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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Are there any major usability differences for Unreal compared to Unity for less experienced developers? I am a big fan of Unity's ease of use when prototyping and Unreal has always seemed more daunting

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Game development is hard and making anything substantial will require spending thousands of hours in either engine, so it's more about the purpose of the engine rather than ease of use, since you will eventually have to learn all the ins and outs of either one.

Unreal is a "AAA" engine originally meant for large teams. It has much better level design tools and collaboration features, but all programming must be done in C++ which is fragile and can break the whole engine. Lighter scripting can be done with Blueprints which is good for designers making levels interactive. Unreal is a good choice if you are aiming to make a serious production with a team making large detailed levels.

The Unity Asset Store has many more plugins and it's easier to put together a sandbox type game with lots of features, since its managed code design makes it easier to drop in scripts other people have made. There are level design tool plugins available that mimic what Unreal does, but they aren't as polished and collaboration is harder.

Just to expand on this a bit, the Blueprints capabilities have grown to the point were you can create entire games without learning a single line of code.

The major downside I see to blueprints is a lack of source control. This is a pretty massive downside, and not something a professional team can forgo. But if you are looking to learn and understand the engine as a solo person Blueprints are a great place to start.

Blueprints can be used with source control, so your comment is highly misleading. Merging and diffing blueprints is possible as well, as they are serialized in text format and there are tools to assist with that, but merging is unrelible. In practice Unity scenes and prefabs have the same issue. Professional teams, including Epic of course, use Blueprints heavily and always use source control...

I used Unity a bit and have the feeling they are more into the mass marked than Unreal.

It shows in the fact that Unity uses C# instead of C++, which has less historical baggage and is a bit safer, especially for junior devs I think.

Unreal seems to be for projects that need the raw power of C++, but don't want to go into doing their own thing.

I for one never met a Unreal dev, only a mass of Unity devs and the ones that do their own engine.

I've used both a little bit and as a complete novice to graphics/game development I would say the biggest difference was the lack of good tutorials which Unity has and Unreal not really.

While I've been a developer for many years, I've only started with UE4 about a month ago, and I've got to say that the experience has really been great.

Not only are there really, really good official video tutorials to get you up-and-running, but also while UE4 is definitely a complex piece of software, you can get started pretty easily just by knowing a few things. I think that having Blueprints is a huge win, since they allow you to very easily program without having to learn new language syntax, are easy to read, and the visual debugging/real-time flow chart capabilities are very cool.

After only a month or so (of inconsistent, hour-or-two-in-evenings hobby time), I feel pretty comfortable with the engine and need a lot less handholding than I expected to need at this point.

Unity makes it easier than get started. Unreal makes it easier to ship. Caveat: my understanding of Unreal is limited.

The sources of differences are:

Unity's primary audience has been hobbyists. Unreal's has been AAA devs. Unity doesn't ship games themselves, so they tend to focus on flashy, marketing-friendly features. Epic used to ship FPSs at least (they've slowed down in that area). Unity's huge audience pushes them into a large commitment to a ton of legacy architecture dating back to the web plugin. UE is on Ver4 (whereas Ver1 & 2 might predate Unity).

A big one is that Unity uses C# vs UE's C++. Garbage collection is great in the beginning. But, when you go to ship it becomes the enemy. You end up needing to structure everything to have no allocations at run time to avoid GC hitches. So, you start out coding like a modern app dev and end up coding like a classic embedded C dev. Except you aren't using C. You are using a language that tries to sneak allocations past you all over the place.

If you are a hobbyist, Unity is really great. It's great for experimenting, prototyping, and for remaking your own take on that game from 10+ years ago. If you want to make a modern game, be prepared to fight and rewrite a lot of the core of Unity. The editor is great though!

Unreal, however, is a lot more complex and challenging to get started. And, it's not all roses when it comes to shipping either. UE tends to favor a heavyweight setup cost in order to make using high-end features a bit cheaper. That's not great if you don't actually want to pay for those features. UE is technically on mobile, but only because high-end mobile hardware is catching up to what UE requires. Getting UE to run 60fps has been a challenge forever. The Mortal Kombat team has at least one GDC talk about the extensive surgery they had to perform because their management dictated that they use UE.

I think UE4 brings a lot to the table for certain genres and game designs. If you need really nice animation, nice character locomotion, vehicles etc... UE4 seems like it is easier in the long run despite it being daunting when you boot it up. I like unity for more experimental work and grid based games. Kind of like programming languages, learning UE4 has taught me interesting things that I would not have learned just by playing around in unity.

I guess there is also the issue of licensing costs which are substantial, but that requires actually shipping for that to matter :)

A few people have mentioned that Unreal uses C++ and Unity uses C#, but note: https://mono-ue.github.io/

Unity will tend to be easier, unless you need performance then Unity can get harder!

There are more tutorials out there for Unity but a lot of them are written by people who don't have much more of an idea of what they doing then you do.

Less experienced developers might benefit from using neither of these things at first, start with maybe basic 2d stuff using just SDL2, or maybe a framework like monogame.

This way you can learn a bit about game programming, fundamentally, without having to learn how to use the engines and its editors and so on.

If you want to write something with old-school blocky 3d models (think X-Wing, early Mechwarrior games, Starfox) is it easier to just learn how to do that in a modern engine like Unreal/Unity, even though it's way overkill for the purpose, or work from a smaller and simpler base?

From my experience I would say yes: Go with Unity.

I'm a big fan of making everything by "scratch" (using libraries like SDL2 or SFML for 2D), but when it comes to 3D games I wouldn't think twice and dive straight into Unity; even if I'm not a huge fan of the environment I know it's the easiest/best tool available.

You can maybe use something like Irrlicht (http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/) but I don't think that's still going to be easier in any way than Unity.

Unity has put a lot more effort into optimizing for lower-end iOS and Android devices. You can build a big shiny awesome game in Unreal, but it's unlikely to run on older devices due to memory requirements.

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