Unreal Engine [thumbs down]

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
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Hi guys I hope it is OK to discuss this here. But I decided to download and test unreal engine and I would like other’s feedback who have tested.

I was distinctly underwhelmed, not only was it a 2gb download, plus the 100mb installer, it tried downloading xcode for mac which took another inordinate amount of time.

Upon opening program it was insanely sluggish, bearing in mind I’ve got 16mb of ram on this bad boy. Terrible ux, the node material node editor was madly complicated.

WTF is this?

There were no decent assets, just a cube and cyclinder and some other crap, no foliage, and scene sculpting which looked incredibly slow.

I was expecting a load of different skies as well, nothing of the sort here. The only good thing was the default characters for first person /third person and the racing game. But all that is, is a decent model that is properly rigged.

Another thing is the water, I thought you could just drag and drop a running water onto the scene, nope, you probably have to write the shader using the node editor or something.

And the compile/build times, wow, how slow were they, it was unreal (pun intended) it was like waiting for paint to dry. :no:

Ultimately, it makes me totally appreciate the BGE, not only is it much faster it is much easier too. I’m really thankful for all the work the contributors make to making our lives easier. :smiley:

In short, don’t bother with unreal, total waste of time, waste of bandwidth. It looks like if you want to create really good sh*t you have to build up all your assets, shaders and actions, (all in another toolchain.) :no:
Needless to say, I’m uninstalling this as soon as possible and that makes me :smiley:

Anyone else share their experiences? I’d be glad to hear.

1 Like
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My Linux build from source code reviews:
*Usually games works, for some reason, it was set to 25% resolution at beggining so the testing looked very werid.
*FPS low(mostly 20-30 in the templates), I don’t get real-time reflections on objects where other users get them.
*In advanced car demo the occlusion culling has bug for me and I see almost nothing, car is visible only from few several angles.
*My GPU gets almost overheat from it, most of the editor data is calculated in GPU, that’s why shader compilation is very slow. Actually, my computer gets like 5x slower while using it and ~2x slower after closing it till I restart computer.
*The Starter Assets Pack has single floor plane instead of the normal seen hundreds of several assets.

So that you can see my results aren’t very positive. Maybe, if I would be able to delete 2nd, 3rd and 4th line, than I may test the workflow - how easy it is to use it and how fast I can achieve high results. However, I must say - this engine is not the best choice for me at all…:frowning:

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I’m glad I’m not the only one, did you ever try writing an action code in c++? And how long were your average build times?

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I didn’t try building and C++. Basicly I just tested if it works and found out that it works, but I can’t with it on my low machine + it has some install bugs in Linux.

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Well actually Unreal was originally made for professional usage. I remember Unreal 1 costs 1 million dollars back in the days. They made U4 free only because that’s what the market dictates.
It is very powerful engine with a top notch capabilities. Blender on the other side is a hobbyist engine made for one purpose to- be used mainly by beginners and probably for prototyping by small indie studios. That is why it seems easy and fast.
Before it was Unreal script instead of C++, but C++ offers much more flexibility and speed and the fact that the engine is used by pro programmers made the U4 creators to choose C++ over Uscript. Blender also uses C++ for the logic bricks,and the core engine, imagine if you need a new brick or anything new, you just write it in the editor in it appears in the UI, that is flexibility.

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Well, Blender is used for a lot of other engines as modelling concept. However, I think BGE should show out more proffesionality while getting user friendlier(easier way for advanced shaders is most important).

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UE4 in general is a heavyweight engine that requires a rather high-end machine (and uses a UI that practically necessitates a multi-monitor setup).

According to their forums, if you do things according to the “Unreal way” you won’t have so many problems, but a lot of people regardless report they have to spend a lot of time filling their projects with workarounds because it doesn’t have such good support for allowing people to do things in a way that they prefer (that and the fact that while they get a lot of bugfixes, the lightning fast development means a lightning fast introduction of new bugs too). This is also compounded by the fact that compatibility in tools are broken at a breakneck pace (supposedly for the better) and people who upgrade have to a spend a lot of time redoing things.

There’s also been complaints that Unreal is a poor choice for mobile because the build sizes for small projects even are quite large. The most mystifying thing though is that a lot of people who seem fed up with fighting the engine decide to still use it as their main application just because it’s made by Epic Games. From what I read of how development is run, they make adding new features a very high priority and don’t have an equivalent of Blender’s Bcon3/Bcon4 phase (features are added almost right up to the release).

I think in their case, they really need to have a period where feature addition is frozen and they just focus on polish and bugfixes, but a lot of developers are also what you call “core” gamers and that group is known to be big on wanting bells and whistles.

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Well actually Unreal was originally made for professional usage. I remember Unreal 1 costs 1 million dollars back in the days. They made U4 free only because that’s what the market dictates.
It is very powerful engine with a top notch capabilities. Blender on the other side is a hobbyist engine made for one purpose to- be used mainly by beginners and probably for prototyping by small indie studios. That is why it seems easy and fast.
Before it was Unreal script instead of C++, but C++ offers much more flexibility and speed and the fact that the engine is used by pro programmers made the U4 creators to choose C++ over Uscript. Blender also uses C++ for the logic bricks,and the core engine, imagine if you need a new brick or anything new, you just write it in the editor in it appears in the UI, that is flexibility.

Just to be clear, only look forward to feedback from people who have actually used unreal engine. :wink:

UE4 in general is a heavyweight engine that requires a rather high-end machine (and uses a UI that practically necessitates a multi-monitor setup).

No idea but I got a reasonable spec graphics card 16GB of ram, and the thing was chugging away. And compile time pffts. Don’t get me wrong some of the videos on youtube look awesome but given my first impressions, I can’t see why something similar can be done in bge.

I understand why games need to be written in c++, but I think controlling simple logic in a high end language like python was a good choice. There are a lot of gotchas with c++.

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Just to be clear, only look forward to feedback from people who have actually used unreal engine. :wink:

Not really sure what this is trying to say, but if you dispute the validity of the statement simply for having not used the engine, that’s a little naive.

UE4 and BGE are vastly different. They target different people etc… but ultimately the Unreal Engine is better at making games. Not perhaps at making games fast, but better, overall with many different metrics. That’s not a bad thing or a slight at those of us who’ve worked on the BGE. It’s just a statement.

The compile times are slow the first time because of all the linking that’s required and compiling of every file. The next compile is usually faster. You can improve this with additional options: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/3647/how-to-improve-compile-times-for-a-c-project.html

UE4 probably chugs on lower end PCs because they don’t target that developer market. Here, low end is given in the studio sense, where £300 + for the GFX alone is often a baseline.

Uscript was UE’s equivalent to the BGEs Python, and they removed it because it was too slow for some of the games the engine was used to develop. Python is even slower, arguably, but as many don’t have tight rendering budgets (as many don’t use frag / vert / displacement / compute shaders) with the BGE, it’s not easily noticed (and often games really aren’t that complex).

It looks like if you want to create really good sh*t you have to build up all your assets, shaders and actions, (all in another toolchain.) :no:

Yep, Unreal doesn’t have a magical make-game button :wink: It just makes it easier for you to get performant results that look and feel nice (doing your work justice).

Now, as a hypocrite, this post may/may not be offtopic for this subforum, so if it is closed, that’s the reason.

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Reducing overall system complexity was the core motivation for excising UnrealScript (ref):

There are performance benefits, but performance was rarely an issue with UnrealScript, and when it was, there were a number of ways to optimize (including dropping down to C++).

Python is even slower, arguably, but as many don’t have tight rendering budgets (as many don’t use frag / vert / displacement / compute shaders) with the BGE, it’s not easily noticed (and often games really aren’t that complex)

It has very little (if anything) to do with “rendering budgets”; the GPU runs the shaders, and is generally used to draw the scene, so language speed on the CPU is virtually irrelevant.

Python inefficiencies are tolerable because Python is typically used to program computationally inexpensive gameplay logic.

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Just to be clear, only look forward to feedback from people who have actually used unreal engine. :wink:

You are right, I never had the chance to use Unreal professionally in my 8 years in the game industry, because our programmers rejected it as a choice for each of our projects. I can speak for hours why Unreal is not a good choice for an indie game studio(just from participating in the meetings), but I don’t think this is the right place.

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BGE is WYSWIG and fast at prototyping, the only things its missing to be as good as ue4 in my opinion

  1. Shader profile compatibility- Shader won’t run on IOS or Android

  2. Instancing - BGE instances are not done using a geometry shader, so no batched render call advatages

  3. No tesselation shader

  4. Python logic is not easy to thread for a beginner

  5. No touchscreen sensor

  6. viewport draw code is inefficent

once all these are addressed, bge will be just as good as UE4 (in my mind at least)

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From a game dev perspective.(not the technical side of tings,like rendering technology…etc.):

  1. Lack of speed, I don’t think there is a slower engine out there. :wink:

  2. Appropriated shadows

  3. Debugger/text editor like MonoDevelop for Unity

  4. A real profiler, with graphs, groups…etc.

  5. BPPlayer integration or some serious publishing tool with assets archivation and protection,splash screen,icon change, etc.

  6. Realtime scene edditing and realtime editor window rescale

  7. Build-in tools and assets like, ragdoll,grass shaders, water shaders, toon shaders,particle systems, tree generator, terrain generator…etc

  8. Even more speed :smiley:

I think there are approximately 1000 more things that BGE is missing to be just as good as UE4.
…
…
…
1000. Real-time floating water that is affected by the stones in it :smiley:

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From the networking articles on the subject, the main reason given was a performance based one. Interesting to see Sweeney explicitly state otherwise.

It has very little (if anything) to do with “rendering budgets”; the GPU runs the shaders, and is generally used to draw the scene, so language speed on the CPU is virtually irrelevant.

Python inefficiencies are tolerable because Python is typically used to program computationally inexpensive gameplay logic.

Yes. Most BGE users are not going to be performance counting because they’re not stressing the platform. Python does not run GPU side, but necessary blocking for GPU IO and other rendering components demands certain performance targets. A slower interpreted language used to implement expensive game mechanics / systems is a sure way to rapidly diminish this budget.

To be more precise however, I would in future refer to the frame budget and include other systems.

Python inefficiencies are tolerable because Python is typically used to program computationally inexpensive gameplay logic.

and often games really aren’t that complex

Yes. :wink:

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To make good comparisons you have to have used BOTH engines extensively :wink:

Does unreal engine have real time floating water where pebbles splash out of the box? I didn’t see anything, You probably have to write that in, so how does that compare with BGE?

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Number 1000 was just a joke. :slight_smile: Ofcourse…you have to write it and in UE4 is very possible as I’ve seen one floating on my monitor.

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Yes but it is also possible in bge, we could even say vanialla c++ is possible but then what’s the point of comparison. :wink:

Still hate unreal engine, and soon going to uninstall it. Anyway, who here on BA is going to make a multi-million dollar game franchise. 0%.

We’re all best sticking with bge and the using the resources driven by the community. Unreal doesn’t affect us.

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I really like the BGE, but I have to admit, I think UE4 is amazing. My only issue with it is the terrain tools, 'cuz they really suck. I typically make all of my terrain in blender, than export it as a height map.

We’re all best sticking with bge and the using the resources driven by the community.

Yeah, one of the biggest pros of blender is the community.
Either way, I think both engines are good at what their for and work well for their intended users… But…I do like having swaying vegetation in Unreal.:cool:

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I also just found a thread in the UE4 forum which gives another reason why you might think twice before jumping on board. Namely, the high frequency of people dismissing critique by either saying to modify the source yourself or saying to use another engine.

In this case, someone doesn’t want UE4 to throw them everything they may or may not need when they start a new project (like a navigation and multiplayer manager), and the response is “Open Visual Studio” and disable the un-needed objects yourself". One person even said that letting the user have control over what classes to choose will lead to more questions on the forums.

Unfortunately, the way the culture surrounding UE4 works, saying the wrong thing in your critique towards the engine can lead to a long confrontation with the project’s cheerleaders (which includes moderators and engine developers). They even dismiss people who assert that the dev. team should focus more effort on bugfixing and instead hide behind the “all software has bugs, some slip through the cracks” statement.

Either way, it seems to me like UE4’s forums is becoming a toxic environment for those who want more flexibility and control in their game making approach, perhaps Epic should’ve kept the subscription.

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Just about anything visual is usually going to be hell in the BGE. If you’re going for a stylistic approach, that usually won’t be much of a problem. But attempt to do anything intricate with light, and you’ve got quite a headache. No native support for SSAO, HDR, instanceable lightmaps, bloom, environment maps, global shadows, or lens flares.

The one very high mark I will give the BGE in the visual area is that it allows the full use of the Node Editor in creating realtime materials. Which, as a counterpoint to the OP, is basically exactly the same system Unreal uses.

Then you have the crashes when trying to fully remove vehicles, intermittent crashes when moving to a scene with a navmesh, and the lack of detailed control in regards to either of the above. Some of those are dealbreakers.

The final counterpoint I can provide, is that while Epic’s developers are certainly in need of revising their technique in order to keep themselves and their product afloat, Blender’s are passively intent on abandoning BGE altogether. Some of Ton’s statements several months ago indicate that the BGE and its features are the bells and whistles, and are ripe to be trimmed at a moment’s notice.