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This week at work, I am learning Unreal Engine 4.
Its part of an internal 'hack week' to experiment with ideas. Never used the engine so thought i'd give it a go!
Initial thoughts:
- Blueprints are fun but you VERY QUICKLY reach head-scratching moments when doing anything with dynamic data or anything verging on 'intermediate' complexity.
- Contextual views is great until you start jumping between them.
- Blueprints are fun but you VERY QUICKLY reach head-scratching moments when doing anything with dynamic data or anything verging on 'intermediate' complexity.
- Contextual views is great until you start jumping between them.
- I like the over-scoped specular-mapped 3d camera gizmo.
- The Game UI system is a total nightmare to work with. Ive spent an hour trying to work out how to set a string using data in a different blueprint.
- The template flow is real nice!
- The Game UI system is a total nightmare to work with. Ive spent an hour trying to work out how to set a string using data in a different blueprint.
- The template flow is real nice!
- The FPS Template is kind of confusing; the only projectile is a bouncy ball; no hit-scan or forward-moving projectile setups?
- The built-in particle examples are lovely!
- The built-in particle examples are lovely!
Disclaimer: Ive used Unity for about 10 years; so obviously my experience is quite weighted.
- Most of the tutorials and info online is geared towards FPS games. I can find a ton of info on how to make weapons that shoot at things! But as soon as I start googling around that then the quality/quantity very quickly drops.
Day 2!
- Diving into Animation System.
Compared to Unity's Animator, this seems significantly more complex for setting up state machines and playing back animations.?
- I love the Material Editor's preview settings! Have already messaged Shader Graph team about improving ours. :D
- Diving into Animation System.
Compared to Unity's Animator, this seems significantly more complex for setting up state machines and playing back animations.?
- I love the Material Editor's preview settings! Have already messaged Shader Graph team about improving ours. :D
- There doesn't seem to be an obvious way to make one shader setup and share between multiple material instances with different textures and inputs. Weird. Im currently copy-pasting node setups into every material. 
- Shader Compiling takes FOREVER.
- Shader Compiling takes FOREVER.
- Already starting to lose track of what blueprint points where and does what. With code; it would be so simple to search for all of the connections.
- Use with Git/GitHub seems to be more chaotic than Unity. Ill admit that Unity needs improvement but UE4 seems to have a ton of random files that are constantly dirtied whenever you do anything; and some stuff that I wasn't even aware I was touching?
Day 3: Lets play with Particles.
- Every tutorial so far: "Hey, its easy to do X! Just copy this Blueprint:"
- Every tutorial so far: "Hey, its easy to do X! Just copy this Blueprint:"
- I really miss writing code. :(
- *Insert DBZ Meme Here*
- Digging through the setups for the Paragon Character Packs is a lot of fun! Have learnt quite a bit from them. :)
