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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

Mmm... how’s that unreal engine version upgrade going for you? break your plugins? break your blueprints? can’t actually tell because they don't fail until you run them? :)

Just saying; A lot of people say this kind of stuff, but unreal isn’t all roses either.

(don’t believe me? read about it yourself https://forums.unrealengine.com/development-discussion/c-gam...)

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Great, nope, nope, and nope.

I've been continously upgrading a couple months behind new releases on commercial projects since 2015. I've upgraded about 17 times so far. Unreal's update story is light years ahead of Unity's half-hearted "automated" mess.

Worse bug I had was back in 2016 when an upgrade lost reset the scale on weighted bones to 0.

Really depends on your code base and project. Unreal upgrades can be painful if you're using APIs that can or are rewritten, and if you have made engine level changes.

Unity often feels like rolling the dice with upgrades, basic things can break from version to version, but I've done many Unity upgrades with no or minimal issues, and seen extremely painful Unreal upgrades

It’s true that you really, really want to avoid making changes to the engine. Even for AAA studio source licensees in prior UE generations this was widely agreed upon. The good news is, you really shouldn’t have to.

In my mind, the big win from having the Unreal source code is understandability. But also, in contrast to Unity, if you should for some reason need to—say a critical bug that’s stopping your game from shipping at the last hour—you at least have the option.

Every AAA source licensee that I worked at made large changes to the engine source. There are many AAA titles both shipped and in development that change fundamental things about how the engine works. Look at the GDC presentation about Mortal Kombat rollback network, or its predecessor about running UE3 at 60 fps on console for some good examples. Completely avoiding engine changed isn't the reality for AAA, and I imagine it's only true for small indies. Good news is it's pretty easy to merge small engine changes.

Sure, I didn’t say changes don’t happen. Plenty of teams gutted UE and made it into something unrecognizable. But it shouldn’t be your first choice.

How about this... stick to small changes, freeze your engine upstream version, or hate your life: pick one? ;)

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