Why Unity as engine?

[Little Wanderer]

Why Unity as engine? Unreal Engine hasn't pulled the game? By the way, graphics not strongly improved.

[Arshia001]

Originally posted by Voodooman:

There is a simple logic you cant beat - if raw performance of simple operation is slower - more operations in any context would be slower as well, and since games are quite complex and you have to perform hell lot of operations in different contextes, sum of slow raw performance of operations will apply and cripple overall performance.

Difference in performance per simpe operation in a a few MS may look as little one, but 2 miliseconds there and here and everywhere can sum up in quite a big lag behind native code overal execution time, and in result you will get less FPS in less graphical heavy game - this is what usually happens in Unity games comparing to Unreal. And i saw example of game transition from Unity to Unreal which gave quite a performance boost with improvements of graphics. Of cource amateur programmers can make any engine run slow, but when we compare results of same programmer performing same task in Unity and Unreal - Unreal will win.

What you should realize, in the context of Life is Strange, is that the original was made with UE3, not 4. UE3 has a scripting language called "UnrealScript" which is, while being the sweetest game programming language ever, about 20x slower than native (C++) code as documented by Epic. It has no JIT, no machine-specific optimization, nothing. Just pure runtime VM. And did UE3 games suffer? Did, for example, Batman games have substandard performance? I didn't think so.

Another thing you should realize is that Unity has added something called "il2cpp" to their engine, which essentially transpiles C# to C++, eliminating any and all managed code on end user devices. I'm a fan of this feature mainly because it eliminates the need for obfuscation (C# can be decompiled to almost identical source code, native can't) but I've never felt it offers a whole lot of performance gains, simply because skeletal animations, rendering and physics simulation are SUPPOSED to be a hell of a lot slower than any game code you write. Otherwise, you're doing something VERY wrong.

With all of this said, I still think Unity is a bad choice for AAA PC titles, not because of performance, but because it lacks a whole lot of functionality. They're trying their best to catch up, but they probably won't manage to offer the same tools as UE4 any time soon; just as UE4 will never manage to offer the same performance, device compatibility and package sizes as Unity on mobile (did you know a whole lot of the games you play on your phone are also made with Unity?)

[v00d00m4n]

Originally posted by Arshia001:

Originally posted by Voodooman:

There is a simple logic you cant beat - if raw performance of simple operation is slower - more operations in any context would be slower as well, and since games are quite complex and you have to perform hell lot of operations in different contextes, sum of slow raw performance of operations will apply and cripple overall performance.

Difference in performance per simpe operation in a a few MS may look as little one, but 2 miliseconds there and here and everywhere can sum up in quite a big lag behind native code overal execution time, and in result you will get less FPS in less graphical heavy game - this is what usually happens in Unity games comparing to Unreal. And i saw example of game transition from Unity to Unreal which gave quite a performance boost with improvements of graphics. Of cource amateur programmers can make any engine run slow, but when we compare results of same programmer performing same task in Unity and Unreal - Unreal will win.

What you should realize, in the context of Life is Strange, is that the original was made with UE3, not 4. UE3 has a scripting language called "UnrealScript" which is, while being the sweetest game programming language ever, about 20x slower than native (C++) code as documented by Epic. It has no JIT, no machine-specific optimization, nothing. Just pure runtime VM. And did UE3 games suffer? Did, for example, Batman games have substandard performance? I didn't think so.

Another thing you should realize is that Unity has added something called "il2cpp" to their engine, which essentially transpiles C# to C++, eliminating any and all managed code on end user devices. I'm a fan of this feature mainly because it eliminates the need for obfuscation (C# can be decompiled to almost identical source code, native can't) but I've never felt it offers a whole lot of performance gains, simply because skeletal animations, rendering and physics simulation are SUPPOSED to be a hell of a lot slower than any game code you write. Otherwise, you're doing something VERY wrong.

With all of this said, I still think Unity is a bad choice for AAA PC titles, not because of performance, but because it lacks a whole lot of functionality. They're trying their best to catch up, but they probably won't manage to offer the same tools as UE4 any time soon; just as UE4 will never manage to offer the same performance, device compatibility and package sizes as Unity on mobile (did you know a whole lot of the games you play on your phone are also made with Unity?)

UnrealScript VM is faster than unity scripting, and not like Unity which rely on .Net, US coded in pure C++ so performance is still better. Also, do you realise that most of devs who worked with unreal did their own optimisations to engine thats to available source code, and do you realise that up until recently source code for unity was not even available and devs was not even able to do their own optimizations?


Remind me when Unity added c to c++ code translation? A year ago? Should i remind you that most of games we got now on Unity started their production more than year ago and based on older version of engine, and update of engine version in a middle of production could cause unexpected bugs and would require a lot of time to transit custom changes of previous version into new one, so nobody sane enough would upgrade engine in a middle of production and basically what you just said is only a case for recently started game productions?

Performance of Unity was bad and still bad. But i agree with you that i lacking functionality, even gamepad support there is rudimental, there is no human friendly configuration via ini, and most of Unity games never was able to run in exclusive full screen mode with all lots of probblems caused by that. Modding of unity games nearly non existent, community is bunch of greedy ♥♥♥♥♥ who will sell you their assets and code (with shameless overpricing) rather than help you for free and so on...

Mobile gaming died with devices that had buttons and dpad\ministicks. and now the dead corpse of mobile gaming ra-ped by microtransactions and monetisations, so i dont play one button clicking crap on mobile, except maybe for angry birds, i only play emulated games from old consoles with bluetooth or otg cable atached gamepad, and also playing streaming games from pc via nvidia shield and steam link. So if Unity is powering most of that mobile primitive abominations of gaming - you did this engine pretty bad advetising.

[Jeckenn]

Probably Deck Nine had more experience with Unity so they went with it...

[Inardesco]

Yeah this engine sucks...It doesn't even come with build in controller support and you have to go through all sorts of ridiculous rubbish to get controller to work.

In my case....I either have to ruin controller support for 100% of my other games or get this game to work with controller support (while the rest won't recognise my controller anymore)