[haunter]

imho yes. I work in the industry and it has more depth and more solid. Blueprints are awesome, it's a node based scripting editor which allows visual programming. Unity is nowhere near that https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/blueprints-visual-sc... It's completely possible to build a whole game using nothing but Blueprints.

The whole Unreal engine with the editor and such is powerful toolset and you can tell it's an engine geared toward professional game designers and artists, basically whole studios, rather than programmers. Unity is really fun to play with if you are a single indie dev. Also it's much better for mobile development. You can do all with Unreal engine too but it's "meant to be" for FPS/TPS games and anything other than that is not harder just you need to "fight" the engine sometimes.

And the Unreal engine is open source. Well it's like open access because there are some very strict rules and limitations around it. But at least it's good for personal use https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github

[hesdeadjim]

Blueprints may be awesome for prototyping, but I have interviewed numerous lead and principal level engineers who worked on big Unreal games and the first thing they mention about Blueprints is that they aim to convert them to native code the moment they can.

[spywaregorilla]

Most of game dev is prototyping though. This isn't too big of a problem. Converting well written bp to c++ is pretty easy.

[haunter]

Yeah I agree. Just personally I love visual programming and wish there were more advancement on the field. And Blueprints is one of the better solutions available now.

[opyate]

UE's source code is "available", but I wouldn't call it open source.

[dbrueck]

True, it's not "open" in the OSS sense, but the source is open in two incredibly important and useful ways: it's available and modifiable. Being able to step through the code or patch it as needed is invaluable.