Really? It's been a bit since I've loaded up my Unity (like... a think a year now) so I'd be really surprised if they lost support for all their original asset bundles without providing updated ones.
Also, what is that link!? That's not an asset bundle, that's three shapes!
I know Unity is all the rage but I've been building a little twin stick shooter in Love2d. Just wanted to show off some of what I've made so far, it's pretty basic, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't proud of it so far.
My apologies for the crappy gif. Infinite things left to do, as I'm sure you would expect. I am definitely not an artist and it eats up SO much time.
@Sceptre I think your sprites look great and if you keep at it you'll get better/faster at it. That being said, don't be afraid to use blocks of different colours while working on the basic gameplay, I've always been a fan of magenta blocks for players.
Does anyone (e.g. @HallowedFaith ) know what the best practices are for input handling in GameMaker 2?
For example, Unity lets you GetAxis("custom_input_name"), rather than manually checking a specific key. What's the GameMaker way of checking for remappable input?
@Sceptre I think your sprites look great and if you keep at it you'll get better/faster at it. That being said, don't be afraid to use blocks of different colours while working on the basic gameplay, I've always been a fan of magenta blocks for players.
Aw shucks, that just made my day. I am a sucker for trying to over complicate, I will do my best to keep your advice in mind. I've crashed and burned on a few projects like this before, this time I'm trying to keep it simple. My plan is to polish the heck out of a simple game loop, hopefully it will be something I'm not embarrassed to show people.
Really? It's been a bit since I've loaded up my Unity (like... a think a year now) so I'd be really surprised if they lost support for all their original asset bundles without providing updated ones.
Also, what is that link!? That's not an asset bundle, that's three shapes!
Hi, Unity uses the same .unity3d format for store, editor *and* runtime. So what changed is not the format but how to build them in the editor and load them in the game. In principle 5.6 should work with the new Asset Bundle Browser, but it didn't for me. The old Asset Bundle Manager uses functions that 5.6 flagged as deprecated.
I don't think that'd impact existing bundles in any way.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Does anyone (e.g. HallowedFaith ) know what the best practices are for input handling in GameMaker 2?
For example, Unity lets you GetAxis("custom_input_name"), rather than manually checking a specific key. What's the GameMaker way of checking for remappable input?
GameMaker isn't as slick, but this should get you started:
Does anyone (e.g. @HallowedFaith ) know what the best practices are for input handling in GameMaker 2?
For example, Unity lets you GetAxis("custom_input_name"), rather than manually checking a specific key. What's the GameMaker way of checking for remappable input?
GameMaker isn't as slick, but this should get you started:
if (controllerEnabled && !gamepad_is_connected(controllerIndex)) {
controllerEnabled = false;
controllerIndex = -1;
}
if(!controllerEnabled) {
ScanForController();
}
else {
// Get input
var hmovement = gamepad_axis_value(controllerIndex, gp_axislh);
var vmovement = gamepad_axis_value(controllerIndex, gp_axislv);
var actionPress = gamepad_button_check_released(controllerIndex, gp_face1);
// Do something with the input
}
Wait, aren't controllerEnabled and controllerIndex instance variables on the Player object? Does that mean that scripts act like OOP methods and can access instance variables on the instance that calls them? GML is weird!
Does anyone (e.g. HallowedFaith ) know what the best practices are for input handling in GameMaker 2?
For example, Unity lets you GetAxis("custom_input_name"), rather than manually checking a specific key. What's the GameMaker way of checking for remappable input?
GameMaker isn't as slick, but this should get you started:
if (controllerEnabled && !gamepad_is_connected(controllerIndex)) {
controllerEnabled = false;
controllerIndex = -1;
}
if(!controllerEnabled) {
ScanForController();
}
else {
// Get input
var hmovement = gamepad_axis_value(controllerIndex, gp_axislh);
var vmovement = gamepad_axis_value(controllerIndex, gp_axislv);
var actionPress = gamepad_button_check_released(controllerIndex, gp_face1);
// Do something with the input
}
Wait, aren't controllerEnabled and controllerIndex instance variables on the Player object? Does that mean that scripts act like OOP methods and can access instance variables on the instance that calls them? GML is weird!
Yes it does mean that, and yes it is weird!
Scripts act on the context of the object they are called from, like an implicit with() statement. GML is a very odd little thing. It's very clearly a subset of JavaScript, but lacks a lot of the power (and thus a lot of the pitfalls): No function keyword (scripts act as functions), no loose object templates, no 'this', no new fangled toys like multi return, tuples, array/object decomposition, lambdas. Yet it has some really ingenious stuff that make it "just work" for people who possibly don't have an academic or professional level knowledge of software engineering. For instance, object references act as both singletons and not-singletons! If only one instance of an object exists, and you directly reference it, you get that instance, it's a singleton. If more than one instance exists and you reference it by name, you are implicitly referencing all the instances. Which from a software engineering point of view is like "What? No, I must control this"....but from a person with no programming backgrounds point view that's just kind of duh.
Once I understood some of the oddities people rarely explain (like the aforementioned implicit with()), I found I was able to structure my code in a way that was something approaching sane to someone who writes software professionally.
Today I finally got access to visual studio at work. This means I can stop pestering the programmers with my constant requests, and start annoying then with my commits! Mwahaha
Does anyone (e.g. HallowedFaith ) know what the best practices are for input handling in GameMaker 2?
For example, Unity lets you GetAxis("custom_input_name"), rather than manually checking a specific key. What's the GameMaker way of checking for remappable input?
GameMaker isn't as slick, but this should get you started:
if (controllerEnabled && !gamepad_is_connected(controllerIndex)) {
controllerEnabled = false;
controllerIndex = -1;
}
if(!controllerEnabled) {
ScanForController();
}
else {
// Get input
var hmovement = gamepad_axis_value(controllerIndex, gp_axislh);
var vmovement = gamepad_axis_value(controllerIndex, gp_axislv);
var actionPress = gamepad_button_check_released(controllerIndex, gp_face1);
// Do something with the input
}
Wait, aren't controllerEnabled and controllerIndex instance variables on the Player object? Does that mean that scripts act like OOP methods and can access instance variables on the instance that calls them? GML is weird!
Yes it does mean that, and yes it is weird!
Scripts act on the context of the object they are called from, like an implicit with() statement. GML is a very odd little thing. It's very clearly a subset of JavaScript, but lacks a lot of the power (and thus a lot of the pitfalls): No function keyword (scripts act as functions), no loose object templates, no 'this', no new fangled toys like multi return, tuples, array/object decomposition, lambdas. Yet it has some really ingenious stuff that make it "just work" for people who possibly don't have an academic or professional level knowledge of software engineering. For instance, object references act as both singletons and not-singletons! If only one instance of an object exists, and you directly reference it, you get that instance, it's a singleton. If more than one instance exists and you reference it by name, you are implicitly referencing all the instances. Which from a software engineering point of view is like "What? No, I must control this"....but from a person with no programming backgrounds point view that's just kind of duh.
Once I understood some of the oddities people rarely explain (like the aforementioned implicit with()), I found I was able to structure my code in a way that was something approaching sane to someone who writes software professionally.
Wow, yeah, very little of this is spelled out in what I've read so far. Thank you very much for the explanations!
I still have to wrap my head around the idiomatic or "intended" ways to use GML, but I'm starting to see the general shape of it.
Today I finally got access to visual studio at work. This means I can stop pestering the programmers with my constant requests, and start annoying then with my commits! Mwahaha
Man, visual studio is the best.
I'm using Processing for a class this semester, and since it runs it's whole little java applet... thing, it's pretty hard to use any ide other than its own ide. It's possible, but not the best.
Suddenly not having visual studio is the woooorrrrst.
+1
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Visual Studio has a love/hate/hate relationship with most developers. It seems wonderful at first but once you start having to use it for very large projects, or anything processor intensive, its aging non-64-bit architecture becomes really apparent. It can be an anti-productivity tool really fast as project size grows and the IDE struggles to shuffle bits around under it's own weight.
Over the years I've switched most of my development to much more lightweight editors like Visual Studio Code or Atom with a command line in tow.
I am considering trying to learn Unity to make a 2D RPG. I know nothing about game programming, but being a software developer is how I make money. I'm drawn toward Unity because I use C# every day at work. Would that be my best bet for a 2D game?
I am considering trying to learn Unity to make a 2D RPG. I know nothing about game programming, but being a software developer is how I make money. I'm drawn toward Unity because I use C# every day at work. Would that be my best bet for a 2D game?
Unity and Unity's 2d stuff are both a bit peculiar in some pretty specific ways, but I think 2d Unity works pretty well. I also use it because it is well marketed and I can use C#, which is my favorite language.
(For reference, MonoBehaviour is the basic game object class in unity, you can attach unity's framework stuff to it, and it has a suite of events that fire at various times, such as Update() which fires every frame.)
Unity really likes you to drag and drop stuff in the editor, for instance, but you can't drop an interface type object into an object in the editor, you can only drag and drop children of MonoBehaviour. A few similar behaviors like this in the engine really start making you scratch your head, but once you accept the conceit that MonoBehaviours should be a thin layer with as little game logic in them as possible, or preferably no real game logic at all (essentially making them the view layer in MVC), it becomes a lot more manageable, at least in my experience.
Though, that does give you less information in the editor, of course.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents and it's just how I use unity, but it seems to work pretty well.
I am considering trying to learn Unity to make a 2D RPG. I know nothing about game programming, but being a software developer is how I make money. I'm drawn toward Unity because I use C# every day at work. Would that be my best bet for a 2D game?
Unity and Unity's 2d stuff are both a bit peculiar in some pretty specific ways, but I think 2d Unity works pretty well. I also use it because it is well marketed and I can use C#, which is my favorite language.
(For reference, MonoBehaviour is the basic game object class in unity, you can attach unity's framework stuff to it, and it has a suite of events that fire at various times, such as Update() which fires every frame.)
Unity really likes you to drag and drop stuff in the editor, for instance, but you can't drop an interface type object into an object in the editor, you can only drag and drop children of MonoBehaviour. A few similar behaviors like this in the engine really start making you scratch your head, but once you accept the conceit that MonoBehaviours should be a thin layer with as little game logic in them as possible, or preferably no real game logic at all (essentially making them the view layer in MVC), it becomes a lot more manageable, at least in my experience.
Though, that does give you less information in the editor, of course.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents and it's just how I use unity, but it seems to work pretty well.
This approach also helps serialization, because MonoBehaviours are not serializable by default. Having a MonoBehaviour contain a reference to your game logic class makes it a lot easier to just dump that into the serializer than having to send a bunch of individual properties.
@Spawnbroker , I'm also a long-time fan of C#, and I really enjoyed a lot of what I've done with it in Unity. On the other hand, most of that time has been on tool development, but I feel like GameMaker Studio 2 (I'm trying out the free trial) is getting me into the actual game design part a bit faster.
I'm kind of going the other direction. I really like coding in c# but I'm growing less and less impressed with unity so I'm going to give monogame a go. I had a little success with XNA way back in the day when I was first learning c#, so I expect to be able to pick up monogame fairly quickly.
Thanks guys, I'll check out Unity for my initial project and if I need something with a little more freedom I'll dive into Unreal.
I wouldn't
You wouldn't do Unity, or Unreal? Any reasons why you hate one (or both)?
I have heard Unity is awful for multiplayer networking and also has some performance problems on more demanding games. I've heard Unreal is great for networking and has some awesome graphics stuff right out of the gate, but it seems like it has a smaller community and is for more established game developers, i.e. it's harder to learn.
Steam: Spawnbroker
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
Unity definitely has some performance issues if you push the graphics engine, which you generally won't be doing with a 2D game (there are exceptions of course, such as a 2D game that's making super heavy use of pixel shaders and is rendering at a very high resolution). I can't comment on it's networking code, but networking code is a strange beast anyway. Yes out of the box I think Unreal has much better networking code, but if you are making certain kinds of games (lets say a fighting game) you're going to end up implementing your own network stack anyway with something like GGPO.
As far as learning curve, I would say from a programming point of view Unity is much easier. C# is easier to grok for most people than C++, by a lot. That said Unreal has Blueprint which is one of the best visual programming environments available today. It really is quiet slick and you can make a huge chunk of a game in it, only needing to drop to C++ for pure performance reasons.
Community size I'm not sure. Unity has been available to the average person longer, but Unreal has a huge professional development community behind it. It's tough to say. I wouldn't use this as the deciding factor because I think the communities have both reached enough of a critical mass that finding help when you need it is straightforward.
KoopahTroopahThe koopas, the troopas.Philadelphia, PARegistered Userregular
edited October 2017
Honestly at this point, just pick whichever one you want to use and go. If you don't like it you could always switch, but each engine has it's pros and cons.
Edit - I say this because I don't think any one person in here will say we don't use X because it doesn't do Y. What you'll generally hear in here is, I love using X, because I like the way it handles Y more than Z does. But in reality, all of the popular engines are highly capable.
I went with unreal because it was free at the time (unless you sell a bunch of copies). But the blueprint system is fantastic and my game would not be made without it.
Unity does seem to have more indie community support and Sony in particular are very keen on it.
I keep seeing people with this assumption that Unity is limited, and I'm really confused as to where that comes from.
Like, I often run into problems with "Man, doing this thing in Unity can be a pain", and every time that happens it's because someone is trying to basically shoehorn something external into Unity, which, like, everything would have that issue. Unity doesn't handle OSC well? Well neither does, like, anything that isn't built specifically for OSC control. Unity has problems integrating with external programs? Well no shit, it's a game engine, it's not designed to require a bunch of other programs being installed alongside it because who would release a game where you also need a $100 external to run it, or where you need to be running multiple programs at all
All my problems with Unity are based on people wanting to use it as a research tool. And it's really cool that it works for that with some massaging, but like... it needs massaging for that. I've never seen any problem with Unity not doing great as a game engine.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
I don't think any of us said that? It's not a hugely guarded secret that Unity's graphics engine can struggle with AAA level graphics, but aside from that, I'm not sure any of us have said Unity can't do something?
I see it more with people coming in. Like in this case it was Spawnbroker thinking "Well I'll start with Unity and go to Unreal if I need more flexibility"
And I know someone else mentioned in this thread a bit back about "Oh well I just feel so constrained with Unity".
It's just weird, that there's this idea in the world that Unity is some limited or limiting thing
Yeah, from my excessive experience in Unreal and extremely limited experience in Unity, the way the relationship between those two engines goes is more like:
- Unity gives you a blank canvas, but that means you have to paint everything for yourself.
- Unreal gives you a ton of tools and prebuilt things that make life a lot easier, until you try to break out of its paradigms, in which case you have to overcome a certain paradigmatic resistance.
- Unreal looks way better out of the box.
- It's possible to get Unity to look as good as Unreal, but it's not easy and you have to know what you're doing
- Unreal has amazing artist-focused tools
- To get decent artist-focused tools in Unity, you have to spend $TEXAS on the asset store, all the while hoping the tools you buy will keep getting updates as engine updates are released, so that your purchase doesn't become worthless
- Unity has the better 2D tools
- Unity has better low end mobile compatibility
- Unreal has the way better and more helpful community (hello)
- Unity engine updates and bug fixes take ages
- Unreal gives you access to the full engine source code for free, to modify however you want, or fix bugs you encounter yourself
Other than that, the main difference is one of market share, personal preference, and preexisting skills.
But of course Unreal is the better choice. Trust me! Could this face tell lies?
Thanks guys, I'll check out Unity for my initial project and if I need something with a little more freedom I'll dive into Unreal.
I wouldn't
You wouldn't do Unity, or Unreal? Any reasons why you hate one (or both)?
I have heard Unity is awful for multiplayer networking and also has some performance problems on more demanding games. I've heard Unreal is great for networking and has some awesome graphics stuff right out of the gate, but it seems like it has a smaller community and is for more established game developers, i.e. it's harder to learn.
Oh whoops, that was a half-written post!
What I meant is that I wouldn't say Unreal necessarily gives you more freedom than Unity. You can do basically anything you want in Unity, including augmenting the editor itself. I wrote a neat little extension that helps with displaying properties of polymorphic lists.
I see it more with people coming in. Like in this case it was Spawnbroker thinking "Well I'll start with Unity and go to Unreal if I need more flexibility"
And I know someone else mentioned in this thread a bit back about "Oh well I just feel so constrained with Unity".
It's just weird, that there's this idea in the world that Unity is some limited or limiting thing
I'm sure I said something to the effect that "I wish Unity had more helpful defaults or tutorials", like how you're supposed to intuit that the way to pause is `Time.timeScale = 0;`. It works, but it - like a few other gripes - isn't very intuitive or spelled out in documentation.
That's definitely not to say that Unity can't do something. If anything, my gripes are probably due to the system being so extensible that "sensible defaults" are meaningless.
Thanks guys, I'll check out Unity for my initial project and if I need something with a little more freedom I'll dive into Unreal.
I wouldn't
You wouldn't do Unity, or Unreal? Any reasons why you hate one (or both)?
I have heard Unity is awful for multiplayer networking and also has some performance problems on more demanding games. I've heard Unreal is great for networking and has some awesome graphics stuff right out of the gate, but it seems like it has a smaller community and is for more established game developers, i.e. it's harder to learn.
Ah yeah, as for specific points:
Again, I only know the Unreal side, but I know it extremely well. Here's my takes:
UE4 is incredibly easy to learn and pick up, you don't even have to know programming to make simple game prototypes with it. In fact, using UE4 blueprints sneakily teaches you programming without you realizing it, as happened to yours truly.
There's a ton of free content - env art, characters, effects, materials, etc - available from Epic directly, which you can use in commercial games for free if you want to, as well as from the community, who have produced a metric fuckton of free tutorials.
I don't know how big the Unity community is, but one of the UE4 community groups I run recently broke 30k members, and I also help moderate on the biggest UE4 Discord server which is currently sitting at almost 8500 users.
And the fact that UE is used more by established developers doesn't have anything to do with whether it's harder or easier to learn! But it means it's easier to find freelance or fulltime studio work at a place that actually has a budget to pay you with. And the skills you can learn transfer quite well into other industries that are more and more starting to use UE4 for non-game applications.
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
When are we getting that?! That opens up some pretty great code infrastructure opportunities in GML that currently are not really viable. Functions as arguments to other functions for instance.
Posts
Transformations are commands that need to be outlined at the start of the code, and then called later.
Margins do not enable these transformations.
http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=16534
Really? It's been a bit since I've loaded up my Unity (like... a think a year now) so I'd be really surprised if they lost support for all their original asset bundles without providing updated ones.
Also, what is that link!? That's not an asset bundle, that's three shapes!
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
My apologies for the crappy gif. Infinite things left to do, as I'm sure you would expect. I am definitely not an artist and it eats up SO much time.
For example, Unity lets you GetAxis("custom_input_name"), rather than manually checking a specific key. What's the GameMaker way of checking for remappable input?
Aw shucks, that just made my day. I am a sucker for trying to over complicate, I will do my best to keep your advice in mind. I've crashed and burned on a few projects like this before, this time I'm trying to keep it simple. My plan is to polish the heck out of a simple game loop, hopefully it will be something I'm not embarrassed to show people.
Hi, Unity uses the same .unity3d format for store, editor *and* runtime. So what changed is not the format but how to build them in the editor and load them in the game. In principle 5.6 should work with the new Asset Bundle Browser, but it didn't for me. The old Asset Bundle Manager uses functions that 5.6 flagged as deprecated.
I don't think that'd impact existing bundles in any way.
GameMaker isn't as slick, but this should get you started:
https://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/mouse, keyboard and other controls/gamepad input/
This is the basics of my controller code (may not actually compile, I'm not at my desk with real GML code in front of me):
ScanForController script
if (gamepad_is_supported()) { var devices = gamepad_get_device_count(); for (var i = 0; i < devices; i++) { if(gamepad_is_connected(i)) { controllerEnabled = true; controllerIndex = i; return; } } }Player Object Create Event
Player Object Step Event
if (controllerEnabled && !gamepad_is_connected(controllerIndex)) { controllerEnabled = false; controllerIndex = -1; } if(!controllerEnabled) { ScanForController(); } else { // Get input var hmovement = gamepad_axis_value(controllerIndex, gp_axislh); var vmovement = gamepad_axis_value(controllerIndex, gp_axislv); var actionPress = gamepad_button_check_released(controllerIndex, gp_face1); // Do something with the input }Wait, aren't controllerEnabled and controllerIndex instance variables on the Player object? Does that mean that scripts act like OOP methods and can access instance variables on the instance that calls them? GML is weird!
Yes it does mean that, and yes it is weird!
Scripts act on the context of the object they are called from, like an implicit with() statement. GML is a very odd little thing. It's very clearly a subset of JavaScript, but lacks a lot of the power (and thus a lot of the pitfalls): No function keyword (scripts act as functions), no loose object templates, no 'this', no new fangled toys like multi return, tuples, array/object decomposition, lambdas. Yet it has some really ingenious stuff that make it "just work" for people who possibly don't have an academic or professional level knowledge of software engineering. For instance, object references act as both singletons and not-singletons! If only one instance of an object exists, and you directly reference it, you get that instance, it's a singleton. If more than one instance exists and you reference it by name, you are implicitly referencing all the instances. Which from a software engineering point of view is like "What? No, I must control this"....but from a person with no programming backgrounds point view that's just kind of duh.
Once I understood some of the oddities people rarely explain (like the aforementioned implicit with()), I found I was able to structure my code in a way that was something approaching sane to someone who writes software professionally.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Wow, yeah, very little of this is spelled out in what I've read so far. Thank you very much for the explanations!
I still have to wrap my head around the idiomatic or "intended" ways to use GML, but I'm starting to see the general shape of it.
Man, visual studio is the best.
I'm using Processing for a class this semester, and since it runs it's whole little java applet... thing, it's pretty hard to use any ide other than its own ide. It's possible, but not the best.
Suddenly not having visual studio is the woooorrrrst.
Over the years I've switched most of my development to much more lightweight editors like Visual Studio Code or Atom with a command line in tow.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
Unity and Unity's 2d stuff are both a bit peculiar in some pretty specific ways, but I think 2d Unity works pretty well. I also use it because it is well marketed and I can use C#, which is my favorite language.
(For reference, MonoBehaviour is the basic game object class in unity, you can attach unity's framework stuff to it, and it has a suite of events that fire at various times, such as Update() which fires every frame.)
Unity really likes you to drag and drop stuff in the editor, for instance, but you can't drop an interface type object into an object in the editor, you can only drag and drop children of MonoBehaviour. A few similar behaviors like this in the engine really start making you scratch your head, but once you accept the conceit that MonoBehaviours should be a thin layer with as little game logic in them as possible, or preferably no real game logic at all (essentially making them the view layer in MVC), it becomes a lot more manageable, at least in my experience.
Though, that does give you less information in the editor, of course.
Anyway, that's just my 2 cents and it's just how I use unity, but it seems to work pretty well.
This approach also helps serialization, because MonoBehaviours are not serializable by default. Having a MonoBehaviour contain a reference to your game logic class makes it a lot easier to just dump that into the serializer than having to send a bunch of individual properties.
@Spawnbroker , I'm also a long-time fan of C#, and I really enjoyed a lot of what I've done with it in Unity. On the other hand, most of that time has been on tool development, but I feel like GameMaker Studio 2 (I'm trying out the free trial) is getting me into the actual game design part a bit faster.
Huge list of changes but the one I'm most interested in is the orthographic 2D cinemachine, and the 2D tile maps.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
I wouldn't
Finally! Didn't they show off those tile maps at the Unity conference 3 or 4 years ago?
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
You wouldn't do Unity, or Unreal? Any reasons why you hate one (or both)?
I have heard Unity is awful for multiplayer networking and also has some performance problems on more demanding games. I've heard Unreal is great for networking and has some awesome graphics stuff right out of the gate, but it seems like it has a smaller community and is for more established game developers, i.e. it's harder to learn.
As far as learning curve, I would say from a programming point of view Unity is much easier. C# is easier to grok for most people than C++, by a lot. That said Unreal has Blueprint which is one of the best visual programming environments available today. It really is quiet slick and you can make a huge chunk of a game in it, only needing to drop to C++ for pure performance reasons.
Community size I'm not sure. Unity has been available to the average person longer, but Unreal has a huge professional development community behind it. It's tough to say. I wouldn't use this as the deciding factor because I think the communities have both reached enough of a critical mass that finding help when you need it is straightforward.
Edit - I say this because I don't think any one person in here will say we don't use X because it doesn't do Y. What you'll generally hear in here is, I love using X, because I like the way it handles Y more than Z does. But in reality, all of the popular engines are highly capable.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
Unity does seem to have more indie community support and Sony in particular are very keen on it.
I think I'm gonna see if I can get a prototype up of a potential battle system first, just to see if it's fun.
Like, I often run into problems with "Man, doing this thing in Unity can be a pain", and every time that happens it's because someone is trying to basically shoehorn something external into Unity, which, like, everything would have that issue. Unity doesn't handle OSC well? Well neither does, like, anything that isn't built specifically for OSC control. Unity has problems integrating with external programs? Well no shit, it's a game engine, it's not designed to require a bunch of other programs being installed alongside it because who would release a game where you also need a $100 external to run it, or where you need to be running multiple programs at all
All my problems with Unity are based on people wanting to use it as a research tool. And it's really cool that it works for that with some massaging, but like... it needs massaging for that. I've never seen any problem with Unity not doing great as a game engine.
And I know someone else mentioned in this thread a bit back about "Oh well I just feel so constrained with Unity".
It's just weird, that there's this idea in the world that Unity is some limited or limiting thing
- Unity gives you a blank canvas, but that means you have to paint everything for yourself.
- Unreal gives you a ton of tools and prebuilt things that make life a lot easier, until you try to break out of its paradigms, in which case you have to overcome a certain paradigmatic resistance.
- Unreal looks way better out of the box.
- It's possible to get Unity to look as good as Unreal, but it's not easy and you have to know what you're doing
- Unreal has amazing artist-focused tools
- To get decent artist-focused tools in Unity, you have to spend $TEXAS on the asset store, all the while hoping the tools you buy will keep getting updates as engine updates are released, so that your purchase doesn't become worthless
- Unity has the better 2D tools
- Unity has better low end mobile compatibility
- Unreal has the way better and more helpful community (hello)
- Unity engine updates and bug fixes take ages
- Unreal gives you access to the full engine source code for free, to modify however you want, or fix bugs you encounter yourself
Other than that, the main difference is one of market share, personal preference, and preexisting skills.
But of course Unreal is the better choice. Trust me! Could this face tell lies?
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
Oh whoops, that was a half-written post!
What I meant is that I wouldn't say Unreal necessarily gives you more freedom than Unity. You can do basically anything you want in Unity, including augmenting the editor itself. I wrote a neat little extension that helps with displaying properties of polymorphic lists.
I'm sure I said something to the effect that "I wish Unity had more helpful defaults or tutorials", like how you're supposed to intuit that the way to pause is `Time.timeScale = 0;`. It works, but it - like a few other gripes - isn't very intuitive or spelled out in documentation.
That's definitely not to say that Unity can't do something. If anything, my gripes are probably due to the system being so extensible that "sensible defaults" are meaningless.
Ah yeah, as for specific points:
Again, I only know the Unreal side, but I know it extremely well. Here's my takes:
UE4 is incredibly easy to learn and pick up, you don't even have to know programming to make simple game prototypes with it. In fact, using UE4 blueprints sneakily teaches you programming without you realizing it, as happened to yours truly.
There's a ton of free content - env art, characters, effects, materials, etc - available from Epic directly, which you can use in commercial games for free if you want to, as well as from the community, who have produced a metric fuckton of free tutorials.
I don't know how big the Unity community is, but one of the UE4 community groups I run recently broke 30k members, and I also help moderate on the biggest UE4 Discord server which is currently sitting at almost 8500 users.
And the fact that UE is used more by established developers doesn't have anything to do with whether it's harder or easier to learn! But it means it's easier to find freelance or fulltime studio work at a place that actually has a budget to pay you with. And the skills you can learn transfer quite well into other industries that are more and more starting to use UE4 for non-game applications.
Unreal Engine 4 Developers Community.
I'm working on a cute little video game! Here's a link for you.
I'm building a card game right now, I NEED THIS SO EFFING BAD.