Why Unity?

[kingfish_ak]

Why are people still using this engine? I know it is easily accesable, but, it is not ideal from a players perspective, these cheap games need to be on a better engine, or on mobile... I know this is still early access, but, this will be a hard game to optimize because of unity... It looks amazing though, it is kind of funny that developers try to hide that they use Unity, so clearly it is not the ideal choice for developers either, unreal is not that expensive, and has much better quality on every aspect of graphics, why not use that?

I have been watching this game be developed for some time and am looking forward to the final product, you have clearly put a lot of thought and work into this great project!

[andrew.thiele]

Here is everything I could find on the subject from the developers on the games Discord server:

"Unity is the best engine for rapid prototyping, and lets you have very granular control within the engine through code; two things that are very important to us as a team, and have allowed us to iterate as rapidly as we have." -Mitchell (posted March 31, 2018)

"The team was at least somewhat familiar with Unity when we started. Versus Unreal, they both have similar capabilities now but Unity has a larger install base and therefore has more plugins and assets developed for it. A custom engine has the potential to be the most performant but it would take much longer for us to develop as it's a whole separate layer of logic. I'm not a programmer, but that's my read on it." -Hackalöken (posted December 20, 2018)

"That's basically the shape of it. I was one of the primary advocates for going with Unity because it's the engine I had the most experience developing in and I knew how flexible it is. Unreal is also a solid engine, but (as far as I know) we didn't have anyone with much experience with it, so going with Unity got us started sooner. Like Hacka said, developing a custom engine is very time consuming, and had we gone for that route it would have taken us much longer to even start testing, which for a first time indie team was a big deal. Going forward it also would have meant we would have to devote resources to developing and improving our engine, and onboarding new team members would be slower (many people have worked with Unity, nobody else would have worked in our custom engine)" -Mitchell (posted December 20, 2018)

"We looked at multiple game engines, and Unity was the best for our team. This was due to a combination of our internal priorities (e.g. pace of development), the experience of various members of our team, and so on." -Sarno (posted July 16, 2019)

Source: https://discord.gg/lastepoch

[andrew.thiele]

Also, game is still being optimized and each patch brings some form of optimization, but the bulk of this occurs later in development (as mentioned below);

"One of the strengths of Unity is that it facilitates rapid development and prototyping, which to-date has been the focus of our team. Naturally, this has come at a cost in terms of both performance and graphics - and we have occasionally performed passes on both. ...and closer to release we'll be switching gears to focus on graphics, optimization, and polish.

As I'm sure you'll be aware if you've worked with Unity and / or other engines, it is very costly (in terms of man-hours) to optimize a game, and you never want to risk wasting time on optimizing art assets, shaders, or combat calculations that end up not being in the game at release. This is why game development is a notoriously iterative process, and why the majority of studios initially focus on concepting and fleshing out a game before shifting over to improving graphics and performance." -Sarno (posted May 3, 2020)

Source: https://discordapp.com/channels/368953963267096586/414295382625878037/706500012632440832

[kingfish_ak]

Cool, thanks for the info. I am not a developer, and have no clue as to what goes into developing games. A few of my truly loved games have been made on Unity. Fun is really all that maters.

[Dorok]

I have close to no Unreal game, and the few I have show bad performance, sure Epic did a good job to spread hidden commercial among players.

[Uruk-Guy]

Originally posted by kingfish_ak:

Cool, thanks for the info. I am not a developer, and have no clue as to what goes into developing games. A few of my truly loved games have been made on Unity. Fun is really all that maters.

You are not a developer and yet you are questioning the choice of game engine?

Unity is incredible, I'd choose it over Unreal. Unreal is good engine, but what unreal really excels at is marketing.

[Howbbp]

Unreal is a better engine, free for commercial until sufficient profit is made, free for education. You don't need to be a developer to use Unreal Engine. 3D artist, Graphic artists, VR. Developers do programming not assets, not textures, not models.
When I see this game Last Epoch, I can see the graphic looks like Unity, because looks exactly the same as Vikings midgard, typical, unlike Unreal Engine.

[Dorok]

Unreal is crap on Mac, Unity is much better for performances. Unreal for multi OS support is a crap. That said I don't know if it is good or not for modern consoles.

That unity games look the same is plain absurd, I won't bother answer that, lol, I can't believe anybody can write that, or explain yourself better.

[Neocronic]

This game works fine when they add game on steam, but after some patches, when they add new textures, game now unplayable on my pc, i rare see fps better than 30, in most places its even drop to 5 sometimes. If they not do with that, i think they should refund atleast, because i cant play in this game anymore.

[Blowfeld]

Lately I enjoy Unity games more and more. Usually they get higher ultrawide support by devs as most devs screw that up on UE4 (even though that engine supports it natively, 2/3 of the games released with cropped VERT-) and even if the devs don't deliver 21:9 ratio in their game, it ususally can be easily fixed by tons of workarounds like hexedits and registry changes.

[Kobrakai]

As a .net developer myself I almost didn't buy this game when I found out it was made in unity. I'm sceptical that a game like this could ever have good performance on unity and so far my experience is confirming it.

[Gunther Ultrabolt Novacrunch]

Why would a "cheap game" want to spend more $$$ for a better engine? Game is beautiful to me and enjoy the game play very much.

[Dorok]

Originally posted by Kobrakai:

As a .net developer myself I almost didn't buy this game when I found out it was made in unity. I'm sceptical that a game like this could ever have good performance on unity and so far my experience is confirming it.

What's your computer? The current game with many areas (far from all) with a lot of good to great work on look and many details have perfect smooth on my Mac.

That is past few seconds after enter in few areas where there's clearly some loading done, but it's really short, like 2s, quite manageable, only for few areas, and not anymore after this short phase.

[Drac]

Originally posted by Dorok:

Unreal is crap on Mac, Unity is much better for performances. Unreal for multi OS support is a crap. That said I don't know if it is good or not for modern consoles.

That unity games look the same is plain absurd, I won't bother answer that, lol, I can't believe anybody can write that, or explain yourself better.

I work primarily with OSX machines, but you don't need that to know not to use them for gaming. Unreal is a great ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ engine, you just want to ride the REEEE EPIC BAD train when the software side of things of the engine itself has NOTHING to do with the business side.

[Dorok]

Perhaps, but if Unreal is crap with Mac how good it is for Linux, tablets and consoles?

I only play on Mac so I didn't bother comment Unreal/Unity for Windows 10 vomitive crap.

[@Ixxmantisxxl]

Originally posted by Dorok:

Perhaps, but if Unreal is crap with Mac how good it is for Linux, tablets and consoles?

I only play on Mac so I didn't bother comment Unreal/Unity for Windows 10 vomitive crap.

You play on the worst possible platform for PC Gaming and you claim Windows 10 is Crap? I scoff at you sir. I scoff.