Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

And not every Unreal post gets to the front page. The exact same link was submitted way earlier and if the dupe check would have worked this wouldn't be on the front page because nobody would have seen it.

Maybe I'm not a typical game developer, as I don't like to do my actual developing on Windows, but in UE4 I've always felt as a well-loved second class citizen.

Maybe the fact that I, a random dev, know Unreal from 100 other sources and sites, but have seldom heard about Cryengine explains that?

Even as someone who is stuck at the "I should really do something with Unreal one of these days" level, there's a ton in this post for me to read and easily grasp about the changes they made. Even smaller features have enough about them I can speculate about the changes that had to be made under the hood to enable them, and what I could do with them if I ever actually followed through on trying Unreal out. The screenshots are particularly nice.

Another great example of this sort of thing is the Dolphin progress reports.

It seems a little silly (it's just extended descriptions and some screenshots), but the effect is real and the effort needed is just often not made because those closest to a project either don't see the need because they're so close, or are exhausted from pushing a major release of the project so just don't have the time or energy to put into a good post about the release.

So, for example, the Cryengine 5 release post is about a major development and there's plenty to discuss there, but there's not a ton of substance to the post, and it's certainly not very engaging for anyone not in the thick of the industry (and maybe not even for them).

But CryEngine? Nothing. CE5 was released and the only thing that's happened was that a few people found out CE(4) existed.

Availability of source is another big advantage over Unity I believe. When you run into a problem in Unity you're pretty screwed. At least with Unreal you have the option of diving into the source and figuring out what's going on so you can either fix it or find a workaround.

Imagine if Mozilla was supported like this instead of being paid for customer data. It would be a game changer.

All these engines make some efficiency sacrifices for generality and feature set. You can get better performance if you have a specific problem to solve and you design your rendering around it. For many games that's not going to make sense but for certain VR applications it still might.

For my VR projects I've gone down both paths and there are pros and cons to each. For many projects though the biggest advantage of these engines are the editors - writing your own rendering engine for a specific use case is a lot less work than building an editor that can compare to these tools.

The biggest problem with this pre-packaged software is when something ultimately goes wrong, which it always does. Then you find yourself digging round in internals (assuming you have access, looking at you Unity) to find out what when wrong and why banding is appearing only when you use stencil shadows and apply SSAO factor X.. basically, it's still complicated, and you still have to know your stuff.

Another problem with these engines is they force you into a particular way of working. Unreal blueprints for example are a nightmare once you add a decent amount of functionality as per the law that visual programming does not scale.

Finally you underestimate how much code is the actual game logic, which is also the hardest part to write. In this case the engines don't help at all, Unity even just throws you into Visual Studio and lets that deal with you. Additionally I've yet to see a good solution for figuring out why my AI are running through walls on their way to a target, without writing a ton of custom visualization stuff myself. Many algorithms take place over time (units moving, animating, etc), so you can't just step though code in a debugger as that's like looking at a landscape through a keyhole.