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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to compare unity and unreal. To answer the question about c++, with UE4, the blueprint system removes almost all of that. Entire games can be written in their visual programming language. I also think there are ways to use c# (https://mono-ue.github.io/), if you prefer that as well. C++ is needed if you want to extend the native classes.

Regarding the editor, unreal is pretty amazing. It really shines in the tools department. Check out the landscape editor, materials editor, and animation tools on youtube. Pretty fantastic stuff.

The game engine itself is better than unity in almost every way with a few big exceptions:

1) multiplayer map size. unity can pretty easily support large online worlds 2) support for mobile/tablets. unity is the dominant platform on those devices. 3) community support. unity has a much larger community, better documentation, and a much more populous online store (though unreal is catching up)

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https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?52618-Large-S...

According to this thread, as of version 4.6, the maximum supported multiplayer map size out of the box is 20km x 20km. Is this the limitation you were referring to? That wouldn't accommodate an MMORPG or Minecraft, but otherwise seems quite big.

Never understood the concept of measuring map size in km. It's like measuring distance on a map while ignoring scaling. Something like source's hammer units make a lot more sense to me.

In Source the scale is fixed (1 "unit" ~= 1 inch) and I imagine the same's true for UE.

1 unit = 1cm in UE, so 20km has some value as a measurement in game.

Of course, what matters more is what you do in that 20km, but it's also a limit coupled tightly with distant mesh performance and float accuracy issues.

sure it would. you don't have to load it all at once

Isn't that the use case for Level Streaming?

It would accommodate MMORPG - that is couple of times the area of WOW during it peak years.

Also, keep in mind that's likely 20km x 20km x 20km.

    Regarding the editor, unreal is pretty amazing.

If it runs.

...and that's a big IF. The editor ran like absolute rubbish originally on macs, to the point where it was actually unusable.

They've done a lot of work on that, but it's still miles away from the unity editor.

I think it's really hard to argue the unreal editor is better; it's a lot slower, but it does have some nice tools.

You also can't create extensions as easily (if at all?) as you can for unity.

As you say, they're two different things, and the unreal editor is actually not bad... but if you were to compare them, the unity one would certainly rank more highly.

what about macs running windows? i'm curious to know if it's a hardware issue or OSX related.

definitely OS related, it's fine on windows, even on macs. Just the underpowered GPUs in most macs make it not really a pleasure to work with, Epic recommends workstations for development work. Personally, i'd just build a windows pc for UE work, it's not suited for laptops anyway.

Actually you can create extensions to the editor, but it requires a lot more of work compared to the counterpart. Also, i use both UE and Unity on my mac, and while i agree that UE crashes a lot, that's mostly on user error. Unity, on the other hand, crashes while importing textures, generic assets, resizing textures, hangs when clicking play, etc.

OSX support is more or less experimental and macs (except the Mac Pro) have pretty weak GPUs. Also performance on OSX is far worse, so you are better off just building a budget workstation if you plan to seriously work with it.

I was thinking about something like Lua.

Now, the multiplayer map size limitation seems odd nowadays.

Mostly to do with floating point precision, the devs of Star Citizen ran into the same issue with Cry Engine when they tried to make things space-scale, and ended up initially stuck with small battle-arena maps. UE4 can re-origin things for a single player moving through a large world to maintain physics precision, etc. but it doesn't currently work with multiple people and their server model.

So, basically what Kerbal Space Program does. Which also doesn't work well with multiple people.

That said, keep in mind that you can get roughly a maximum of 20 sq km with the default landscape tool (not sure about performance at that scale).

I believe there's also some hard coded limits around the number of simultaneous players (16?), though it seems fairly easy to work around. Again, not sure about performance.

Nothings really hardcoded when you have the source at hand.

True. Also, there are rumors that epic is working on a multiplayer implementation of the player centered coordinate system.

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