Steve Streeting @sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place

Very useful Unity script for copying lighting settings between scenes: https://bitbucket.org/!api/2.0/snippets/pschraut/LeykeL/f7d8017b3f5476d4c386ec045a981b57b4999841/files/CopyLightingSettings.cs

Peppering my Trello with "You know you're really going to regret this hack in 12 months..." cards.

But it works so well *now*

Man, I really wish that Unity's Command Buffers allowed you to schedule to a Render Queue number instead of the fixed "after all X" enum.

I know, SRP is supposed to address this, but it's not quite ready yet. Will probably port to that in a year or something. In the meantime, #hackhackhack :)

I started R&D on next project with the intention of writing fewer custom shaders and sticking to the Unity standard ones as much as possible.

That didn’t last long. 😂 #hackhackhack

All the nitpicky things I used to just accept - separate headers, translation units, scoping cruft, syntactic minutiae - now doesn’t seem so easily waived off. Seeing with new eyes, it feels so clunky & old fashioned. And *I’m* clunky & old fashioned by now! 😉

I always thought I could go back, and probably if I *forced* myself I could, but I have to be honest and admit I r•don’t want to spend my limited time that way. Without realising it, the part of me that loved C++ died, and I moved on.

I used to be 100% OK with C++ foibles and would happily justify them to others but now I suspect I had a bit of Stockholm Syndrome from 20y working with it.

I used other languages during that time too and still would have called C++ my favourite. But now, having spent ~8 years totally away from it, via many other languages, going back is jarring. Like listening back to an old beloved album you remember being better.

Many's the time I've wondered what a tooltip-less checkbox does in Unity, and on looking in the manual sometimes finding just a rearrangement of the same words with no further explanation 😕

Another thing I did really like about UE is that it's a lot better at integrating tool tips, tutorials and documentation in its editor - everything has a pretty good tooltip, often with an extended one if you hold Ctrl+Alt while hovering, with links to more info in docs. 👍 Unity could learn from this given that it's generally perceived to be beginner-friendly.

So UE4 is nice, and I'm closer to using it than I was 2y ago, but I'm sticking with Unity for now. "Blueprints or C++" is still sub-optimal for me, although less so than before. It's also a bit more heavyweight and really needs a better laptop than I have for jams. But I like it a lot more than I did last time. It still has a much more rigid idea of many things which is different

Unity is in a bit of a weird place right now with a lot of things in flux, but I'm going to persevere.

Urgh, the purported VSCode support in latest UE4s is...not good, sadly. Intellisense is completely broken in all but the most trivial cases, and that's how I explore APIs.

Using full fat Visual Studio and C++ works better but feels like going back in time 10 years to the Age of Clunkiness. I can't believe I used to put up with this nonsense 😣

I wondered if LFS would be a pain because UE4 turns *everything* into a .uasset (meaning you have to track all .uassets in LFS), but luckily other people have already considered all this it seems.

It's very nice that UE4 supports blueprint diffing even when you're using Git LFS to track everything. Well done to the Git plugin creator - originally https://github.com/SRombauts/UE4GitPlugin but the built-in version seems fine if you're not using locking

Aww, just discovered that the UE4 wiki section on Git recommends both git-lfs and SourceTree, that's nice 💖

Ironically Unity 2018's insistence on using more noodle graphs has made UE4's heavy use of Blueprints less of a "downside" (to me personally) in a comparison. If I'm going to have to get used to working like this sometimes either way, it kinda evens things out there.

It took me far too long to find the camera in UE4's twin stick shooter example. It's because I didn't understand that I can't see everything with a transform in the Outliner, unlike Unity, because in UE4 components inside individual objects can have their own transform.

I'm not sure if this is better or worse. Makes the outliner tidier & localises info more, but no search for "Camera" found it AFAICT so discovery feels off ATM. Hmm

Ah, it is: toggle the "Realtime" checkbox off in the main viewport and we're down to much more sane idle usage. Wonder why that's not the default.

Wow, when idle UE4 pegs my CPU at 20% and GPU at 70%, that seems excessive : Unity only re-renders when something changes which is nicer. Unless that's a setting somewhere.

In related news, we've now received our first actual real goshdarned money from a vidya game that we made. It's not big, but it's non-zero, so we're taking it as a win \o/

12% revenue share and they waive the 5% royalties if you use UE4, that’s one hell of a deal. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-games-store

I’ve been put off UE4 because I’d rather not go back to C++ and visual scripting doesn’t appeal, but since I’ve been poking at Unity 18 / HDRP / LWRP as research for next project, I guess I really should give it another go as comparison

I've no interest in targeting mobile for the next project, but HDRP is a little *too* constrained by its heavy use of compute shaders, and I prefer concept of the scriptable pipeline. I don't want to build my own pipeline (I'm trying to get away from engine dev, remember? 😂) but feel working up from LWRP is probably the best compromise for a mid-range project.