Why I ended up on Unity after all
So, I have this blog post saying I decided on Unreal Engine. Now I get to say I ended up going with Unity after all. Here are some of the reasons:
First, from my limited exposure to Unreal, I found the code-compile-test cycle to be frustratingly slow. Because of the nature of the game I’m building, there is a lot of code. Unreal has some great stuff going with blueprints, but that isn’t going to work for what I need. Maybe there is some trick to making it really quick and easy to go back and forth between code and test, but I didn’t see it.
Second, one of the first things I was trying to do was create the equivalent of a point cloud for the rendering of the items in the game. The few Unreal people I spoke with it about it seemed to indicate that there was no built in way to do that in Unreal and it would require customized rendering code. Maybe that’s just normal fare in Unreal. In the hands of an expert, maybe it would be an easy thing to do. But that brings me to the third point.
Third, it’s much easier to find Unity developers. There are so many Unity developers out there. I’m not building this all by myself, so getting the right kind of help is important to the overall project. With so many people available, there are many that are still not well qualified to go through, but I’ve been able to find the people to get the job done.
And maybe as a fourth item, I didn’t really want to deal with the percentage licensing scheme for Unreal. It seemed like it would be a nuisance.
So, that’s a summary of why we’re using Unity at the moment. We’ve made some great progress, and I’m really looking forward to making some game play videos in a week or two (I hope).