[ianlevesque]

I don’t take it to that extreme, there’s great Unity content (walkabout VR mini golf comes to mind), but recently when I really played an Unreal Engine game again for hours (Satisfactory), I was floored by just how much better optimized it was. A similar, arguably simpler, game in the genre (Oxygen Not Included) is Unity and famously terrible on performance. I had just sort of accepted that was how it had to be. It’s not.

[kllrnohj]

Oxygen Not Included is a _significantly_ more complex simulation than Satisfactory is as ONI is doing gas movement & thermal transfer mechanics across a large 2D grid.

Now compare Satisfactory to its actual genre-appropriate competitor, Factorio, and suddenly Unreal looks like a pathic joke. Factorio scales _so_ much better it's absurd, but that's really down to the quality & focus of the simulations being added by the game developer. None of it has anything to do with the engine itself (well, except that Satisfactory is limited by the number of game objects it can place as a result of an Unreal Engine limitation...)

[TylerE]

Now imagine Factorio in Unity. Do you expect that to be better or worse than factorio on unreal?

[kllrnohj]

I'd expect it to be equivalent since the task the engines are doing is well within both of their respective capabilities.

The engine is not simulating any of the factory logistics, that's all going to be bespoke code by the game dev and so there's no major reason to expect unity or unreal to behave meaningfully different here.

[TylerE]

Sure there is: C# is substantially less performant than C++ code.

[kllrnohj]

C# has a pretty good FFI system that can call into C++ code. Unity itself does that, after all, it's not entirely written in C#

[TylerE]

Factorio is insanely well optimized. Any overhead is going to be noticeable.

[ianlevesque]

Haven’t played that one much. Thanks for the added color.