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by dandellion 1047 days ago
I spent 6 months trying to learn Unity and 6 months trying to learn Unreal after that and it really shows that Epic use the engine themselves. It shows in how there's usually a "default" way to do things instead of 3 different half-integrated tools for everything, it shows in the sensible defaults, in the documentation... It's also pretty evident that the engine was designed with first person shooters in mind, but I find it easier to adapt Unreal to a different genre than to figure out the best way to do anything in Unity.
3 comments

Having also used both for several months each, I feel the same way overall.

I will say that Unity has better documentation and more learning resources due to the much bigger community around it, but I still found myself reimplementing several things that felt really basic on top of the various APIs.

Unreal's documentation can be really lackluster here and there and it can be difficult to find forum posts regarding specific topics, but after digging you often a function or component that is just the thing for your needs.

I'll agree that Unity had more and better tutorials, especially for beginners. But I found myself using the reference documentation more than tutorials and I liked the engine and blueprints docs in Unreal better, but maybe that's just me.
I'd argue it's less of dog fooding issue, as Unity does use the engine and plenty of others use it too, than a badly organization issue.

For everything there are multiple immature solutions stuffed by different teams. This is clearly a sign of managers grabbing fiefdom nd no one from the top tries to control it.

Unity doesn't really use Unity Engine, they don't ship a game with it or use it in the real world.

From what someone on HN has described before last time they showed something off like this, even if it's made internally at Unity it isn't really made with the tools you get downloading Unity yourself, it's made by an offshoot team who has people doing changes to the internals of the engine and writing custom hacks for this one use case. Then they ship the video, be it Adam (2016) or Enemies (2022) but then that's it, they go on to work on something else and the tweaks and tooling never get made into something viable for the main engine.

That's why Unity themselves managed to ship Adam [1] 7 years ago but since no one else has used Unity to create content like that since. Feels like it's almost to a yearly schedule now where Unity will do a PR demo like the link above on this topic and then nothing real ever materializes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXI0l3yqBrA

There is an accelerated solution team that uses the engine.
That’s the best thing about unreal blueprints. They have excellent discoverability of the engine api