Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

I've used both Unreal and Unity for hobby projects, and as a developer I prefer Unreal Engine.

Unfortunately, I've been unable to use Unreal for game jams. The reason? Collaboration! I tried to get my team set up with Unreal Engine and git, but it ended up being a disaster where the team didn't have the time to figure it out. I also don't want to host my own subversion or perforce, and I also don't want to pay an arm and a leg for a hosted version.

On Unity, I pay $30/mo. You scroll to the "collaboration" tab, hit "sync" and your changes are in the cloud. It works great, my artist were immediately able to start syncing their changes.

I think in general Unreal is a more "professional, big teams" tool, and does not target the smaller market.

Unreal is built with Perforce, Epic Games workflows and tooling are built around Perforce. It is rock solid to manage binary assets of large size. I would highly recommend the publications of Dan Bloch from Google about it: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... and https://research.google/pubs/pub39983/

Yes, I know that they now use Piper.

most game studios don't use git to manage their games. It's becoming more common but it is by no means a standard in games. The git integration in UE4 is very, very bad. It uses perforce terminology to describe git concepts, often to very confusing ends.

Yep, and perforce is expensive!

For good reason. Git is not well suited for games. Yes there are solutions to work around it’s issues but it’s not a natural fit at all.

Git LFS is not bad if that's the only thing you're referring. I've used Git for plenty of games, never had a single issue.

With git LFS it works fine for game dev. The main thing it still fails at is the artist workflow. Git's solution to check out single files or ignore folders is still experimental and no GUI supports it yet.

I love git but P4 is still better if your workflow is on large single files.

What do most game studios use?

Perforce is pretty standard. Plastic SCM has a handful of enthusiastic users but Perforce is more common. Some studios use SVN because they can self-host it and managing art assets in git is really painful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com