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Comment by kensai | Hacker News Reader

Somebody wrote this comment. It was spot on.

"UE5 is very pretty because Sweeny is a rendering god. But its hell to do any real programming with. A project that took me two weeks or so in C# is taking months to reproduce in C++ and Blueprints.

UE5 is a very pretty FPS engine with a low-level plugin interface and a scripting language. The further you get from an FPS the more unwieldly it becomes.

Unity is a programmable physics simulator that happens to have a render pipeline bolted onto it. It is much more flexible, though sadly not as pretty,"

Am also asking myself. Did the company behind Unity going public last year or so not help with the situation? I mean extra money and public scrutiny usually do.

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I'm not really sure where this came from, but it's pretty much nonsense.

Tim Sweeney hasn't written rendering code (or engine code) in years, the Unreal rendering team is enormous these days.

> But its hell to do any real programming with. A project that took me two weeks or so in C# is taking months to reproduce in C++ and Blueprints.

How much of that is familiarity with C# vs unfamiliarity with C++? I find it pretty unbelieveable that someone couldn't reproduce 2 weeks of work in "months".

> UE5 is a very pretty FPS engine with a low-level plugin interface and a scripting language.

Unreal has its roots in an FPS, and that shines through in places, but this hasn't been true for over a decade. The gameplay framework in UE4 is suitable for (and has shipped) many different genres of games. Looking at even wikipedia's list [0] will show you a laundry list of games that are not FPS games that have shipped with Unreal. There are major ARPG, beatemup, open-world shooter, racing, straight up RPG games, and there have been other games announced that don't fit in those categories (e.g. RTS games).

> Unity is a programmable physics simulator that happens to have a render pipeline bolted onto it. It is much more flexible, though sadly not as pretty,"

This is a ludicrous take on Unity. How is it "more flexible" than Unreal? And the claim that it's "not as pretty" is also bizarre (well, up until very recently at least), Unity's pipeline is just as programmable as Unreal's, and sure at the very very very top end of the range of outputs it tops out Unreal, but an "average" PBR pipeline in Unity and an "average" PBR pipeline in Unreal with zbrush sculpts and substance textures/materials is going to be comparable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Even in Blueprint you can push out code fairly quickly if you are familiar.

Before Blueprints there was Kismet.

My last kismet project looked like an ER diagram for a government database. Kismet had decent grouping objects to where you could organize your Kismet, but even my largest and most complex kismets could have been replaced by about 100 lines of unreal script. It's just not as expressive as code. I miss unreal script.

I used Kismet for years and fought with its limitations on a daily basis. By far the biggest limitation of Kismet was that every graph was tied to a level. If you wanted to do any general purpose programming, such as mechanics shared across every level, you had to duplicate your graph for every single one of them. It was a very tedious and error-prone process.

Blueprint is leaps and bounds ahead of Kismet. It's built for general purpose programming out of the box. You can write your own classes, components, enums, and more. You can expose parameters to the Details panel so that designers and artists can easily tweak classes on a per-instance level. You can still write a graph tied to a level a la Kismet — this is called a Level Blueprint — but I find it's rarely necessary, if at all.

I remember trying UnrealScript because of Kismet's limitations. It was certainly more powerful and expressive, but shutting down the editor every time I wanted to compile was a real drag. These days I've gotten used to the fact that Blueprints are compiled on the fly by clicking a button in the editor, with no interruption to iteration. I can't imagine going back.

You are really trying to entice me to open up UE5 again, aren't you :P I opened it, saw verse script was nowhere to be found, and quickly closed it.

In my personal opinion, it's the opposite:

Unity is a black-box machinery with a C# interface bolted on. But as soon as you touch the limits of the black box, your sand castle breaks.

UE4 is the full but raw deal. If you stay within Blueprints, things are easy and predictable. But if you need to exceed its limits, then you have the C++ needed to recompile everything, but things are messy and ugly down in the basement.

As for Unity going public, my impression is that now they are spending much more resources on shiny things to show off instead of fixing bugs that actually affect their paid customers - who mostly do mobile games. Also, it appears that they improved their profitability by massively increasing prices and simultaneously reducing support.

Unity is primarily the renderer and physics engine, everything else is really easy to just write yourself as c#, and unity in no way hinders your ability to write everything else in c#. If you want to change the renderer or physics engine then you have a problem, yes, but unity isn't for people who wants to customize the renderer or physics engine.

In our case, we jumped ship because Unity had bugs and were unwilling to fix them for years.

I believe it still is effectively unusable for anything requiring realtime multiplayer.

Seriously, how can the most used game engine not add proper multiplayer support in 20 years. They announced Netcode for game objects this year which seems OK but even that has "Clientside prediction" in "under consideration" category, any proper realtime multiplayer game on the market has this feature and rollback netcode isn't even under consideration. So if they achieve their goals, they will have a system that is good for at most indie games after 20 years.

AFAIK, Netcode for game objects is merely a rebranded version of a previously existing third party plugin called MLAPI that Unity acquired and hired its developer.

It is very close to what they already had before and was probably mostly to reduce the amount of complaints from, well everybody, regarding their non existent multiplayer, the deprecation of their previous multiplayer solution (however bad) before having any sort of replacement and the semi recent addition of the low-level networking solution that is mostly way too complicated and poorly documented for most average Unity developers.

> "UE5 is very pretty because Sweeny is a rendering god. But its hell to do any real programming with. A project that took me two weeks or so in C# is taking months to reproduce in C++ and Blueprints.

Sweeney is the CEO of a company with over 1000 employees. I highly doubt he has had much (if any) time to write any rendering code for a long time now.

Mostly spot on, as someone else said: "Sweeney hasn't written any of that rendering code in a decade now." And probably more than that. He's got other stuff to attend to, than writing modern 3D pipeline code.

Well, if you want to explore the depths of human despair and misery, just search the Unity forums for 'Scriptable Render Pipeline'

Why didn't that person add Blueprint to the comparison?

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