

Why is it amazing and why did the studio never look back? I am thinking of switching.

[@alzearafat]

Care to elaborate?

[@oshinwane6902]

amazing for what type of game?

[@halfbakedproductions7887]

I tried Unreal. Gave up when nothing worked as expected (even when following the tutorials religiously to the letter - stuff just straight up didn't work and there were no errors or warnings) and the editor made my brand new £2000 PC sound like it was about to blow up. What a pig. The editor is cluttered and clunky to the point where even Unity looks like award-winning Apple design. I was using a 1440p monitor and it was still a mess. There is also an industry-wide meme and moan that UE is ruining things because all the games built in it look and play alike. I have to say that I agree. Unity may be skeletal out of the box and require 14 billion 3rd party packages to make it worthwhile, but it's less intimidating and arguably more versatile in the type of games you can make with it. Unreal is just for shooters, boring walking simulators, and those identikit games like Spiderman that have a draw distance of 800 miles because why not.

[@temotskipuri3151]

​@@halfbakedproductions7887Username checks out

[@generalcjg]

Welp, now you certainly got an excuse to switch to Unreal since Unity now wants to charge extra fees to developers having their games using the Unity engine, starting in January 2024.

[@reikooters]

I'm not a game dev (have recently started learning Unity for fun in my own time), but as a developer who also has a decade of experience in C#, I definitely suggest you at least give Unreal a try, just to learn something different. With all your experience, there's probably very little you don't know or can't do, even though you say you still have to google stuff. That means that you're not doing much growing any more. For myself, C# is getting to a point now where it has a lot of legacy baggage. This probably doesn't affect game dev much and Mono is years behind the main C# language anyway. Though I saw in the recent dotnet conf they showed Unity are in the process of ditching mono and moving to .NET 7 finally. Besides tinkering with Unity, for something different I've also been learning Rust (programming language) whenever I have spare time. It's humbling to go back to being a noob and struggling with the basics again and build up your knowledge but this time with your past experience in the back of your mind. It makes you think in different ways than what you are used to. I think much of your skills with Unity will carry over in some way to Unreal. At least try making a small project with it. You may find that either you really like it and want to keep using it, or it won't totally sell you and you'll go back to Unity - but if you do go back, I'm sure it'll make you think in different ways than you are used to and it'll make you better with Unity than you were before. It's a new year and it's been 10 years. It's time to broaden your horizons.

[@harlzthedev]

I started out making games in UDK so I have this connection with the UE4 and 5 engines, but there's something about the community that's been built around unity that is just so compelling plus c# is so much easier to comprehend as a beginner compared to C++

[@steven3314]

Unreal C++ is not ordinary C++, it's like C# with built-in GC. Not to mention the powerful Blueprint visual scripting language for prototyping and VFX. I found new books on Amazon about UE5 C++ programming which are also very useful for beginners.

[@harlzthedev]

@@steven3314 thanks I’ll look into that

[@halfbakedproductions7887]

@@steven3314 Blueprint is a mess. Writing the code is in some cases actually easier.

[@stevenpike7857]

I Used to be a Unity fanboi, but I forced myself to learn UE5 using Cobra Code's tutorials. I said I would focus and force myself to spend 30 days learning Unity everday regardless of how frustrated I got - and I got plenty frustrated and hated UE5 the first week. I am past 30 days and I am loving it, after about 4 days of frustration, wishing they did things like Unity. When you are used to something, you don't like change, but after 30 days, it's now my engine of choice. I absolutely love everything about it. First week, I was frustrated with how bloated it seemed, now after 30 days, I realize it's not and just as modular as Unity, but superior in so many ways, in my opinion. 2D and 2D / 3D hybrids with FlipBook plug in is a freaking dream. So glad I got off my Unity addiction. They even introduced and are continuing to develop their AI Agent plugin - which is like Unity's MLAgents, but it works, and UE takes it seriously.

[@CoffeeAI201]

Probably a good switch but I imagine unreal will have other issues of its own.

[@vladkostin7557]

It has. I tried to switch after 10+ years with unity. Unity is way more stable than Unreal 5 (crashed multiple times a day), it so much lighter to run, there was a ton of visual bugs in unreal, etc. But it would be worth it for many projects.

[@realdlps]

@@vladkostin7557 What did you do? I haven't had a crash since early access

[@KekoahJones]

Yeah every engine is better and worse in different aspects

[@mgodoi3891]

​@@vladkostin7557 Really? for me is the opposite. Everytime i try to give Unity a chance i got random crashes and need to restart the engine. Even UE alpha versions are more stable and reliable than Unity LTS versions. Could be something with my hardware, maybe? Also one thing Unity got me crazy is nonsense errors on a blank project.

[@owdoogames]

@@mgodoi3891 There isn’t such a thing as a ‘blank’ Unity project… not when compared to (for example) a blank Godot or LÖVE project. It’s what threw me when I first started using Unity after those 2 engines - it creating folders containing thousands of files totalling hundreds of megabytes before its even had a single object added to a single scene!

[@marcusstorage6944]

Let me just start by saying that people should absolutely use whatever game engine that want to. If you want to start from scratch even, go for it. However, videos like this give people the wrong impression about what they should care about when choosing a game engine. Focusing on Unreal's new features is a mistake. They're cool and all, but you're right when you say that most indies won't need them. That being said, most indies also haven't been building games in Unity for 10 years. What everybody overlooks with UE is all the foundational stuff that's included that makes it so much faster for indies to start building games. Do a search for UE Gameplay Framework. Look at Data tables. Look at the Gameplay Ability system. Look at all the movement components. All of these things and more are built by AAA developers and the code is available to use, learn from, and modify as needed. You have 10 years worth of code and experience that you've built up that can fill in that hole for you, but for most indie developers they'd come out much farther ahead if they invested in learning Unreal instead. You mentioned that Unity has more tutorials and that Unity is constantly adopting and dropping features, but didn't make the connection that the result is a lot of those tutorials actually have outdated information that doesn't work. Unity's also had to come out with new systems like the new UI system and new Input system because the old systems were just gross. People like to talk about how much content is out there for Unity, but they don't mention how much of it is bad information filled bad practices, outdated, or teaching you how to do stuff that would just come out of the box in UE. Also, you might want to rethink your assumptions about the future of the Unity game engine. Unity's business model is increasingly moving towards advertising and game operation. The game engine side is growing, but at a slower pace than the operation side. Their market share for the game engine is mostly due to mobile which means they don't really have any reason to make technological improvements. You can see plenty of evidence of where their focus is by looking at the topics of their videos from their recent Unite event.

[@lordviator]

I'm in a similar position. 10ish years of Unity, and accumulated a huge library of assets over the years. I'm strong in c#, and next to nothing in c++. These are the biggest reasons I've never made the leap. Well, over this Christmas I decided i'm finally ready to put in the precious time, and learn the Unreal engine. Now, I must stress that i am EARLY in my journey, but so far what it has immediately highlighted to me is the problem with Unity that I already knew... Unity have slapped on and stitched together so many features over the years, that it has become a Frankenstein's monster! Everything has become so convoluted and compartmentalized, that the workflow is slow and painful. Anyone that uses Unity will know what I'm talking about here. In Unreal, I have immediately noticed that so much of what I need is just ready and available, and easy to access (once I know where to find it). I don't know if this assessment will stand in the long run, but this is where I am at right now.

[@ErikLevelUp]

I made the switch to Unreal Engine about 6 months ago after hobbyist deving in Unity for 4 years to start my first commercial game. Very happy with the decision so far. Unreal has so much built in that Unity requires countless plugins to fill in the gaps for. It gives you so much less technical debt to deal with. That is the biggest difference to me.

[@lukarisisgaming]

yes... the same goes for me... have the exact same story.. And using UE for 1 year now, I never regretted it.. just the opposite.. I wish, I would have changed earlier

[@drednac]

I have 8 years of Unity and I am also professional and I had the opportunity to work with Unreal for a smaller project and so far it doesn't look like I would like to switch to Unreal. Lumen and Nanite are game changes, but not as much because of the results, but rather massive productivity improvements. I have been working on a detailed 3D games and setting up the lighting in Unity is a lot of work. You have reflection probes, you have light probes and you have lightmaps which needs proper UVs and topology of the meshes. All these things needs to be set up manually for you specific environment piece by piece and there are still imperfections that are unavoidable. In Unreal Engine 5 these are not your concern at all, forever .. But writing anything in C++ with the massive lack of quality information is going to mess up your productivity massively and the learning curve is steep. The code is in average 3x as much and when something goes wrong not only that your game will crash, but almost always the editor crashes too so you are restarting the UE over and over. The stack traces are less helpful, and with C++ there are so many more ways how to shoot yourself into your foot, some of the bugs can get really nasty and hard to find. But the tools seems better and engine is fast and have great features, it's just not as developer friendly or to be more accurate not nearly as developer friendly.

[@ashir.javed6]

I have had the same issues and more, to the point i hated unreal at one point but i have grown to not expect much from it anymore

[@duramirez]

This didn't age well with the current Unity Exodus 😆

[@marularch]

Although it's a valid question, I think you're focusing on wrong things. If you want to continue working with a small team you will most probably not utilize nanite and lumen that much. The things you should focus on (with my limited knowledge of unreal) could be partially loading maps for an open world game for example... Or the amazing system of using blueprints for everything... I feel like you will probably change your mind once you get into working on that game ;)

[@SoloPython]

I've been watching this guy for a while and he is an artist. NOT a programmer. DONT FOOL YOURSELF

[@graysonlorenz1441]

Generally speaking, your skills as a dev will translate, and your domain knowledge will be about all you're losing, 80%+ skills you developed in unity will translate to unreal. Senior software engineer here. I've had to bounce between languages and engines several times in my career and usually the transition time is not nearly as large as one is afraid it'll be. Syntax has minor changes between things, some languages have more or less efficient bones, but you'll find and work with/around those things pretty quick like.

[@noven329]

I agree. In my opinion, no developer should ever rely on a single technology only, but be able to adapt to new technologies that surge.

[@Ash-vt5cp]

yep, the concepts are the same, it's only the syntax that's different

[@7heQuaX]

I started using Unity over 10 years ago. Starting with UnityScript and Boo and quickly started learning C#. Last year I also thought about switching to unreal. More, because Unitys decision making. But also because of buggy packages and sometimes weird or outdated documentations. At work I am still using Unity, also for private prototyping, but started learning UE, too.

[@Sligili]

In Unity lacks so much of the basic stuff and has a lot of half-assed/barely-working features (DX12 still runs like shit), and it's really frustating when Unreal has all the stuff u need to pay like 80$ to get in Unity, but for FREE. Unreal may be harder for starters but it's so worth it imo. I kinda regret starting with Unity now.

[@aryavatan]

Any update to your stance here given the recent news from Unity updating their pricing?

[@CobraCode]

Both have their pro's and cons and I started out with Unity. Switched to Unreal Engine about 5 years ago and didn't regret it one bit... until I wanted to start making 2D games again. Turns out though that you actually CAN make 2D (or rather 2D/3D hybrid) games in Unreal Engine and even make use of Lumen, Post Processing and Niagara to give it a very distinct look! The learning curve is a bit steep though since there's not a lot of documentation about it and you're of course not gonna target less powerful devices.

[@GabrielAguiarProd]

What a great video! Well I hope Unity keeps up with some features it tries to implement instead of dropping them so quickly.

[@pimeine]

Hello, I'm a new baby indie game dev 😆 In 2013 I was using Unity a lot but after few years of doing university and no game dev, in 2021 I've been looking the both and chosen Unreal for the Fees and the possibility to use C++ later. Right now for some courses I'm using Unity but definitely prefer Unreal ! What I like with Unreal is that the dev team are doing showcases to announce and show their new features, even if the community isn't as big as Unity it's still here and have decent documentations. ► In my opinion, you should give Unreal a try, the work won't be 100% lost if it doesn't fit with Unreal (It's not because we use Unreal 5 we have to use nanite or lumens, you can also work with LTS previous versions). But yeah, when you are really good with Unity and almost never touched Unreal this could feel like a wall (Got that feeling while doing the Unity course and everything got fine, did a little RPG where the player only collect coins lol)

[@deenman23]

this did not age well

[@nuruluin9840]

Well that ending aged like fine milk

[@curaxu]

as a linux developer - i switched to godot. kudos for those with the courage to change! if i could, i'd have taken a closer look at unreal. i remember UE 4 when i was in school and its gotten a lot better from what i can see. you'll be right at home in no time - a lot translates!

[@Wineblood]

I'm starting gamedev soon and I'll be using godot, it rarely gets talked about.

[@Malak-rb6vu]

@@Wineblood Me too!

[@ioneocla6577]

Unreal isn't as painful on linux as it used to be. There is now a pre compiled binary for linux (even an unofficial gtk4 epic games launcher replacement) and you can use rider as your editor although it's not free

[@-Engineering01-]

Unreal has first hand support for Linux bro, i think u can take a look it.

[@chris.davidoff]

The biggest problem I have is that blue prints vs C# are two very different things. If Unreal let me code in C# like I do with Unity, then Unreal would be awesome (except I mostly do 2D, but that aside). It's hardly a comparison, I don't want to use visual scripting, I want code scripting. Unreal doesn't have that offered, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

[@rezalavasani3169]

Love to know your perspective now with all the pricing drama around Unity.

[@sabiplaypuzzles7332]

7:55 You didn't really compare 2700 to 7. Update: I did some more research and in 2020 Unity had 1.5 million Creators/Developers and 2 billion monthly active consumers.

[@DbleOohWoo7]

And by 2025 theyll be lucky to have any…

[@sabiplaypuzzles7332]

@@DbleOohWoo7 right

[@AndrzejGieraltCreative]

This is super informative Thomas. I think I would also stick with Unity. I'm also a bit concerned about having heard about Epic having some sort of ties with Tencent and the CCP but, I don't know a whole lot about that or if anything has changed there since I last looked into it.

[@Nefarious_Bread]

They do have ties with TenCent, not sure about the CCP, but it's probable. There was also all the unethical Epic exclusive fiascos. Also, the fact that they literally use characters from other Intellectual properties without their permission in Fortnite. But they have so much money and Fortnite is so popular that they just pay the fines and keep it pushing. Imma stick with Unity for now for those reasons and also the fact that I'm not trying to make games with AAA graphics anyway. But Unity will have to get ECS DOTS up and running if I'm going to stay with Unity long term.

[@TheAndrejP]

@@Nefarious_Bread giveUnity a couple of monts, they will fire the dlts teem and will councecs

[@cjeff99]

Everybody make sure to check out “Nano Tech”, an upcoming 3rd party Nanite-like solution for Unity.

[@gabe2o2]

I think it’s a wise decision to stick with Unity. It s what you know, and from my perspective, Unity is constantly trying to keep up and surpass the competition. The tech will (likely) come whether it is Unity working on it, or some independent studio working on it and Unity buys it up, similar to what they did with Cinemachine. Someone had started to work on a Nanite for Unity as well (just google Nanite for Unity). Although I’m not super up to date in the project’s progress. Regardless, I hope all continues to go well!

[@Arelenda]

As Unity Dev... I disagree. The last couple of years has been feature after feature that they introduced, implemented poorly or lacked support for, then ditched. If they'd get their ducks in a row and actually focus on delivering quality, I'd be on board, but lately it's been the opposite.

[@gabe2o2]

@@Arelenda I can see where you're coming from, and I think everyone who is a Unity dev can agree it's pretty much one of the most frustrating aspect of working with Unity. That said, there's still a lot of features they do very well on that I don't think folks should take for granted. I've never built a game engine, but I'm sure it's highly complex, and I think Unity ultimately holds market share because what they do provide serves developers greatly to even get to a "releasable" product To me, every product will have its shortcomings. Any choice will be accepting the pros and the cons. At the least, staying committed to features is something a team can improve on

[@colonelb]

I've played a little with Unity but have mostly played with Unreal, and based on my limited experience, Unreal has a lot of nifty features even for stylized low-poly games. There's a ton of AI and material/shader features that as far as I can tell give you a ton more options and capabilities than Unity does. But as Thomas said, ultimately, it's far more important to know ANY tool well if your primary focus is getting the job done. When it comes to any kind of programming or content creation, I recommend folks try a few tools / languages and try and find one that resonates with them. Whether it's Davinci vs Premiere or Angular vs React or AWS vs Azure or even Unity vs Unreal - being kick-ass in SOMETHING is better than being so-so in whatever the new hotness is, so try all the things and pick what you like. Cheers

[@_ciraz_]

Now that Unity posted the article about the charging fee of installations, I am sure a lot of developers will now switch to Unreal.

[@FrankLenhard]

Nice video but the sheet at minute 8 is just so comically skewed. Comparing user base (does this mean all players??) to developer base? market share? of what? all games ever made or top 10 mobile games on appstore?

[@ShieldSniper]

That comparison between unity and unreal at 8:01 is a bit sketchy

[@renzorust7]

I agree with your ending statement that Unity has the bigger side of things or whatever and is statistically better than Unreal. But, I can only agree at this very moment. I think it should be a red flag that an engine with 99.9999% (almost quite literally) less people using it and a significantly less market share value is able to release such game-changing features while Unity pulls off quite the opposite. So yes, as of now, Unity may be the winner. But, I look at it like Unity is the old one (obviously), that will try their best to keep up with the future of itself. It won't ever be able to. It's almost like those movies with time travelers that "know your every move since they've already experienced it". Unity is trying to make moves, but Unreal will beat them to it as they have everything Unity has, and they have the future and modernization on their side. So if I were you, I would look into learning Unreal. Get to a point where you can make a simple, functional game on it. While working on that game, continue what you are doing with Unity. And by then, Unreal will likely have improved even further into becoming the future of video games. I mean, already I wish that some HUGE games could just switch to Unreal because it would make their game SO much better (and likely prettier). That's just my opinion though. You did a really good job analyzing their differences and qualities. Keep up the good work, and have a good one!

[@AlagosGaming4Life]

this video didnt age well

[@a.m.thepro4956]

How

[@michalrv3066]

I'm guessing he is referring to the unity scandal

[@xumakis]

I think even back then he just did not fully understood Nanite in depth. But yes only works for directx12. But the fun part is unreal let you choose to use nanite and lumen for certain platforms or even have both options as fornite does. So it's always a win win.

[@wywarren]

I come from a similar background with 10+ years of Unity dev. The last year or so I’ve been heavily using UE for the work I’ve been doing and although I still keep tabs on the latest and greatest from Unity, there just seems to be so much more depth in many of the solutions they’re coming up with than I can see working with Unity. The transition over was by no means smooth and there is still a ton I have to learn. However depending on the type of games, what you’re trying to do, and the target platforms, I still would recommend Unity to most people making indie titles. I just hope they’re more transparent and active with their roadmap, rather than what’s been going on the last couple of years.

[@jhemerton]

Eu acredito que a melhor ferramenta é aquela que você domina, aquela que você sabe usar para resolver os problemas e no meu caso essa ferramenta é a Unity.

[@luk3dcode]

Seguindo esse princípio, a gente nunca deveria tentar aprender algo novo.... Uma ferramenta é apenas uma ferramenta, você deve usar a melhor opção para o projeto, não para você. Não da pra resolver todos os problemas com um martelo, as vezes você vai precisar usar outras ferramentas.

[@jhemerton]

É uma resposta muito ramificada pelas possibilidades, pelo projeto, as pessoas envolvidas e o próprio tempo. É claro que não disse a respeito de não aprender algo novo, mas sim a respeito de ser bom naquilo, e não se expor a riscos desnecessários.

[@SoulGuitarMetal]

Definitivamente não. Dominei GameMaker e a melhor coisa que fiz foi mudar para Unity. Linguagem obsoleta tão simplificada que torna difícil programar (estilo C mas com menos funções), sem investimento nenhum em novas funções ou tecnologias além da basicão, continua sendo uma ferramenta extremamente rudimentar mesmo desenvolvida a mais de décadas. Abandonar uma ferramenta ruim mesmo depois de investir anos nela para uma melhor vale muito a pena. Agora que estou fazendo trabalhos de visualização 3D realística, tá na hora de abandonar Unity e usar UE.

[@jhemerton]

​@@SoulGuitarMetalOs detalhes sempre importam, não é apenas dominar, mas também resolver os problemas usando a ferramenta. UE vai ser uma melhor solução para muitos problemas específicos como o render por exemplo, mas deixando essa discussão de lado e criando outra, qual seu workflow para criar texturas realista?

[@SoulGuitarMetal]

@@jhemerton O quanto mais simples possível melhor (muito do realismo esta no modelo e na iluminação), separa por tipo (plástico, metal, madeira), fazer uma biblioteca reusável e economizar bastante tempo com coisas prontas de marketplace. Mas ate ai é workflow para visualização de objetos e arquitetura o que costuma ser bem limpo. Jogos tem mais detalhes em cima tipo sujeira e arranhões sem contar baking e texture atlas para otimização e para isso uso Substance Painter e Designer. Materials para jogo é bem mais trabalhoso.

[@falricthesleeping9717]

a bit of a click-bait for sayinjg switching, but then backing out at the end, but I appreciate the fact you brought a good point to the table

[@Basel-ll8fj]

I'm glad I can use both and honestly there is not much difference between the two The main difference is the scripting language and they did a great work to make c++ easy to use, so switching from Unity to Unreal or vice versa should be easy and for me I prefer to work with unreal because I love c++ and Unreal's marketplace is really great and you get a lot of high quality assets

[@ArkaidDeims]

Welcome! I've started to learn Unreal as from a few weeks ago and yes, there is a learning curve, the documentation isn't as good, but man, it works so much better that Unity. I think Unity still has its place in mobile, but if you're targeting PCs and consoles, it's no contest right now. Unreal is the best engine.

[@thegamedevcave]

i started out in unreal because of blueprint VS but i quickly found that it felt pret slow and somewhat limited to work with that so i gave unity a try and even though switching to C# intimidated me i'm really happy i gave it a shot because for programming, i much prefer it over blueprint. Now... i'm also trying slowly to get my feet back into unreal with C++ and see how that compares. because as much as i love unity for C#. i do think i felt more positively about unreal's material editor and particle systems. which are also pretty important in the whole scope of making a game. Still, if it turns out C++ isn't for me, i'll likely stick with unity C# over unreal blueprint .. at least for the time being.

[@khanlakhno2757]

*I literally laughed at the 50$ tag for your set of ps brushes :D*

[@TegridyMadeGames]

Unreal will tank this company in coming years. Maybe TRY the engine before you make a video. I just switched, I'm making games 100x faster and 100x better graphics with 100x better performance. Oh yah, you can also make maps up to 66 MILLION km with world partition, try that with your unity. Heres a list of built in features unreal has that unity SHOULD HAVE: 1. World partition, massive maps with million of miles/km (unity can barely break 20km) 2. lumen 3. nanite 4. ray tracing settings that actually work! 5. an engine that doesn't give you stupid null-reference bugs 24/7 6. PROCEDURAL WORLD BUILDING (LOOK IT UP) 7. A fence tool....? 8. BUILT-IN AI TOOLS (SOMETHING UNITY IS LACKING AND HAS EVEN REJECTED MY AI ASSETS THUS CAUSING ME TO SWITCH IN THE FIRST PLACE) 9. NO RENDER PIPELINES, everything is ALWAYS AMAZING. 10. Seriously why are you using a mobile game engine, are you a mobile dev? Edit: yes i code too, learning C++ isn't that hard. It literally takes 1 day for me to learn a language if I try. All languages are basically the same if you understand the patterns and syntax.

[@WoWUndad]

all unreal games are literally the same, should be ashamed make something other than a generic fps or skyrim with wands

[@TegridyMadeGames]

@WoWUndad it doesn't matter what engine you use numskull I'm just saying it has better features out of the box. 0$ spending vs 5000$ to get the same crap of the unity asset gambling store.

[@vladimirkirillovskiy8056]

What about cost of Unity Vs Unreal, as I understand Unity is more expensive for indie dev?

[@vladimirkirillovskiy8056]

@user-vg9vf3fk2s SCAM!

[@ryanb2633]

For the long game, you should switch. A lot more features. Gonna be a lot of work up front but I think it’s the better choice. Especially 3D

[@Massive-3D]

As if you have any real games and projects released

[@A-Rune-bear]

@@Massive-3D why do you need that? that sounds stupid, both engines are good, but that dosent mean someone cant say something that the other engine is better at

[@chasesommer]

Which engine seems to be optimal for VR development?

[@gamercorpseplays]

I switched to unreal from Unity with the launch of 5.0, the learning curve is next to nothing, but Nanite and some other features it's worth it for me.

[@smelge]

Exactly. When you move between engines, the most important thing is understanding and using design concepts you used with the previous engine. At it's base, all programming languages, game engines, whatever all run on the same core concepts. There's going to be differences, but one engine will call a feature something different, but when you drill down to it, just having the experience in another engine means you'll be able to understand the differences pretty easily. Plus if you have to go all-in on a single engine, maybe your first project won't use lumen, nanite or any of the other UE things, but they're available to play and learn with for when you do decide to do a project that can utilise them.

[@AvstractIndustries]

Hold on, Wait for me. I am Switching next Week 🤤

[@liyuubds6098]

Unreal only has two problems: a narrow platform support and a very mediocore doucmentation. Other than those two, I couldn't think of any other aspects where Unity outcompetes Unreal.

[@sabriboughanmi2435]

I have been using Unity for over five years and have gained a significant amount of knowledge, particularly in regards to the DOTS framework. However, it is true that Unity lacks certain features that are readily available in Unreal Engine. This can be frustrating, as it requires recreating them in Unity, which can be time-consuming. Despite this, I have gained a lot of valuable experience with Unity and do not wish to start from scratch with Unreal Engine. I hope that Unity will continue to improve and address these features in the future.

[@hector3dev]

You won't start from scratch with UE, some knowledge is transferable from Unity to UE. It will easer to pick up UE concepts and workflow.

[@MichoSchmidt]

I did feel to change to Unreal before, but I did stay with Unity because I got my experience there with couple of years. And I hope and think that Unity gonna be improved and have a great future too. Only can is crossfinger that.

[@crit_cannon1090]

Most of my career has been in unreal and it’s a great engine, for some stuff. It’s very artist focused. I really like that since that’s where my career began. Unity has a wide toolset for other things and is equally versatile. I wouldn’t discount either. Playing the engine wars can end up getting you trapped in development hell though. Make a choice and move on. But if you change, don’t look back. It will bite you in the butt

[@wasteurtime5677]

best answer i've seen so far. I switched to unreal after only a year and a half of unity. I had so much trouble onboarding that I felt like a complete noob again. It made me really appreciate the momentum I had built up with using unity and the speed at which I was able to actually produce instead of wasting time "setting things up". I do not recommend switching unless you're starting over on a long term project with no deadlines.

[@Metaman9000]

Is it true that with games produced on unity you can host them on a web browser so no downloads are needed to play but with ure5 u have to download to play them?

[@StevenBloomfield]

Given that you switched gears once already with Father, it definitely seems like a good idea to stick with Unity for Twisted Tower. As for your open world idea, maybe it would be worth it to find someone well versed in UE5.1 who could show you what it might be like to build a game like that? Would you be willing to learn C++? I know you can do a lot in Blueprints but I don't think it covers everything (could be wrong here). Even if you use Blueprints, you still have to overcome that learning curve. I'm interested in learning more about your decision making process for this.

[@StevenBloomfield]

@@Iobsterpeterson can't do editor UI code from what I've read you probably wouldn't want to exclusively use it for a large open world project.

[@steven3314]

Unreal C++ is not so difficult to learn honestly compared with the C#, it has the GC built-in just like C#.

[@ItsBYBO]

What if you were supposed to start now, would you choose Unreal or Unity? And why? Would love to hear from others too. I just started in Unity Visual Scripting, but I'm considering switching to Unreal Blueprints...

[@stylie473joker5]

If you prefer visual scripting i'd recommend Unreal but if you want to start coding Unity c#

[@eteriumgames6723]

I work with unreal and i found it excellent. Unreal needs no presentations, it's powerfull and well supported.

[@kyanrowse4921]

Honestly the best features of UE5 are the workflow features. World partition is a game changer, being able to have multiple artists work on the same map and not cause merge conflicts. Plus allowing people who don't have beast computers to load a massive map and work on it. That one feature saves tons of time when making a large game.

[@therabbitholeguild]

Good, fair, honest comparison. As always thank you Thomas!!

[@FlameOfInsanity]

I recently decided that I wanted to make a 3d game. After doing some research and talking to other devs in one of the discord servers Im in, I decided to swap from unity to unreal, so I'm learning that now. I've been using Unity for a few years now, but after seeing everything with UE5, I got talked into it. May have been drawn by the "shiny" that is Nanite and Lumen initially. But im hoping that Unreal will be the better option for me long term.

[@jumi6051]

Can someone please explain to me how unity has a user base of 2.7 billion? I don't think there are 500 million devs in the world (meaning every 16th person is a dev). And certainly not every dev has 5 different accounts on average. I am confused ^^

[@hawtlava]

Yeah it makes no sense from a dev perspective. It must mean 2.7 billion people use applications built with Unity. Seems plausible when you consider Unity's dominance in the mobile market but still 1/3 of the population of the earth still seems pretty high.

[@jumi6051]

@@hawtlava Yea thats what I though. Like 2.7 billion is insanely high. Maybe we are missing something ^^

[@xLTxFire]

Honestly I've had so many instances where I've been really using a Unity feature just for it to be deprecated in the next version that I'm done bothering with it. I end up left with the choice of rewriting the component from the ground up or keeping the game in an outdated version of the engine, and neither seems like a good option.

[@aknakos5448]

Now in godot 4 there is autoLOD and SDFGI (a lumen-like feature for global illumination), among many other things to help 3D development! Not trying to say what you should do, but I just wanted to add godot 4 to the list of possibilities to anyone reading this.. I'm stoked and hyped for this next generation of game development tools, being godot 4, unreal 5 or unity!!

[@fmilioni]

But unfortunately it does not support console builds. They say you can hire some studios to do it but for almost all indie devs, that is not a doable thing.

[@aknakos5448]

@@fmilioni Hmm, well, for unity you’ll need unity pro (also expensive) and then do the port yourself. In my opinion, all engines are not indie-friendly when handling console ports. I’m hoping that this will get better sooner rather than later for everyone.

[@fmilioni]

@@aknakos5448 Do you think that porting a game made in Godot 4 to - let's say - Nintendo Switch will take more or less the same effort as Unity or Unreal? I've been stuck on this question for about a month. I really want to try Godot 4 but if in fact I DO made a game, I want it to be ported as well. Right now, I'm considering Unreal but it's overpowered for my project. And yes, Unity is out of the question because of the "two official packages to do anything, one is obsolete and the other beta since the beginning of time".

[@00beast7]

Little thing to say, In Gujrati... it can pronounce as Guj - Raati

[@Hososugi]

This video came at the perfect time for me. A few years ago I decided to try a game engine and I came across Unity and UE4. I tried both and liked Unity more because I'm a senior software engineer and the idea of video game development has driven me since I first started learning to code more than 20 years ago. I am a bit of a workaholic, so I've never finished anything. Just a week ago I thought maybe it was time to switch to UE5 because I keep hearing it's more professional etc. As I was struggling to use UE5 I kept thinking about how I know exactly how to do all these things in Unity already, but it's probably just growing pains. But after watching this video I'm going back to Unity because I am an indie developer doing it for fun and I enjoy Unity (even with all its problems) haha. I just need to work on project planning instead of hoping a new piece of software will solve my problems :)

[@LoneWolf6063]

I have used both. And I think your issue comes from the case that you have learned unity already and just want to do unreal from scratch. Unreal just feels way more consistent and less cluttered as compared to unity which needs plugins for every single shit alive. Forcing to use everything on one screen just feels irritating on Unity. Not to include the shitty UI being a huge ass thing in the scene. Theres lot of issues but as long as ur fine with it, its alright. I would say to learn both because it teaches you a lot about how to approach things differently

[@jobolek]

It's really a non-issue and simply maxing out the tools you are familiar with. I've seen plenty of examples of Unreal and Unity projects that look and play fantastic, and developing on both, can be a headache. I've had projects that have used one or the other, and have screamed into the void over various bugs they both have... but it's just another tool in the end and there are compromises just as you pointed out depending on the target platforms, and it's up to you what's needed to achieve the best result. There's no real reason to switch, but adding that tool to your arsenal isn't a bad idea for some project that might need it, down the road.

[@elvinrivera5638]

What is your take now that Unity has changed…

[@derpersona]

But how about now?

[@TegridyMadeGames]

If you are going to make a open world game without unreal you are going to be screwed bro. You forgot world partition....... Theres so much more. Please, actually download it.

[@AlexLusth]

I've worked with unity for a little more then 10 years now, switched to unreal about 6 month's ago, never looked back. There is so much transferable knowledge from unity anyway, and I've never really felt this "lack of documentation" people keep talking about. Strangely , it seems to only be Unity Devs that actually talk about this documentation issue in the first place anyway, I don't think its a real issue tbh. Id really recommended trying it out for a month or two and see how you feel at least.

[@johnhershberg5915]

How did you deal with going from C# to C++? That's the biggest hanging point for me. If I could use C# in Unreal I'd switch right now. But having to handle memory management and pointers and all that just seems so unsavory to me.

[@Flad.]

@@johnhershberg5915 Unreal C++ is a lot easier than normal C++, aside from the many benefits from the generated headerfiles (files that are generated everytime you compile your code that effectively add features with meta programming) there is also built in garbage collection for memory management.

[@mx1rx1nc-llc13]

have you ever considered using both? Like another version of you old projects in an Unreal version or maybe a small mini game in Unreal?

[@GreenBlueWalkthrough]

Yeah nothing stops anyoe from using just one engine... And you could even have multiple engines in one game it's just only bee done a few times like Medal of Honor 2013 and Halo Master cheif collection.

[@propoppop9866]

@@GreenBlueWalkthrough there's also one mini game in judgement(a yakuza game) that flashes a made in unity sign although it did look terrible because they had to relearn how to do graphics in that engine

[@TheReallyRealSunTzu]

wait. Unity has over 2 billion users? So a quarter of the world is engaged in game development somehow? That's some stiff competition for indie devs

[@SequentialSnep]

Also, with 5.2, the enhanced input system is a great addition. so much easier to setup controls for keyboard/mouse/gamepad. And yeah, I switched over to Unreal purely for Lumen. Lumen + raytraced shadows is sweeeeeeet! I thought nanite would be a game changer as well but in my tests it's slower for the poly counts I'm at. Bloody amazing when you duplicate a very heavy model across your (test) scene with seemingly no hit at all. C++ though, omg. It is not as easy to pick up as C#. Less the coding itself, more understanding how the unreal api works. Getting there! Thanks for sharing!

[@moose43h]

You think until you meet c++

[@venny1689]

Something you should probably keep in mind, the switch is now into its 6th year. If you really plan on making an open world game, how long do you think that will take you? Realistically speaking you're not gonna make it to the switch's current gen at this point, assuming it gets rolled into its next gen in 2-ish years (god I hope so). Do you think you'd be able to develop and finish a polished open world game in just two years, especially as a mostly solo dev? That's just not very feasible. At this point you'd have to be thinking about what comes next. I understand the appeal of the switch, I was hoping to publish on it for my current project as well, but being a 3D game is so much more complex it's taking way longer than anticipated. And I'm not even working with a "realistic" artstyle. It's likely gonna take longer than the switch will be on the market.

[@GorkaGames]

I have been using both for over 7 years now.. and I must say that Unreal Engine is a beast compared to Unity for the most part. Not only its graphical fidelity is just more advanced, but it's noticeable that its made to make games from the start: it has a built-in Multiplayer replication system, built-in game modes to pretty much plug n`play and the combination of Blueprint and C++ makes prototyping and making efficient systems so easy. And now with UE5 with Nanite and Lumen.. you can make whatever you want! I have to say that Unity is also a GREAT engine and I also love it for small things and big things, but compared to UE when I try to make a big project, I can definitely work better and more efficient in UE.

[@eriryuukai]

the only thing UE inferior to Unity in my opinion is 2D.if they actually put effort in that front,im sure most of unity devs will migrate to UE

[@alxdrksoul]

@@Goldstone-algo you wish.

[@GC-jm9bt]

@Goldstone Blockchain gaming and web 3 is the dead genre, not 2d games.

[@TylerLarson]

I went the other direction, from unreal to unity. It's trivially easy to make an unreal game that can bring a top of the line gaming PC to its knees. The amount of amazingness you can cram into a starter template is amazing. But you wanna know what's absurdly difficult with unreal? Actually ship a game that performs reasonably well on a reasonable computer. Is it possible? Of course it is, there are several examples out there. Are you likely to succeed? Again, there are "several" examples, not "lots of" examples.

[@LorneDev]

Tech chasing is usually not a good idea. Lumen and nanite is too young and has massive performance issues right now. However i think with unreal you get a few things: * Its easier to make scenes pretty without too much effort * performance is generally way better for bigger scenes * you have a way bigger set of tools in the engine so you dont need as many plugins to get some basic functionality I think sticking with unity is a good idea, but I would love to see a youtube series of a Daily dev vlog in ue for 30 days straight. If you would swap you really shouldnt do it for lumen or nanite, but all the other things you get. Im actively using both unity and ue, but made the move to ue4.26 for Lorne 18 mongs ago. Cheers

[@pawnix4122]

People seem to forget that CryEngine had a version of Lumen all the way back in 2013 with the release of Crysis 3. That was 9 years ago. 10 years ago if we wait two more days for the new year to come around. The fact that CryEngine didn't make anything with it has always perplexed me. Isn't that crazy though?? Crysis had real time global illumination and any game developed on that engine since 2013 didn't need to bake lighting if they didn't want to

[@LorneDev]

@@pawnix4122 yea, they ran a decently big series of game on it, but cryengine is apparently notoriously obnoxious to work with. Maybe that has been a factor?

[@pawnix4122]

@@LorneDev I can confirm from first hand experience. CryEngine is like Unreal Engine. You can make absolutely mind-blowingly good looking games, but you have to be hyper specific when working with some models and interiors, which Unreal doesn't struggle with at all (from my testing)

[@raznayr]

For the VR developers out there, what's your opinion? Personally, I find Unity's OpenXR integration to be great, including the new input system. It's also a breeze to build a game and target it for both PC VR and mobile. Obviously, the bigger the scene, the bigger the headache to minimize draw calls, reduce vertices, and work on LODs; But I find that with smart map design and occlusion culling, these aren't so much of a problem. The performance is boosted especially when you convert terrains into meshes and include impostors instead of LODs. The DOTS framework also looks really promising for being able to handle larger VR worlds as was done for Zenith. As a VR dev, I'll definitely stick to what I know for now and what I feel my strengths are in, that being Unity, but I'd love to hear your guys' opinions!

[@suryasel.7065]

I've used both for PCVR as well as Quest 2 standalone. While there's no correct answer here, I personally recommend Unity for the latter (Quest/PICO standalone). The iteration speed is much quicker for previews as well as standalone builds. For PCVR, both have their tradeoffs, but I'd still lean towards Unreal. For both though, do NOT judge them by the VR sample included with the engine. Judge them by the packages available for the same. For instance, check out XRI Toolkit and UltimateXR for Unity. And for Unreal, try out the VR Expansion Plugin. These packages are pretty powerful and solve a lotta things for you that you need not reinvent or break your head over.

[@AlexKolakowski]

Do it, it's a lot easier to transition than you think

[@zappy7393]

When I was in uni, for my last game project I decided to go against the grain and my teachers advice and move to Unreal, from Unity. We were told that we would not receive assistance from the tutors as they only knew Unity...and this was when Unreal was pretty damn new... For a 6 month project with 5 people, we smashed it out of the park. The transition was actually quite lite...the biggest being that we didn't want to use Blueprints so learning C++ was a big call for our coder... We all came away with high distinctions, best visuals, best gameplay and best overall. Im using Unity for my 2D game Im making now but I would be happy to move to Unreal in the future, once again.

[@jeremyberkeley36]

7 year Unity user here. I switched the instant I realised the amount of pains I encountered making my FPS game. Plus with Unreal megascans was a huge reason for our switch and now with lumen and nanite being so easy to use and integrate the switch was easy.

[@parrotthemachine]

Completely agree with your decision, no matter what it will be. They are just a tools. One thing which is very funny lately that people really do thing that UE 5 (or 5.1 which improves a lot) is Lumen or Nanite and that's it. There is much more features even more useful that those two. For example a lot of new animation tools - control rigs, motion warping, motion matching, animation layers. Battle tested ability system ready to build whatever you want. New modelling/modelling editing tools, new networking, world partition, ready to go streaming, modular features etc. It is a really long list. All of those new stuff make possible to do awesome stuff in reasonable time. Ofc learning them is a lot of work and time and it is very hard but there are a lot of benefits, especially when you create features for more that one game. And I don't know much about Unity it just making a point about Unreal.

[@stickguy9109]

The best thing with unity is the massive community. If you want a dynamic LOD system I am sure there is an asset for that in the asset store

[@Glenjii]

I am brand new to game design. I’ve recently swapped my major to take classes to learn for this career path. Should I play around in unity or unreal right now?