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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperTechnical (Moderator: ThemsAllTook)Unreal Engine 4 is now available to everyone for free
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Layl
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« Reply #20 on: March 09, 2015, 01:38:19 PM »

I perfectly understand it when a bunch of scripters and artists meet to create a carbon copy of Gears of War or something originating from the same pipeline established for them.

But if you are someone who wants to be in exact control of mechanical interactivity (gameplay, physics, collision etc.) and code system architecture it is hard to see a benefit to it. I would feel more safe to create my own engine than hunting down the bugs in a foreign one.

As someone who has been writing their own engine for a while now, I strongly disagree with this statement. Writing your own engine is a big investment of time and effort that should not be taken lightly. As well, there's a huge amount of experience and knowledge that you need to have to make an engine with an architecture that will even remotely keep up with a modern professional game engine.

Modern game engines have tons of tools to give a custom look and feel to a game. Keep in mind that Mirror's Edge is an UE3 game. Even more, an existing engine has tons of tools to make those things that give your game your own feel work across multiple platforms. Shader code isn't easy to port and keep efficient across all frameworks, drivers and platforms.

Even more, there's a huge existing toolset and support community you're throwing out of the window when not going with an established engine. Having to write your own editor adds another extra few months to the development timeline, and as a result it will probably still not be as good as what UE4, Unity or CryEngine have to offer. As well, Unity has a huge asset store available for use with tons of great easy to plug in components for your game. (though I personally really think they should at some point support NuGet as well)

Dismissing using an existing engine as just being for making carbon copies of existing games trivializes a lot of people's hard work.
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J-Snake
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« Reply #21 on: March 09, 2015, 02:07:43 PM »

You make the assumption that a custom build engine has to compete with the feature set of commercial general purpose engines.

You make an engine for your game, not for every hypothetical need. You don't have to carry all the bloat and infrastructure that other engines carry. And you are not limited by the engine in deciding what game you can create, since you build the engine to suit the game and not the other way round(what is really typical for a lot of commercial "copy paste" games).
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Layl
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« Reply #22 on: March 09, 2015, 02:50:16 PM »

Even for game engines aimed at very specific games, the rendering pipeline itself will take a lot more work than adapting an existing engine into rendering the way you want. General purpose game engines are written to be flexible enough to do a lot more things than generic shooters.
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J-Snake
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« Reply #23 on: March 09, 2015, 03:10:55 PM »

Sure it can do more, but is ue4 really suited for things outside its pipeline? For example it would add nothing but bloat to my puzzle game. I also doubt the game No Man's Sky would be practical/feasible to create with it. Are we AAA developers who have to stick to a given scope and pipeline? That's the perspective of my question.
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Layl
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« Reply #24 on: March 09, 2015, 03:31:38 PM »

Sure it can do more, but is ue4 really suited for things outside its pipeline? For example it would add nothing but bloat to my puzzle game. I also doubt the game No Man's Sky would be practical/feasible to create with it. Are we AAA developers who have to stick to a given scope and pipeline? That's the perspective of my question.

Ah well there I can see where you're coming from. I'm approaching this as a view from a game that falls somewhere more in the middle of the spectrum. But your puzzle game would not at all benefit from UE4's overkill pipeline, while No Man's Sky has both the resources and need for a custom engine. (though they could as well adapt UE4's source to fit their needs)
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gimymblert
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« Reply #25 on: March 29, 2015, 05:23:10 PM »

or you can go the rain world way, implement important stuff yourself and use only the extra stuff
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« Reply #26 on: March 30, 2015, 11:00:21 PM »

The biggest difference in feel between the two for me is that Unity is clearly designed from the ground up to be a generic game engine which it does a good job of.  It adheres well to its entity component design and gives you a lot of flexibility in structuring and organising your game as you see fit.  Unreal on the other hand has clearly evolved from a bespoke tool and is still carrying around a lot of baggage and legacy from its origins.  As a result it can be quirky to use since it makes a lot of unwanted assumptions for you regarding your game that makes it less flexible but also makes me distrust it since it can sometimes do unwanted things behind your back.


Unreal has a number of draws but I've found any iteration of the engine hard to play with, because it's so bloated. Wondering if it's worth pushing through and using it for the bulk of my work.

Is it easy to develop your own esoteric graphics techniques in Unreal? I'm not a fan of the engine's typical look, and I find small-budget Unreal games (even popular ones) tend to be horrendously inefficient for their visual fidelity.

What about multithreading? Unity makes it and other aspects of writing CPU-efficient software painful. You have to work around Unity, either littering your project with tedious boilerplate or more-or-less writing an engine within an engine. Does Unreal have an edge here?
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Layl
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« Reply #27 on: March 31, 2015, 12:02:03 AM »

What about multithreading? Unity makes it and other aspects of writing CPU-efficient software painful. You have to work around Unity, either littering your project with tedious boilerplate or more-or-less writing an engine within an engine. Does Unreal have an edge here?

Fun little fact about multithreading in Unity, if they just supported 1 higher version of .NET, you would get the Task Parallel Library. It's a full fledged task-based multithreading architecture entirely ready for you to use. They are planning to upgrade their version of mono but who knows how long that will take.
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« Reply #28 on: March 31, 2015, 07:42:30 AM »

The biggest difference in feel between the two for me is that Unity is clearly designed from the ground up to be a generic game engine which it does a good job of.  It adheres well to its entity component design and gives you a lot of flexibility in structuring and organising your game as you see fit.  Unreal on the other hand has clearly evolved from a bespoke tool and is still carrying around a lot of baggage and legacy from its origins.  As a result it can be quirky to use since it makes a lot of unwanted assumptions for you regarding your game that makes it less flexible but also makes me distrust it since it can sometimes do unwanted things behind your back.


Unreal has a number of draws but I've found any iteration of the engine hard to play with, because it's so bloated. Wondering if it's worth pushing through and using it for the bulk of my work.

Is it easy to develop your own esoteric graphics techniques in Unreal? I'm not a fan of the engine's typical look, and I find small-budget Unreal games (even popular ones) tend to be horrendously inefficient for their visual fidelity.

What about multithreading? Unity makes it and other aspects of writing CPU-efficient software painful. You have to work around Unity, either littering your project with tedious boilerplate or more-or-less writing an engine within an engine. Does Unreal have an edge here?

Take a look at Guilty Gear Xrd or Street Fighter 5. They certainly have unique looks.

I havent run into any issues with threading in unreal but whenever I'm using it I'm usually just spinning off some other work that doesn't really touch the engine.

Unreal is my favorite large-scale engine right now. It also has a very high learning curve but it smooths out considerably once you learn the basics. I've also found it to be a lot more programmer-friendly than other large engines such as unity.
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