[jokoon]

How really easy is it to set up a beginner's project with this engine ? I mean it's a commercial engine, it has all the bells and whistles, but how easy is it to learn it ? Does it require one to use the editor to use the engine, or can I start with a simple bit of code and start going from there ?

What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unreal Engine more earth to earth when it comes to programming ?

If it's a powerful 3D renderer but it's hard to use for simple things and it's not easily extensible, it's not really worthwhile.

I see it's very powerful, but I'm still wondering about the real utility of an "engine" versus a library.

For example, if you have some new idea and you are a programmer, and you want to be able to experiment and not be constrained by the design of the engine, I doubt such engine would really be relevant. Programmers need simple tools and frozen platforms.

I guess this engine is great for small studio who want to make a real 3D game quickly, if their programming style fit well, but if you're an indie or a demoscener and you're just experimenting, this engine is just too powerful.

I mean it's great to have such great and powerful tools (if they can last at least 5 year and not make projects obsolete) for free, but I don't see becoming a standard in the game programming community, and I don't know why...

[Arelius]

> What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it. Is this Unreal Engine more earth to earth when it comes to programming ?

The programming experience in UE4 is great, but is clearly not what you are looking for. It's very opinionated, And your code very much needs to fit within it's framework.

> If it's a powerful 3D renderer but it's hard to use for simple things and it's not easily extensible, it's not really worthwhile.

It's not a powerful 3D renderer. It has a quite nice 3D renderer. But Unreal is a game engine, and must be treated as such, it's renderer isn't really modular, and if a 3D renderer is all you want, I suspect you can be better suited elsewhere.

> I see it's very powerful, but I'm still wondering about the real utility of an "engine" versus a library.

I could perhaps go through a lot of examples to help illustrate the point, but perhaps the significant amount of games that ship every year based off of Unreal Engine is better evidence that there is significant utility in the "engine"

> if you have some new idea and you are a programmer

What if you aren't a programmer, what if the idea fits within the bounds of what the engine is built to do. Certainly, there are large classes of problems that UE are poorly suited for, but there are also large classes of problems that a web browser, or even a blender are ill-suited for, use the tools when they suit your problem.

> I guess this engine is great for small studio who want to make a real 3D game quickly, if their programming style fit well, but if you're an indie or a demoscener and you're just experimenting, this engine is just too powerful.

I'd agree that this engine is poorly suited for demoscene type work, but depending on your game, UE is great for indies, and depending on what your experiment is, can be great for experimenting.... Not all experiments are technical in nature.

> but I don't see becoming a standard in the game programming community

Unreal Engine is already a standard in the game programming community, and has been for 10 or so years.

[ffn]

In my opinion, if you're just a hobbyist programmer who want to experiment building games on the side, it makes more sense to build your MVP demo using humble html5 canvas (I personally use pixijs, but things like threejs or whatnot might be more appropriate depending on your idea). This is because building a good indie game is a big commitment requiring lots of time (which is money), and unless you're building this game for your grandchildren, it makes sense to test the market with a MVP and try to raise money for it on a kick-starter site before you commit to building it on a powerful engine like Unreal (or Unity).

In addition, worrying about powerful graphics as an indie game dev is like worrying about distributed database scalability as a minor e-commerce startup. Your priorities are messed up and, just like how you can just get away with mysql on a free heroku instance as long as you have interesting junk to sell on your ecommerce startup, so too can you get away with a shoddy 2d engine with box2d physics as long as your story is engaging (or your mechanics are fun).

[greggman]

It really depends on what type of game you're planning to make. Go to any game jam and look at the amazing games prototyped in Unity over a weekend. Compare the html5 games. It's often night and day. The amount of stuff you can get done in an engine you're familiar with so many tools and plugins at your disposal is a huge force multiplier.

Of course do whatever you want. Most of my projects have been HTML5. But at the same time I recognize that free importing of nearly any format of 3d assets into unity and built in animation, collision, physics, ability to edit nearly all parameters at runtime, even code. Is a huge boost once you get used to it.

[trendnet]

I don't have any experience on Windows, but here're my 5 cents.

>What I hate about unity is the whole interface editor thing, it's big and you must use everything to use it.

Unreal Editor is even bigger.

>...earth to earth when it comes to programming ?

~4k headers, they have their own build system. Using Xcode is not very fun, it's either indexing/compiling, or just waiting while the build system tries to decide which files were changed.

A powerful machine with SSD for Unreal is a must. Unity is not that beefy (thus responsive), but you don't get a powerful editor for materials, AI, visual scripting and so on out of the box.

Also guys at Unreal prefer new features over stability. Every release is a fight with bugs.

[tsotha]

They're all like that. One of my favorite games keeps running out of memory because Unity 4 doesn't really work on 64 bit windows so they had to stay with 32 bit.

[Arelius]

> Also guys at Unreal prefer new features over stability.

Unity was just as bad on the stability department in my experience. And at least Unreal pushes their new features to production quality. Unity on the other hand seems to push for new features just to hit a feature list on a box cover.

[cpitman]

I think what may be missing that this is more than just a "graphics" library, and that by taking over the event loop and overall structure of the app they make it so that you can get a running game (as opposed to rendering a quad) far faster.

Game development forums are full of skeletons of people that tried to roll their own "game engine", forgetting that their goal was to make a game[1]. Unity (haven't used Unreal yet) makes it so that you can get a prototype done in less than a day. I probably looked like a kid waving my phone around like a joystick to steer my sub around a 3D ocean, changing the handling, etc. Starting with a graphics library would make that a multi-day task.

[1]: No really, when I was younger I essentially stopped working on my game and developed a fully compositing GUI/Window manager. Fun, but totally besides the point.

[nacs]

It has a system called Blueprints that allows you to use a node-based system so you don't have to write any code at all.

I haven't used Blueprints myself as I prefer their C++ option but I have seen a number of gamedev streams using Blueprints exclusively.