Unity vs. Unreal Engine: Which Is Better for XR Development | Hacker News Reader

Unity vs. Unreal Engine: Which Is Better for XR Development

circuitstream.com

38 pointsbarbelldan25 comments

Last month I was attempting a game in Unreal Engine for fun. The article does a decent job describing some of the problems. I know C++ and use C++17 at my job, so it wasn't an issue. One minor point is that Unity just tends to work. Unreal engine has some odd bugs some times and the lack of community I think is a huge downside. I have made a few games in Unity and it is a lot easier to find help and free support.

Unity “just tends to work” for Hello Worlds and other hobby-size projects, but when you start building up components and relying on it’s lighting system, for example, to cooperate with you, trouble is inevitable.

Unreal has a better rendering system in my experience, and although this mostly matters for realism, it can also be very valuable in other situations.

I've heard it from Unity expert themselves telling you can achieve the same quality (that's why I've included the performance and graphic comparison).

One thing that maybe the "poisoning the well" element is the fact Unity had a generous freemium open doors for hobby developers, which means there's tons of project that are meh while Unreal Engine is well used in creation of AAA games.

Have you tried them both? Is Unreal really that much better for rendering?

The way I've heard it is that Unreal has better defaults in it's rendering pipeline, producing a slightly more "professional" look despite a lack of ability. Having said that, I was unable to wrap my head around Unreal to make a toy project with it, but even the demo project it has looks better than my game in Unity

I have an idea for a game, but it has rather complex mechanics and physics. Would you recommend Unreal just in general? Is there a use case beyond hobby size projects that you might recommend Unity?

Don't know how relevant these statistics are, but the Unreal subreddit has around six times the users of the Unity subreddit. I've always found it much easier to find help for UE4 than Unity.

Granted I've run into a few bugs in UE4, but then again it seems to include a lot more features out of the box. Lastly a lot of people seem to appreciate having the source code available which I don't believe is the case for Unity, as least last time I checked.

Can you tell me where you are pulling these figures? I just checked now and got the following figures?

/r/Unity3D/ 159k members

/r/unrealengine/ 66.9k members

Ah my bad ... I only looked at /r/unity. I stand corrected.

Unity might be great if you need to ship something. As a gamer I can say its a badge of lower quality and severe performance problems.

Here is the top selling list of VR games on Steam.

Boneworks - Unity

Westworld Awakening - Unreal

Beat Saber - Unity

Blade & Sorcery - Unity

Pavlov VR - Unreal

Pistol Whip - Unity

Skyrim VR - Internal

Fallout 4 VR - Internal

Superhot VR - Unity

Layers of Fear VR - Unreal

Zero Caliber VR - Unreal

Moss - Unreal

5 - Unity, 5 - Unreal, 2 - Internal. Depends on a game type you wanna build and perks of each engine.(grants etc)

Worth noting, there is a HUGE difference in quality and jankiness of those games, sometimes irrespective of engine

After using both Unity and Unreal Engine for XR Development, my personal favorite is Unreal only for the fact that I can still look at the source code of the engine if something weird is happening and I can even fix it myself. That's the main reason. Unity seems to be catching up a bit in the performance area but I still feel that UE4 is ahead.

They don't take pull requests, but Unity has at least had their source code published for reference for a while.

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference

There's an elephant in the room comparing the two. A month ago, Epic (Unreal Engine) acquired Quixel Megascans - a company which makes photorealistis materials.

This scans are going to be included in for free in UE4. This is a huge deal since all developers will have access to 100,000+ sleek assets from the start.

Can someone please tell me what XR means? It's not defined in the article. I'm guessing something to do with VR but it's not clear.

Sorry. Consider XR as an umbrella term for immersive technologies (augmented, virtual, mixed, whatever spatial reality comes next...)

X is simply a wildcard for the V and A in VR and AR.

Thank you very much. Googling gave me an iPhone XR.

Thanks, I was also quite puzzled

This article is written by a fanboy who cannot see where Unity is lagging behind when it comes to game development in general. If we are talking about XR then certainly unreal beats the charts but if one has more understanding of Unity over Unreal then I can totally understand where the bias is coming from

bad code/non-performance optimized can be pain in both. a lot of games done in unity have quite a bit of 'sluggishness', that's opinion from some of my friends whom are those 8h per day play, 6 hours of sleep gamers. so if youre after high performance & amazing looks which is even more important in vr AND u are/have decent devs then ue is a better choice (personal opinion). comparing the speed c# vs c++... well, there's no no point right? ;)

Seemed like there was more resources and info for Unity a few years ago. This was an interesting update about Unreal Engine.

Which of them depend on GC?

Both. Unity is built on .NET, while Epic has added custom tooling to enable garbage collection (and reflection) for its C++ Object hierarchy.

> Below is an example of a jet engine 3D model that you can find in Unity Asset’s store. It could be used in VR training simulation for jet maintenance:

Jeez I certainly hope not

I’ve dabbled with both for VR. The primary concern is just getting your hardware to work with the provided examples. I had a frustrating but eventually successful time with Unity. I had an unsuccessful time in Unreal.

But in either case VR is just a camera controlled with your head plus some wands. I don’t think the engine will differentiate much compared to the mountain of careful design decisions you need to make to accommodate VR tech.

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