I assume you meant hate boners.
Before I say why Unreal (and Unity) attract a lot of hate, let me say that for many genres and teams they are absolutely the way to go. Modern Unreal in particular has phenomenally good graphics. And for an action game, RPG, etc, they basically have all the facilities you need.
Now, their problems.
1. They result in samey-looking games. You CAN stylize your game but if you make something in Unreal or Unity and are aiming for high-fidelity graphics, your game will probably look very similar to other games in that engine. Unreal is particularly bad for this, especially older Unreal with the distinct shitty shadows). Sometimes this is kind of disappointing especially coming from the 00s era when games had widely varying appearances due to using in-house rendering techniques.
2. For strategy games in particular, Unreal and Unity have SHIT CPU performance. Particularly for multithreading. You don't notice in a typical action, racing, RPG, fighting, etc game because they have relatively simple game states that a modern CPU can crunch through quickly even with a single-threaded and poorly-optimized Black personlicious ECS-whatever design. They don't have good thread pools. They are incapable of floating-point determinism that you would expect in, and historically found in, any multiplayer RTS.
Strategy games in these engines slow to a crawl late-game. I'm going to name Unity examples because I don't know of any Unreal ones but it's likely the same for both engines - Per Aspera and Endless Legend both take several times as long to compute a tick or turn respectively in the late game vs the early game. Endless Legend for example, a turn at turn 1 takes a few seconds. A turn at turn 400 takes a few minutes.
Compare that to the Clausewitz Engine - despite being ancient as frick and mostly single-threaded, the slowdown difference in Victoria 2 is maybe... 2x by the end of the game at worst?
>despite being ancient as frick and mostly single-threaded, the slowdown difference in Victoria 2 is maybe... 2x by the end of the game at worst?
V2 has fewer actors in the end-game than in the early game. it should run better, not worse.
Pop consolidation can & should happen, but there are some other concerns.
- More factories.
- More brigades. You'll notice the worst slowdowns in the lategame happen when there's a big war, GPs are mobilizing hundreds / thousands of brigades, China has westernized and is mobilizing reserves, etc.
There's some amount of computation that needs to be done to track the relation between factories and employed pops, and between units (normal or mobilized) and the pops they're from. More factories means more computation, and more brigades means WAY more computation.
I've actually had times in lategame V2 when I get tired of a stalemated Great War running like shit and I just tag switch a couple times and make the side that should be losing accept a peace (or I save and reload, because Paradox doesn't serialize the entire simulation state and AIs will often be more amenable to peace right after a save is loaded) and as soon as they all demobilize the game starts running way better.
But even V2 at its worst is still miles ahead of any Unity/Unreal 4X performance-wise.
> Unreal and Unity have SHIT CPU performance. Particularly for multithreading.
Cities Skylines runs under Unity Engine and it runs like shit even on a good PC. I have a Ryzen 7 5800X + RTX 3070. Still experiencing dropped frames on a populated city.
I don’t understand why a lot of people have boners for this game engine
Seconding this. Also, as a dev currently working with Unreal 4, the tools just fundamentally aren't built with the assumption that you'll be making a strategy game of any kind.
It's not that it can't be done - much of Unreal's source code is public IIRC - but when you're getting to that point it's probably a better idea in the long run to just make a separate engine assuming you have the skills and resources.
The engine is too complete out of the box, devs end up going "good enough" without tailoring systems to their game.
>You CAN stylize your game but if you make something in Unreal or Unity and are aiming for high-fidelity graphics, your game will probably look very similar to other games in that engine.
This is just devs not customizing graphical features. Swapping out the bloom and lens flares for your own thing in Unreal is very easy and makes a huge difference, most devs including AAA simply go "that's good enough ship it" with default stuff.
These engines are so complete and streamlines most people forget you're supposed to make your own shit in them.
i think this meme that all games made in unreal look the same mostly comes from people who've seen too many steam asset flips or youtube demos and had their impressions coloured, there are a lot of games built on unreal that you probably never would've guessed. like said it's really not hard at all to swap everything out
>i think this meme that all games made in unreal look the same mostly comes from people who've seen too many steam asset flips or youtube demos and had their impressions coloured
I'm judging them by AAA games mainly. Like you could look at Mass Effect and Gears of War and instantly know they were from the same engine because they both had the same weird shadow / texture artifacts.
> For strategy games in particular, Unreal and Unity have SHIT CPU performance. Particularly for multithreading. You don't notice in a typical action, racing, RPG, fighting, etc game because they have relatively simple game states that a modern CPU can crunch through quickly even with a single-threaded and poorly-optimized Black personlicious ECS-whatever design. They don't have good thread pools. They are incapable of floating-point determinism that you would expect in, and historically found in, any multiplayer RTS. >Firefly switched their own engine to Unreal for the next Stronghold.
Damn it, they can't fricking stop shooting themselves in the foot can they?
>engines designed for action games run action games better than strategy games
Woah...
Is Godot the way to go for strategy game dev? It's open source so you can add/trim things as needed without having to build an engine from scratch
I don't understand why people here have such a hate boner for it. Blaming an engine when greedy publishers make shitty outsourced devs produce bad games is just moronic
it isn't
I assume you meant hate boners.
Before I say why Unreal (and Unity) attract a lot of hate, let me say that for many genres and teams they are absolutely the way to go. Modern Unreal in particular has phenomenally good graphics. And for an action game, RPG, etc, they basically have all the facilities you need.
Now, their problems.
1. They result in samey-looking games. You CAN stylize your game but if you make something in Unreal or Unity and are aiming for high-fidelity graphics, your game will probably look very similar to other games in that engine. Unreal is particularly bad for this, especially older Unreal with the distinct shitty shadows). Sometimes this is kind of disappointing especially coming from the 00s era when games had widely varying appearances due to using in-house rendering techniques.
2. For strategy games in particular, Unreal and Unity have SHIT CPU performance. Particularly for multithreading. You don't notice in a typical action, racing, RPG, fighting, etc game because they have relatively simple game states that a modern CPU can crunch through quickly even with a single-threaded and poorly-optimized Black personlicious ECS-whatever design. They don't have good thread pools. They are incapable of floating-point determinism that you would expect in, and historically found in, any multiplayer RTS.
Strategy games in these engines slow to a crawl late-game. I'm going to name Unity examples because I don't know of any Unreal ones but it's likely the same for both engines - Per Aspera and Endless Legend both take several times as long to compute a tick or turn respectively in the late game vs the early game. Endless Legend for example, a turn at turn 1 takes a few seconds. A turn at turn 400 takes a few minutes.
Compare that to the Clausewitz Engine - despite being ancient as frick and mostly single-threaded, the slowdown difference in Victoria 2 is maybe... 2x by the end of the game at worst?
>despite being ancient as frick and mostly single-threaded, the slowdown difference in Victoria 2 is maybe... 2x by the end of the game at worst?
V2 has fewer actors in the end-game than in the early game. it should run better, not worse.
Pop consolidation can & should happen, but there are some other concerns.
- More factories.
- More brigades. You'll notice the worst slowdowns in the lategame happen when there's a big war, GPs are mobilizing hundreds / thousands of brigades, China has westernized and is mobilizing reserves, etc.
There's some amount of computation that needs to be done to track the relation between factories and employed pops, and between units (normal or mobilized) and the pops they're from. More factories means more computation, and more brigades means WAY more computation.
I've actually had times in lategame V2 when I get tired of a stalemated Great War running like shit and I just tag switch a couple times and make the side that should be losing accept a peace (or I save and reload, because Paradox doesn't serialize the entire simulation state and AIs will often be more amenable to peace right after a save is loaded) and as soon as they all demobilize the game starts running way better.
But even V2 at its worst is still miles ahead of any Unity/Unreal 4X performance-wise.
> Unreal and Unity have SHIT CPU performance. Particularly for multithreading.
Cities Skylines runs under Unity Engine and it runs like shit even on a good PC. I have a Ryzen 7 5800X + RTX 3070. Still experiencing dropped frames on a populated city.
Seconding this. Also, as a dev currently working with Unreal 4, the tools just fundamentally aren't built with the assumption that you'll be making a strategy game of any kind.
It's not that it can't be done - much of Unreal's source code is public IIRC - but when you're getting to that point it's probably a better idea in the long run to just make a separate engine assuming you have the skills and resources.
The engine is too complete out of the box, devs end up going "good enough" without tailoring systems to their game.
>You CAN stylize your game but if you make something in Unreal or Unity and are aiming for high-fidelity graphics, your game will probably look very similar to other games in that engine.
This is just devs not customizing graphical features. Swapping out the bloom and lens flares for your own thing in Unreal is very easy and makes a huge difference, most devs including AAA simply go "that's good enough ship it" with default stuff.
These engines are so complete and streamlines most people forget you're supposed to make your own shit in them.
i think this meme that all games made in unreal look the same mostly comes from people who've seen too many steam asset flips or youtube demos and had their impressions coloured, there are a lot of games built on unreal that you probably never would've guessed. like said it's really not hard at all to swap everything out
>i think this meme that all games made in unreal look the same mostly comes from people who've seen too many steam asset flips or youtube demos and had their impressions coloured
I'm judging them by AAA games mainly. Like you could look at Mass Effect and Gears of War and instantly know they were from the same engine because they both had the same weird shadow / texture artifacts.
> For strategy games in particular, Unreal and Unity have SHIT CPU performance. Particularly for multithreading. You don't notice in a typical action, racing, RPG, fighting, etc game because they have relatively simple game states that a modern CPU can crunch through quickly even with a single-threaded and poorly-optimized Black personlicious ECS-whatever design. They don't have good thread pools. They are incapable of floating-point determinism that you would expect in, and historically found in, any multiplayer RTS.
>Firefly switched their own engine to Unreal for the next Stronghold.
Damn it, they can't fricking stop shooting themselves in the foot can they?
>engines designed for action games run action games better than strategy games
Woah...
Is Godot the way to go for strategy game dev? It's open source so you can add/trim things as needed without having to build an engine from scratch
Yeah, seems so simple, yet bafflingly, people keep recommending them for ALL genres, even ones they're complete shit at.
>godot
Perpetually unfinished toy engine. No, it's not a good choice. It just has loud cultists.
If you want to make a strategy game, start with The C++ Programming Language.
popular=bad
Whoever made Unity engine should die of suffering
why are you rude to Tim Sweeney
no
>>>Ganker is that way, the more appropriate board to ask about engine used for just about anything, but strategy games
It looks good but the performance is absolute dogshit.
UE4 has shader compilation and asset streaming issues.
I don't understand why people here have such a hate boner for it. Blaming an engine when greedy publishers make shitty outsourced devs produce bad games is just moronic