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Which is the future direction of Unity3D and UE4 🔥
UE4 has a better toolchain and a better framework; Unity provides a lightweight and flexible underlying layer. Each has its own focus and is becoming more and more solid in its niche.
Unity is by far the biggest player in the mobile game market, but it’s better at being lightweight than UE4. However, for large games, UE4 is used more. Unity is not unable to do high quality screen or big procedures, after all, from the historical development, UE status or senior level, Unity as a rising star, do the effect is speechless. Unity is also relatively inexpensive to use for niche game developers and indie developers, and the barrier to entry is much lower than UE.
UE4 ⛄ ️
UE History ❄️
Four years ago late at night, or rather early in the morning, the Unreal saga began. It takes place in Rockvill, a small town in Maryland, and echoes to a mariachi band’s tune in an apartment complex where the game developers from Epic MegaGames live.
It’s 5 a.m., and the three game designers are still listening to the last piece of music, the beautiful Mexican melody spilling out through the walls. After all, 5am in the game world doesn’t mean the rooster is about to crow, it means programmers can finally turn off the lights after a hard night.
Being a game developer has never been fashionable, and at the time, there was nothing glamorous about it. The Rockville company that calls itself “Epic Apartment” is just as boring as any other studio. But it’s the focus of Epic MegaGames founder Tim Sweeney, where a brain trust of his top producers has been working through the night on their latest game. On the evening in question, James Schmalz, a young Canadian designer, made a decision. He was about to show his partner Cliff Bleszinski the initial design prototype for his new game, a continuation of his earlier work, including the famous Pinball game “Extreme Pinball.”
While his next game was at the time just a theoretical study — perhaps a little better than the solid lines flying across the screen — it was a first step toward Schmalz’s goal, which he calls “a magic Carpet like environment where you can move through the crypt.”
This is how the Unreal story unfolds. The setting changed from a crypt to a castle, and the graphics went from rough to gorgeous, but four years later, Schmalz and Bleszinski, along with Tim Sweeney, turned into arguably the greatest game of the year.
💬 From a toolchain perspective, the UE4 is a knockout. Take animation control for example: in UE4 animation control, the logic is bound to the state machine. In large projects, you will not have the problem of not finding the trigger logic for animation control, or not knowing how to structure the code if you want to add animation control logic. Unity’s AnimatorController exposes variables to the GameObject through the Animator, which is operated by the MonoBehavior, and the operation is done in a hard-coded way. UE4 has a better toolchain and a better framework; Unity provides a lightweight and flexible underlying layer. Each has its own focus and is becoming more and more solid in its niche.
- UE4 animation control logic is bound to the state machine, so on larger projects, you won’t have the problem of not finding the trigger logic for animation control, or not knowing how to structure your code if you want to add animation control logic.
- Unity’s AnimatorController exposes variables to the GameObject through the Animator, which is operated by the MonoBehavior, and the operation is done in a hard-coded way.
// AnimState is a variable defined in the AnimatorController
ator1.SetInteger("AnimState", mAnimIndex % mAnimTotal);
Copy the codeIn terms of engine design, UE4 uses engine + Framework model, the framework definition is very careful, for the game development of a perfect abstraction, around them to do a complete tool chain.
The disadvantage is that the learning process needs to follow the design of UE engine to grasp various concepts, but because this set of abstraction is quite reasonable, so it is not difficult to understand. There are a lot of Settings hidden in the engine, behind which are professional and detailed domain knowledge. There is still a threshold to understand.
Another problem is that projects are too big, small things tend to look bloated and overqualified, and no matter what you do, the framework has to be followed. In the first place, we lost ground to Unity in terms of lightweight and low performance devices, so the 2D component didn’t grow, and now the 2D component is not as good as Unity.
Unity ⛄ ️
History of Unity ❄️
The origin of the game is the video game, video game in 1952, in the vacuum tube computer platform, developed the first video game – tic-tac-toe game, and in October 18, 1958, developed the game “tennis for two”.
The ATARI era came soon after, marking the emergence of the first game market, known as the “ATARI Era”. In this era, poor quality of players, unclear game concepts, and a large number of manufacturers faring in troubled waters became the most distinctive features of this era, and the video game ET was also developed. Then, in the 1970s, word games came along with another major Japanese player, Taito. The classic space Invaders game was developed, pac-Man, Ultima, and so on. In the 1980s, Sega, Atari, and Nintendo began to bring the game war to console hardware. Video games took a turn in the late 1980s when computers got graphics cards and began to rise. At the same time, Nintendo launched the Game Boy, which opened the door to portable consoles, but there was no Game engine yet.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that Copcom introduced Street Fighter, the Pentium chip, paladin and Legend came out, and Nintendo was beaten by Sega Saturn and SONY’s Plag Station. In 1992, 3D Realms /Apoges released a mini-game called Wolfenstein and ID Software’s shooter Doom, which became the first engine to be licensed. In late 1993, Raven developed Projectors using an improved Doom engine, the first successful graft in game history. Quake — The first true 3D engine to fully support polygonal models, animation, and particle effects, Quake was used to develop Quake in 1994. Later, the Quake engine led to the game Quake, which set the standard for FPS games. A year later, ID Software came back with Quake 2. With a new set of engines that take full advantage of 3D acceleration and OpenGL technology, ID Software has made a quantum leap in graphics and networking, and successfully established its dominance in the 3D engine market. In 1999, WITH ID’s Quake iii once again dominating the market, Epic Megagames (Epic) quit Unreal and soon followed with the Unreal2 engine. At the same time, it was upgraded to Unreal2.5 and developed a number of well-known games, including Tom clancy: splinter cell 2: Pandora tomorrow, lineage 2, John the Johns, and more. The development of game engines has further driven the expansion of the game industry.
In the 21st century, home games form a three-legged parallel situation, the game field unprecedented development, and the game engine has also been unprecedented development. In 2002, With the advent of Direct9, EPIC introduced Unreal3, which supports 64-bit HDRR high-precision dynamic rendering, multiple lighting and advanced dynamic shadow effects, and provides powerful editing tools. At the same time, Monolith’s Lith Tech engine grew rapidly, with games like F.E.A.R and F.E.A.R2. Since then, various engines, such as max-FX engine, Geo-mod engine, Serious engine and so on, have appeared. Around this time, Joachion from Denmark and Nicholas Francis from Germany liked making games so much that they invited David from Iceland to form Over the Edge Entertainment and developed the first version of the Unity engine. Unity was founded in 2004 in Amtedam, Denmark, and in 2005, the company opened its headquarters in San Francisco, USA, with the release of unity1.0 engine. At this point, the Unity engine was born.
💬 Unity can be said to only do engine + Framework Bus. The so-called Framework bus refers to unity has no convention of gameplay framework, only specifies that everything is organized with **EC (Entity + Component)** structure All logic is executed on monobehavior (although UE4 is also organized as EC in BP, it writes functionality with OO thinking).
This structure is simple and fairly beginner friendly, but the downside is obvious: the gameplay framework and a set of toolchains need to be defined from scratch for large projects. And because monobehaviors are collected using c# reflection, their execution order is out of control, and too many monobehaviors can affect efficiency, further forcing large projects to work on top of the engine. In practice, it is often a Mono that acts as an entry point, is responsible for pulling up, recollecting custom frames, and providing a beat (deltaTime), then some corner system runs mono independently to reduce reflection collection.
This process, the application of operational space is too big, like the js, flexible tend to cause confusion, the frequent changes of the early stage of the project demand, the architecture design to the program of minus entropy work is particularly difficult to do, a lot of big patch of the use of small patches, also unable to new students at sea plug a flag to the end of the world, I can’t find it when I debug it (even if it works correctly when other people read it).
Although unity’s tool chain provided by the engine is completely inferior to UE because of its loose structure and not actually using its own engine for large projects, EC structure is indeed simple and efficient, and the smaller the project, the more obvious the advantage. This is the key to Unity’s dominance in 2D.
In the past two years, Unity has put a lot of effort into rendering process and 2D Toolkit, and the image quality has been able to catch up with UE. Although a lot of things are left over by UE, burst Complier + Job System + ECS (DOTS) is designed for EC characteristics. With the potential to go further in the direction of lightweight, Project Tiny is a promising new tool. I personally think that flattening the engine further and slicing ECS to the extreme is the key for Unity to stand out from the rest, and IT is impossible for UE to discard the gameplay Framework to use ECS.
ECS can also be used on large projects, and is great for games that require frequent spawn objects, such as gunplay (Overwatch) and business simulation (Dyson Ball), but it’s bad for flow, which is not the engine’s purpose. So pure ECS is going to be a downward incompatible adjustment for unity, which we won’t see any time soon (but hopefully, a pure ECS branch will be possible, just like the blueprints and C++ projects).
Conclusion 🏠
There is no unified future for game engines, just as there is no unified paradigm for good game design. In addition to Unity and UE, there are many engines out there that have never been heard of, such as Cocos, that developers love to use and maintain.
These two first-tier engines gradually developed different market attitudes:
- UE4 tends to add the most advanced graphics features, optimize the tool chain and design the experience for the job, and raise the ceiling on what can be produced. Suitable for large volume of games and online games. Unity tends to optimize for flexibility, design programming patterns for flexibility, and push the limits of what can be produced. The job of raising the ceiling was left to the game companies, by designing the architecture and rendering processes that fit their type of game.
- Unity play the best company (Miha swim, fold paper) are to buy a source a magic change, the engine thoroughly. In terms of the engine itself, it is suitable for 2D games, small and medium-sized independent games, and we can expect high quality and strong page games in the future.
Article reference, only for everyone to understand oh