An Unreal Decision

http://martiancraft.com/blog/2014/08/an-unreal-decision/

by cledet • 12 years ago

316 100 12 years ago

klodolph• 12 years ago

I've been bitten before by some of the problems regarding Unity and collaboration with source control. Everyone wants to test out their changes on the same scene, but it just blows up when you go to merge... even if you use a dumb merge strategy like ours or theirs (as a Git user) it seems to break things. Unity seems really cool, but I'm never going to use it again for any project with more than one programmer.

keerthiko3• 12 years ago

We build BitGym (www.bitgym.com) using Unity, and it has a lot of moving parts and 2-3 developers working on scene, code and assets, and we've made it work with git. It really comes down to developing and maintaining some best practices:

- Always use prefabs wherever possible. But avoid nesting prefabs

- Always save your prefabs, then save the scene before pushing. Thus the .prefab files are also updated through git: these are more robust and have higher priority than the scene.

- Make sure source control uses meta files (unless you're using Unity's Asset Server) so that scene references are stored again in separate files updated through git.

- Make sure individual developers have a lock on individual prefabs. Unlike scripts, Unity will bomb changes from one side of the merge on binary files, but this is expected when using git on binary files. Of course you can treat the scripts as any other code project, and they merge fine.

It's still not ideal, and we occasionally wind up with merge issues or a day of having to carefully iron out scene conflicts when doing larger branch merges, but they haven't been so dreadful as to make us decide never to use it again because of the collaboration issues.

midnightclubbed2• 12 years ago

Yes to this! You can also use the additive scene loading to build pieces of your product independently of each other and pull them all together at runtime.

Stratoscope2• 12 years ago

That's very helpful, thanks! One question...

Make sure individual developers have a lock on individual prefabs.

Can you elaborate on that? Git doesn't have file/directory locking unless you use something like gitolite, so what kind of locking do you mean?

I found UnityLock in the asset store, which is supposed to let you lock assets against editing, but it doesn't seem to work in 4.5:

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4851

The code seems straightforward enough, so I may see about getting it working if the author doesn't do it.

Tepix• 12 years ago

I recently started getting to know Unity3d and it was extremely easy and quick to learn. One annoying discovery was that their variant of JavaScript is not real JavaScript, it's "UnityScript". It took me quite some time to convert a simple script that I had written for node.js to UnityScript.

I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift. For someone who is just doing a bit of indie development, that's too expensive.

So I checked out UE4 also. You can subscribe for a month for $19 and then continue using the version that was the current version during your one month of subscription. If you need updates later on, subscribe for another month.

UE4 is harder to learn but looks a lot better than Unity OOTB.

Anyway, I hope Unity will be competitive again regarding pricing with the imminent announcement of their 5.0 release.

daredevildave• 12 years ago

If you're interested in writing games in Javascript, you might like to take a look at PlayCanvas [playcanvas.com] which has Unity/UE4-like tools for building WebGL/Javascript games.

sillysaurus38• 12 years ago

Has WebGL solved the local storage limitation yet? I've been waiting for a few years for that. There's still no way to "install" a game into a browser, as far as I know, and redownloading 1GB+ of assets every time the game loads isn't an option.

jimmaswell• 12 years ago

Why would you choose to develop for a game in JavaScript anyway? The language devs use for Unity tends to be C#. The design of the language fits the framework much more. I've been using C# with Unity and using JavaScript on webpages for years and JavaScript has always been much more cumbersome and error-prone to write nontrivial logic in. So many errors all the time that would've been found at compile-time in C#. Maybe Unity's JS is different; I haven't used it.

JabavuAdams2• 12 years ago

Unity's JS is different. It's all Mono under the hood. It's not at all like working with browser Javascript.

Cacti• 12 years ago

It's not JavaScript, it's UnityScript. Basically since everything that's not compiled to native code is run through Mono.

By default Unity provides support for UnityScript, C#, and Boo. However, since it's just IL all the way down, you can easily use IronPython, IronScheme, ClojureCLR, F#, etc., etc. just as easily.

phenylene• 12 years ago

Anyway, I hope Unity will be competitive again regarding pricing with the imminent announcement of their 5.0 release.

The last couple of paragraphs from this Unity blog post from today seem to indicate that they are happy with the current pricing:

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/08/14/building-and-maintaining...

ivanca3• 12 years ago

This is the worst mistake Unity made, inside unity it call those scripts "JavaScript" and it even uses the .js extension but is not a superset of JavaScript, is not a subset of JavaScript, is an abomination that just opens new questions and errors and calling it JavaScript doesn't help one little bit.

If you think I'm exaggerating just as a quick overview, there are no object literals (e.g. {value: true}), there is no array literals (e.g. [1]), you have to use new Array() which is deprecated in real JavaScript, they also implement some of the JS native functions but forget others making everything more confusing (for example parseInt exists but btoa doesn't), colons don't do anything they do in JavaScript, nothing, they are use to specify type, because UnityScript is a semi-typed language. Functions are not first class citizens and is not prototype based; at the end is just a mask for C# and that would be okay if it wasn't for them calling it "JavaScript" or even gasps "Unity-Flavored JavaScript"

bitpew• 12 years ago

I need the pro version of Unity3d to generate iOS, Android or VR games for the Oculus Rift

Not true anymore. You can generate iOS and Android versions of your game with the free version of Unity3d (although with a reduced featureset in comparison to the pro version).

TMichael2• 12 years ago

I think he was referring to the Oculus Rift part. Pro has one feature (is it deferred rendering?) which is requisite for OR development.

increment_i• 12 years ago

Indie devs -- particularly one man shops -- should also take note that the hardware requirements to run UE4 are magnitudes higher than what is required to run Unity. I was basically ready to jump ship to UE before I realized this.

vyrotek3• 12 years ago

I just discovered this for myself this past week. I've been playing with Unity for a while now and just recently decided to give UE4 a try. I couldn't even do a serious evaluation of it on my PC with my current graphics card. I didn't have any problems with Unity at all but with UE4 I could barely open or run the sample projects. Even the blueprint editors were terribly laggy. I purchased a new graphics card and it runs beautifully now. I'm not sure how I feel about this. UE4 is definitely a lot "prettier".

rodgerd• 12 years ago

The other big obstacle was that the UDK tools which were Windows only. MartianCraft is a shop of (mostly) dyed-in-the-wool Mac folk who’d rather not spend their days using Windows.

That really doesn't seem like a great way to run a railroad.

malkia2• 12 years ago

Haven't used the tools much, but I'm subscribed, and simply in awe of Unreal's internal UI system (used for the Tools), and hope EPIC release it in some more independent form.

Coincoin3• 12 years ago

As someone who tried to develop a Unity game on a big team, it was hell. The collaboration is horrible, there are conflicts all the time for no reason. Simply getting the source, running the game and updating would produce conflicts. We also had to buy the cache licenses to make it somewhat workable.

But the worst was the support. It was worthless. Anytime we would open a ticket, they would simply google and return us links to forum threads that didn't address our issue. When we asked about missing important features or bug fixes, they told us to buy something on the asset store.

oafitupa• 12 years ago

Wow, that's horrible. So what do you recommend?

Coincoin3• 12 years ago

For a big team, either use Unreal or the in house engine.

I heard good things about Havok's game engine too, and their support is the best I've ever seen.

Stratoscope2• 12 years ago

I'm sure you know this, but for anyone who is new to Unity, one thing that helps a tiny bit is to open the Edit/Project Settings/Editor panel and change the Asset Serialization Mode to Force Text. Then your .unity scene files and such will be text files instead of binary. Whenever I start a new Unity project I flip this setting right away and save the empty project with text assets as the first commit.

This won't solve the problem at all - the asset files are still fairly inscrutable and the slightest change in the editor can result in all kinds of seemingly unrelated changes - but at least you'll have text diffs instead of huge binary files in the repo.

midnightclubbed2• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what you would classify as being a big team but you can definitely pay for dedicated support (and source code) should your organisation want to. Of course that comes at a cost significantly more than a couple of pro licenses.

Coincoin3• 12 years ago

Don't worry we had the whole package. They just simply didn't care.

mrfusion4• 12 years ago

Side question. Where do single indie developers get the artwork for games?

nacs• 12 years ago

By hiring a graphics person or by creating it yourself.

There are some free assets out there but they're mostly low-quality and the few production-quality ones are used in numerous low-quality games.

mrfusion4• 12 years ago

Why aren't more production quality ones free or available for sale? It seems like it might encourage more foss games?

Titanbase2• 12 years ago

I use Turbosquid for free 3D models, and then customize them in Lightwave or Blender. I work on my own textures.

For audio I rely on Looperman for free music and sound fx.

mrfusion4• 12 years ago

Wow. Thanks to the link. Would this be a good way to go for beginner (hobbiest) oculus rift development?

Are there any tutorials out there that explain your process a bit?

JabavuAdams2• 12 years ago

I may eventually do the same for a project I'm working on, although for me the draw would be UE's battle-tested network prediction code.

For visual programming in Unity, there's PlayMaker -- an add-on available from the asset store. It allows creation and graphical editing (and graphical runtime debugging) of FSMs (though not hierarchical FSMs). It's quite a good implementation of a FSM / event / action framework. It's basically superior to some tech I spent half of 2013 developing for an in-house proprietary engine.

I agree on the collaboration problems. Even with purely text-based serialization, collaboration is one of Unity's weak points.

mahyarm• 12 years ago

Their entire attitude of accessible, changeable source, accepting patches and responsiveness is really refreshing. If you do windows or apple dev, the frustrations of having none of that available is a big productivity drain. The high amount of responsiveness part is even nicer, since that seems rarer in platforms such as unity or android.

keerthiko3• 12 years ago

My teammate and I started moonlighting on the first game for our studio about 8 months ago, right before Epic announced the current $19.95/seat pricing model. We decided to go with Unity purely because I already owned a Pro license, that we could use to make final beta builds and be responsible for the advanced visual effects that needed Pro. Additionally I already had lots of experience with Unity, and nearly none with UE.

We are only a two-person team, making a fairly limited-scope 3D puzzle racer game. Thus we didn't hit the major issues with collaboration bugs (we did a few times) or platform switching (we're focusing only on PC). We were able to build our MVP in less than 2 weeks of hacking, and it felt amazing. The asset store was also an amazing resource to circumvent the artist issues.

However, it's been nearly a year since then, and polishing the game to the standards we'd like has been presenting larger and larger challenges -- performance, obscure shader behaviour, limited editor extensibility (it's good, but not quite good enough), and reading this post, it looks like at this stage of development Unreal would have served us much much better.

If we can get our studio rolling and increase our team size to actually incorporate dedicated artists, we'll have to seriously consider switching to UE4 for our next game.

Jeff's write-up sheds insight that few people can have, given not everyone has spent the time to get well-enough acquainted with both engines in the team setting to know their professional tradeoffs as well, and I appreciate it a lot.

christoph• 12 years ago

You highlight one of Unity's real strengths here that is often forgotten - the asset store. Want to drop in a nice city scene? Thats 10 bucks. Want realistic car physics? That's 10 bucks. A few nice NPC's with rigged faces? Thats 20 bucks. A pack of nice shaders? 10 bucks.

I don't think Unity is targeting AAA developers at all. Its targeting small studios that want to get ideas built quickly. It's got great, simple Oculus integration as well. If you're planning on building something AAA (or close), you probably have modellers, artists and level designers and don't need the asset store. You probably need, or are already using Unreal.

ivanca3• 12 years ago

Absolutely false, using imported materials and creating your own is extremely easy to do in Unreal, and there are tons online of stores where you can buy 3D models, Unreal integrates pretty well with all kinds of 3D models (including riggs) specially those from Autodesk Maya. And over top of that there is an Asset Store for Unreal, is called the Marketplace and the EPIC team is filling it itself with tons of free high quality materials and models.

_random_2• 12 years ago

Then people publish whiny posts on how tough the mobile game market is and how nobody notices their game (which is a bunch of scripts tying together pre-made components and assets).

reitzensteinm2• 12 years ago

I'm a PC game developer that's been using Unity for 2.5 years, and it was pretty clear after getting involved in the ecosystem that Unity Technologies was just resting on its laurels, and making decisions primarily on marketing to sell even more copies. Just a few pain points:

1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, being stop the world non generational.

2) A similar story of PhysX, though I can't pin down the exact date, 2010 at the latest

3) They added a new particle system with flashy features, but no scripting access. I don't even...

4) Unity 4 added next to nothing useful (DX11 naturally on Windows only, Mechanim which was broken etc), though it was necessary to purchase to keep getting bug fixes

5) No 64 bit editor is very painful (I have 32gb of ram laying around doing nothing)

6) The project is riddled with bugs, being added and removed each release, though probably much less than hacky in house solutions which are the norm in the game industry

7) Nasty serialization formats make programatically changing the hundreds of meta files in a project next to impossible

However, I'm getting the impression that the new Unreal licensing scheme has been a real kick in the ass for UT, and they're taking the competition seriously. Nearly every major problem I've had with Unity seems to be being worked on now, for Unity 5, after a long period of atrophy.

I fully expected Unity to die a slow death, and that it was just a question of when to switch to something else (there is not much high quality competition), but now I'm not so sure. If they pull off their roadmap, it'll finally be an engine I will be happy to use and recommend. Right now my feeling is: it does the job, mostly.

Note that the experience making small puzzle games for iOS etc may be very different, I've done that kind of thing but not with Unity.

binarycrusader• 12 years ago

Or maybe these are all difficult things to solve and you're just now seeing large projects to address them finally reach completion?

Sorry, but your "resting on its laurels" is clearly not true. If you had bothered to track the improvements made to Unity's rendering engine (or the addition of Unity 2D support) over the last two years (well before the Unreal engine subscription launch), you'd see they actually have been doing quite a bit.

I do agree that the situation around Mono is pretty unfortunate, and that is clearly a business decision they've made. But they're also trying to find a way to mitigate that as should be clear from announcements made over the last year.

ivanca3• 12 years ago

Not true, instead of focusing in people that are a bit serious about game development they have done plenty of bad chooses, 64 bit processors on home PCs exist since more than a decade ago, and their engine was created in 2006 for 32 bit platforms, when it was clear 64 bits processors were here to stay. Also the GUI system is one of the worst GUI systems I have ever seen, yeah yeah they say they are going to fix it in Unity 5 but we need to develop games now, not tomorrow. Also calling JavaScript to their "implementation" of what comes down as just a mask for C# was a huge marketing mistake.

reitzensteinm2• 12 years ago

As I understand it, the projects aren't nearing completion. The features are coming in Unity 5.x, which means over the next few years (since 5.0 isn't even out yet).

If the timing were purely coincidental, and the effort routine, you'd expect to see a big problem being solved every now and then. Instead we've gone from radio silence to a barrage of activity.

You also seem to be making the mistake of assuming that the Unreal engine subscription public announcement was the first Unity Technologies realized the threat. It's a small industry, and the default assumption should be that people talk to one another and know which way the wind is blowing.

Unity2D is actually one of the things I had in mind when I wrote the post. It seemed to me to be aimed at increasing the potential market size for Unity, rather than something that made life better for existing developers.

My post was not to claim that Unity was doing nothing; only that they were not acting like they had a fierce competitor. I believe that now they are. And that is a fantastic thing. It makes me much more comfortable being on the Unity platform, because my ideal preference is to stay on something like this for a decade. I want Unity to succeed.

pjmlp3• 12 years ago

1) Mono hasn't been updated for five years due to licensing issues on iOS. GC pauses with a complex game can be hundreds of milliseconds, being stop the world non generational.

I really don't get why this is like this still.

Currently they seem more willing to implement their own IL2C++ generator, than agreeing with Xamarin about a new license.

Personally, specially given that C++11/14 is quite an improvment over C++98, I would go Unreal instead.

joeld42• 12 years ago

I'm writing my own engine. That's a terrible idea, I'd be much better off with either unity or unreal. But since game dev is more of a hobby for me, and writing the engine is the fun part, I'm ok with that.

However, for smallish projects (smaller than Republic Sniper, I mean) sometimes it's the right choice. I see a lot of indies struggling with lugging around and maintaining a huge engine (unity, especially, but even cocos2d), and running up against the limitations like difficulty integrating with native sdk features, and their game's requirements are modest enough that they could probably code it from scratch in not too much time.

erikb• 12 years ago

Also hacking together a development environment through different open source projects and own code is not a bad idea. It's harder in the beginning but also gives you more control and more skill in the long run.

LeicaLatte2• 12 years ago

Recently moved to UE4 too. Used to do Unity.

I moved because I was originally a C++ developer. Had code lying around I could use easily.

vyrotek3• 12 years ago

How was the move from C++ to C#? The last time I seriously touched C++ was 10+ years ago. I've been doing almost all C# (and a bit of Java) since. The only reason I feel like I'm sticking with Unity is because of how familiar I am with C#.

LeicaLatte2• 12 years ago

C# felt like it is tooled well for doing many things on game stacks. Would love to spend more time with it.

jokoon2• 12 years ago

I remember being at a private game programming school, there was a school project to make a game with unity 2 or 3. An entire class was using it.

Things were synced using subversion.

I never really jumped in that. I did not continue at that school.

I really think a video game is something that should be made with your custom tools. A good smith makes his own tools. Of course if you want to save time, you can use an expensive, well-made tool, but it will be at the expense of something else.

I'll always remember at that school, quickly arguing with a guy, that in C++ a vector is just a linked list.

Game programming is often highly technical, and often much more complex than what you're expecting it to be. That's why you should not neglect your tools and highly concentrate on making choices that fit your work.

scott_karana• 12 years ago

A good smith makes his own tools

The problem is, this can be taken to infinitely far ends.

Editor annoys you? Modify it to your desires. Don't like the compiler? Write your own. Get sick of the programming language? Invent your own. Get annoyed with how the OS does something? Change it or invent your own. Bump up into x86's limitations? Start on custom FPGAs.

Ten years later, you might still have 0% completion on your videogame, and indetermine completion on your ever-fractaling toolchain. (And this isn't just a thought exercise; I remember a HN submission earlier this year that was nigh-identical to what I describe)

I would rephrase what you said as "A good smith knows his tools and their limitations, and knows when it's appropriate to make his own tools". Even when talking in analogy... a smith's apprentice would not presume to make his own tools before experiencing his master's, and even further I suspect most smiths did NOT make their own anvils, or mine their own steel... ;)

There's also a healthy serving of "Worse is better" in this line of argument.

jokoon2• 12 years ago

Yes it's true, but I would not take the smith tools argument that far.

You could say there's a spectrum of low level/high level tools you will either work with or build yourself.

Most low level tools are now quite good enough. The more you go high level, the more will deal with specific cases that will restrain your ability to do thing the way you intended. Like the article said, Unity will fit for very small teams and very simple games, but it will be hard to do anything really complex.

I think compilers, languages and engines are better suited for more use cases than an editor like unity is. It's a dilemma of flexibility versus speed and ease of development.

ease of development/flexibility:

ease<|--#-------------------------|>flexibility

ease<|-----#----------------------|>flexibility

ease<|----------#-----------------|>flexibility

ease<|--------------#-------------|>flexibility

ease<|------------------#---------|>flexibility

ease<|----------------------#-----|>flexibility

ease<|-------------------------#--|>flexibility

Fr0styMatt• 12 years ago

These are my gripes with Unity, in question format :) Would love to hear from anyone that has concrete answers for these:

- How does UDK build apps for iOS natively on Windows without requiring a Mac? Are they doing some kind of insider thing that Unity can't replicate?

- I see Unity as massively extensible and that's one thing I like about it. Comparisons are often made between vanilla Unity and UDK; what about Unity + PlayMaker + UFrame + Level Builder, etc. I don't see this ease of editor extensibility with UE4 (I'm sure it's there; but the Unity Asset Store just lets me cherry-pick one, click buy and then just have it to use immediately after download - I like that).

- My biggest gripe with the editor is the font size. Will the new UI that's coming in 4.6 and/or 5.0 allow me to increase the font size used by the Unity editor to actually make it comfortably usable rather than fatiguing?

FWIW I've preordered Unity 5 and I use UE4 at the moment as well. Nothing big completed in either engine (just some side work here and there) but no fanboy-ism for any particular one (though a bit of a fondness for Unity as I encountered it back in the old Mac days when Unity were called Over The Edge Entertainment; GooBall was pretty cool by the way).

ido• 12 years ago

I don't know how UDK does iOS but I'd like to mention that was also a big draw to adobe air for me - you can develop/compile/deploy to ios from windows (don't know how it does it either but apparently it's possible).

atjoslin• 12 years ago

Unreal iOS Building: They are probably building the .ipa on their server and then sending it back to you

georgeecollins• 12 years ago

I have been Producing a very large game project with Unity. We have a large team, at times 50+. Our graphics aren't as state of the art as they could be but the performance of the Unity engine does not seem bad. The cross platform compatibillity is very strong. The third party tools are very strong. It's worked out well.

Unity seems like it was built with ease of of entry as a first consideration. As people do larger and more ambitious projects with it they are hitting some of the tradeoffs and limitations. I am sure UE4 is a good choice as well.

_random_2• 12 years ago

The problem is that Unity3d is being mis-marketed as a triple 'A' tool-set. It's not.

An Unreal Decision

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