While I fear asking anything in a Unity v Unreal thread, I'm going to do it anyways.

I would honestly prefer working in Unreal, mostly because I have 15 years of experience with C++, and about six months of experience with C#. But one thing caused me to avoid it. I cannot get a straightforward answer about if a game developed with Unreal Engine can legitimately support low-end hardware. I've seen plenty of people say it's not worth supporting XYZ because a real gamer wouldn't be caught dead with such an awful system, but I am actually perfectly fine selling software to someone with a low-end laptop that's five years old or whatever.

So, has anyone here maybe made a simple game (Sudoku, Tetris, whatever really) and tested it on low-end hardware? Like perhaps an Asus Transformer or other hardware that's barely more than a tablet? I had once checked, and performance was abysmal, but apparently that may have been because of project settings or whatever. And if I tested again, I would never be able to know if the performance was bad because I didn't do it right or because UE just can't target a system like that.

TL;DR: does anyone know the lowest system requirements the simplest game made with Unreal Engine can target? Like if I made Pong in UE4, and set the proper project settings, what would the minimum requirements be?

I was merely stating that if we are going to debate, then facts should be brought to the discussion, not assumptions that you can "only create simple 2D games and prototypes" with Unity. The first page of replies to this thread made this claim several times.

I was merely stating that if we are going to debate, then facts should be brought to the discussion, not assumptions that you can "only create simple 2D games and prototypes" with Unity. The first page of replies to this thread made this claim several times.

Plenty of people disagree. You should post your disagreement rather than retreating from the discussion. You're as much of "the forum" as the people posting incorrect facts. The vast majority of professional studios that I've met in my local area use Unity :wink:

So again: Unreal is far cheaper for hobbyists, Unity is far cheaper for professionals.

I agree with this, not taking into account AAA as professionals

Even in the AAA space (ignoring your point out the extra cost of tools / actual systems work that you have to do yourself!!) Unity is way cheaper than Unreal.
Say you've got 50 people on $80k salaries working for a year, that's a mere $75K in Unity licensing. With those staff, your budget is probably over $5M to break even though, so Unreal is going to cost you 5% royalty * $5M / 70% retail cut, or over $350K. I'm guessing that most AAA studios who use Unreal would go direct to Epic and negotiate to pay a quarter million or some such figure up-front instead of taking the royalty deal.

a person who has worked with one (Unity) for two years professionally, I think I can make some contribution to this thread.

I think Maxest makes the most valid defence for Unity. That is for a developer who has been using Unity for a year or more, changing to Unreal would be difficult; because the approaches the two engines use, to game development, are the exact opposite.

However for newcomers to game development, the rewards of learning Unreal over Unity would be large; although a more difficult task.

Yea I feel that this is true. I've been using Unity for a while now, and when I had to switch to Unreal for another project I had to do, it was pretty tough to switch over. Unreal really approaches dev quite differently than Unity. The approach, imo, is more personal preference than anything else. Although it does seem that a lot of people really like the blueprint system?

Costs are an interesting question I never really considered. I don't do any of my work for professional/for profit. I do it more for fun than anything else (though I do love viewership haha). It's interesting to see how costs compare against one another. I do as much as I can for free, unless doing so really hinders quality, at which point I go ahead and buy things.

@ScoutingNinja: what documentation did you find barren for Unity? I'm really curious about this.

@eatsleepindie: Calm down. No one is suggesting that it's amateurish to use Unity or Unreal as opposed to an engine you wrote. I haven't seen any posts alluding that Unity is only useful for 2d games and prototypes. And in any case, this is just a discussion to discuss what engine people like and why. It's just casual game engine gossip (hence why I posted it in the lounge).

This was an interesting article I read some time back. It compares Unreal and Unity side by side. Now it may not be the best source, so I'll let people decide: http://not-lonely.com/blog/making-of/unity-ue-comparison/

It seems that lighting in Unreal is somewhat better than in Unity from this example at least. I'd love to hear some thoughts (especially on the veracity of the article).

@ScoutingNinja: what documentation did you find barren for Unity? I'm really curious about this.

I had list, if things I needed to research for Unity, however it appears it's deleted. Out of the top of my head the particle and terrain pages. Neither explains much of how it works, only the bare basics of implementing the tools. I wanted to know how the particles where optemized because I was getting a lot of overlap, smoke from a single building would dip the frames bellow 35 fps. The terrain tools don't tell you how it calculates spread, I had terrains where only a small patch would receive grass.

I hid a post which was a reply to a now-deleted post, to keep things tidy. Reminder to all: keep it factual, not personal. And don't post if you haven't read the thread - making claims about the first page of posts that clearly does not stand up to a reading of said posts isn't really welcome.

So, has anyone here maybe made a simple game (Sudoku, Tetris, whatever really) and tested it on low-end hardware?

I have mid-range and low-range PC for testing. My mid-range has AMD FX-8120 Eight core 3.10 GHz, GeForce GTX 650, five years old. My low-range has one of the first dual cores 2.11 GHz, GeForce GT620, ten years old at least.

My self made Unreal games run at max on the mid-range PC, only basic scalability used. On the low-range PC it runs smooth on low, the glass shader however doesn't work as expected, high scalability used. So if you make your games for a low-range PC it will work on the low-range PC.

This like Unity's scalability was made to allow for mobile games, however can be exploited to make games on low end PCs that you couldn't before.

not assumptions that you can "only create simple 2D games and prototypes" with Unity.

What was stated before is that Mobile, 2D and small 3D games are better to make with Unity, not that it's all Unity can make. AAA games can be made with Unity it's just that doing it with Unity would be a pain. Once you start with 3D graphics or large 2D worlds Unreal is the better engine.

I hid a post which was a reply to a now-deleted post

Then I just want to state again that Unreal is better for prototyping, main reasons the workflow of Unreal is better for multi pass level design, Unreal has Bsp meshes and imports with little to no problems.

Common there is a lot to say in Unity's defence, if this keeps up I will have to switch sides.

Ha-ha ha ha, let's keep fanning the flames! :lol:

I have mid-range and low-range PC for testing. My mid-range has AMD FX-8120 Eight core 3.10 GHz, GeForce GTX 650, five years old. My low-range has one of the first dual cores 2.11 GHz, GeForce GT620, ten years old at least.
My self made Unreal games run at max on the mid-range PC, only basic scalability used. On the low-range PC it runs smooth on low, the glass shader however doesn't work as expected, high scalability used. So if you make your games for a low-range PC it will work on the low-range PC.
This like Unity's scalability was made to allow for mobile games, however can be exploited to make games on low end PCs that you couldn't before.

My sincere gratitude for your input. I'd still love if anyone has input about Unreal targeting Atom-based laptops.

Interesting topic, so i give a opinion as well - even though i am not a professional game developer, just another hobbiest since two decates:

I made dozens 2D game prototypes in different environments with different tools, including unity 4/5 and unreal engine 4,

but i never shipped a finished game with that - so keep that in mind when i give you my comparison:

Unity:

- Scripting in C# and JavaScript was really simple and straightforward

- Very easy to handle entity components and adding entity behaviours

- Prefabs are really nice

- No integrated Tilemap editor: Reason why i always made 3D Playgrounds in Unity and not 2D

- Hard to follow control flow

- How to debug, i never found a way except for stupidly printing out ????

- Had never trouble upgrading my projects from a minor version update

UE4:

- Blueprint Scripting is really nice, but only for people who dont care about code or do not know how to code -> for me as a programmer it always gets in my way, but for simple things this is just fine

- Has a integrated debugger which works quite good

- Hard to follow control flow

- Really great graphics quality in 3D when just looking at the sample applications

- 2D Sprite support was just basics when i made my platformer

- A integrated 2D tilemap editor with a lot of potential, but still not quite good

- Git integration was extremely broken when i made my platformer

- Creating entities, adding components was not that straightforward

- Version upgrade madness had driven me crazy

- Controlling sprite quality was pretty hard (2D pixel game without artifacts)

Summary:

Unreal engine 4 was pretty good at first glance, but after working with it for a while - there was a lot of issues regarding version control and version upgrades. As a matter of fact, i lost a lot of work due to this madness :-(

For Unity i never made nothing more than just simple playgrounds testing out different game mechanics and this was working totally fine, so i cannot say much about that.

Now i am making everything myself in C with a few C++ features, without using any libraries - building my own framework, but not an engine. So i have full control over everything, know where everything starts, how the game control flow works and most important: Never need to fiddle around with bad third party APIs - except for low level operating system and graphics driver stuff.

I just want to create my game i am dreaming off since i was a kid - nothing more.