Slashdot Mirror
Switching Game Engines Halfway Through Development
An anonymous reader writes: Third-party game engines are wonderful creations, allowing developers to skip a lengthy and complicated part of the development process and spend more time on content creation. But each engine has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be apparent at the beginning of a project. If you realize halfway through that your game doesn't work well on the engine you picked, what do you do? Jeff LaMarche describes how he and his team made the difficult decision to throw out all their work with Unity and start over with Unreal. He describes some technical limitations, like Unity's 32-bit nature, and some economic ones, like needing to pay $500 per person for effective version control. He notes that Unreal Engine 4 has its problems, too, but the biggest reason to switch was this: "Our team just wasn't finding it easy to collaborate. We weren't gelling as a cohesive team and we often felt like the tools were working against us."
$500 per developer doesn't seem particularly absurd, nor have I heard of any particularly onerous restrictions on using these engines.
What's $500 work out to? A day's pay?
Daikatana
About 3 or maybe even 4 days pay, more likely. We're talking game devs here. Not exactly the highest paid in the industry.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
More like 3 or 4 days wages, actually... and for each and every person in the studio who willl need access to it. For every 10 people you have on the dev team, that's a whole month of salary being spent just on licensing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Kerbal Space Program (a bleeding edge physics sandbox game built in Unity that includes orbital space travel) had unofficial 64 bit support back in... February '14? And now has official 64-bit support.
$500/developer is pretty cheap, did you buy the developers $250 Chromebook "workstations", too?
Anonymous poster slamming Unity and praising Unreal 4 right after the Unreal team announces huge cuts due to lack of engine uptake, and Unity flying high right now reeks of ad-placement.
moox. for a new generation.
A game engine is a very, VERY big enterprise to make, particularity if you are talking one with modern 3D graphics. It is a big undertaking even for a company who's done it before and has a decent team of people. You will spend a lot of time and effort on it, and it still might not end up being very good.
Game engines get a lot of that low level hard work out of the way. That's why they are so used. You see even large development studios with big budgets license an engine because the cost of doing so is far less than the cost of properly developing their own.
If you want to build a game engine, that's great, but make that your goal. Build an engine for its own sake then, if you have one that seems to work well, think about using it for a game. Don't set off to make a game form the ground up, it isn't likely to happen.
Woosh
Did you read the article at all? It has nothing to do about quality of graphics, the article is about 2 things tools and collaboration. I've used both game engines for development and even though Unity is easy to pickup and build for, as already mentioned, collaboration is right out the window along with its tools. Unreal isn't great either but at least it offer a hell of lot better collaboration compared to Unity and this is the most important part of any team based development.
Being a Unity fanboy isn't going to help the engine get any better when the flaws are bloody apparently the stars in the sky.
Switching game engines halfway through development says more to me about a lack of proper requirements analysis and planning than it does about the benefits of one engine over another.
Because the author is calling asset management 'version control'.
The author really doesn't know what he's talking about and if you look at the full article, it shows.
Another example would be that they basically rewrote the game, with no art and assets ... and then claim it looks better because of the Unreal engine, and not the fact that they changed the textures.
Unity isn't the problem. The project management and developers are.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Planning correctly can save you a lot of time and money... not to mention heartache.
I've used all of them, quite effectively. Sorry, but Perforce's overly centralized control and the administrative expense of error prone Perforce management makes it unusable for long projects. The centralized control is too vulnerable to central administrator errors, such as having to delete content and accidentally deleting the only copy. Subversion has some similar issues, and relatively poor performance and very confusing upgrade cycles to deal with.
Git is working out _extremely_ well for small and large projects in my experience, and its ease of replication and offsite management are far superior. Bitkeeper is comparable to git in performance but now badly lags in cross-compatibility features and broadly available hosting resources like github or bitbucket.
One function of special vocabulary is for specialists to easily communicate. But another, important, social function is as a badge of in-group membership. If you use the words correctly (from the point of view of the group) you show that you belong, and that you probably know and understand all the other explicit and implicit rules of the group. If the word use spreads too far it loses this function and the group needs to find new words and expressions instead.
You dislike "gelling". You dislike "paradigm shifts". It would probably be a fairly risk-free bet on what you think of expressions like "optics" (as in "the optics of this decision is good") and the like. You dislike these words and refuse to use them. Which signals to management people that you are not management and should not be treated as part of their in-group. "gelling" works exactly as intended, in other words.
Asking for words to not be used like this is futile. It would be like asking people to no longer care about fashion (another in-group signal) or to not form groups of like-minded people at all.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You dislike these words and refuse to use them. Which signals to management people that you are not management and should not be treated as part of their in-group. "gelling" works exactly as intended, in other words.
You have a valid point. However, slashdot is not intended as a forum for middle management to trade buzzwords. Slashdot is supposed to be for technical discussions. Arguably even if we can't permanently strike "gelling" from the English Language it should be reasonable to present an argument against using it here.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Games development is one of those fields where everyone wants to do it*, so the games companies can afford to pay peanuts. Get them in, burn them out, get a fresh batch in. EA is notorious as a meat grinder: fresh faced college grads go in, meat comes out, jaded, exhausted, and relegated to working on ancient VB apps for the rest of their careers (I jest). Granted, it's not like they're getting paid minimum wage; from a pure numbers standpoint they do okay for themselves. But those numbers are eroded when you factor in the fact that sure, you're making $80-100k, but you're also working 120 hours/week since you're exempt. Family life? Good luck. Hell, good luck finding the time to meet the ones you want to start a family with.
*Seriously, how many software developers do you know that came out of college saying "Golly, I really can't wait to work on making SSRS reports with pie charts for some MBA to use in a meeting to justify replacing me with an H1B?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Entirely serious. I've worked as a game dev for 6 years, and I know of what I speak. Okay, it might not work out to be *FOUR* whole days pay, but very easily three to three and a half. Salary ranges in my experience range from about $36k/year to $52k/year... but even with the latter, $500 still works out to 2 and a half days of pay. Also, usually with the higher pay grades comes a greater expectation on the part of those above you that you would be willing to work extended hours on projects, and probably only leaving work at something resembling regular business hours maybe only 2 or 3 times in a single month.
Basically, you do it because you love programming games. That's it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Git is used to maintain the Linux kernel; I don't think any game has a rate of commits that comes even close to that. The problem you're referring to is probably that Git is not designed to handle large binary data efficiently. That doesn't make it a joke, but it could disqualify it for a particular use.
Hey, at least you're not leveraging synergy to effect a value-add win-win amoung thought-leaders, increasing mindshare and gaining net.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I hate to say it, but this Jeff guy is fairly cluesless when it comes to Unity. And is, therefore, in a poor position to give any useful insight into Unity vs. UE4.
My studio (of roughly 27 years) has used a lot of tech in its time. We even developed our own engine, HeroEngine (used in games like Star Wars The Old Republic MMO). We've made lots of games and have lots of experience with Unity. I used Unity to do the Android port of Temple Run, and we've made a lot other titles with it too. We're currently working on a marquee franchise for a major publisher... using Unity.
Unity is not just for small teams. Jeff didn't do his homework on this one. Our team is 27 strong, using git for version control. We use a deep feature-branch approach and it works well not only for our developers, but our non-techies: artists, designers, sound guys, etc. Sure there are issues with Unity and version control, but you find ways to make it work through convention and approach. Same thing happens in all Engines. They all have their issues. The only engine that put collaboration at the forefront was our HeroEngine, but even that has issues. Though we sold off that tech, you can still check it yourself... just Google.
The 32 bit editor limit is true, but is it really an issue? It never has been for us. His problems smell strongly of bad development practices... they can't seem to manage their memory resources well and that suggests other major issues in their group. Just reads a bit amateur to me. No engine will save you from bad practices. The game builds are 64 bit, and the Editor will be also in Unity 5 (how did he not know this?).
It is notable that the guy is fascinated with a lot of things in UE4 that, as it turns out, you can also do as well or even better in Unity. He loves, for instance, Blueprint visual scripting... did he bother to check out uScript for Unity? He loves the node-based Shader in UE4.... well there is ShaderForge in Unity. He loves Physically Based Rendering in UE4 but doesn't mention Alloy in Unity. Sure some of these things are add on costs (usually pretty tiny) and there are also lower cost or sometimes even free alternatives to many of them. The best part is you can mix and match which pieces work best for you. If you don't like UE4's node-based shader... tough! But in Unity you have a few to pick form..... .... or better yet, you can make your own! The best part of Unity is how seamlessly extensible the editor is. This is a huge productivity booster. Every game we do we create custom tools that enhance the efficiency of the designers and artists. It's so easy to do, you just naturally create augmenting tools as the need comes up. Our designers and artists can do amazing things without ever having worry about writing any code... much less even a visual scripting system. This is because we made the tools specific to the game that let them express what they need all from the inspectors and the scene tools.
Another cool thing: make a great addon that is generally useful... then wrap it up and sell it in the Asset Store. Monetize that sucker! Or give it away for free if you like.
Is Unity perfect? Nope. But it is insanely efficient for developing games. Works with any sized team well enough, and creates titles that run across tons of platforms. And the Asset Store is a treasure trove of extensions that just make it better and better all the time.
The places where it falls behind a tad are either addresseable from add ons, and ultimately in Unity 5.
I am not advocating that one choose Unity over UE4... but if you are going to make an argument, at least make a balanced one with all the facts. I would take his critique with a grain of salt. Try each engine yourself, but make sure you take the time to fully understand both the tool and its eco-system and how it applies to what you are doing. And above all, make sure you have sharp developers on your team who understand the fundamentals. Like I said, no tool will get you out of a jam of your own making.
David Whatley