I felt the exact same way until I tried Hazelight's AngelScript UE fork. It is amazing, it brings the developer experience and iteration speed to Unity levels. They even made a VSCode plugin for it. Cannot recommend enough

I have worked full time for five years with a combination of Unreal and Unity. I've also worked for five years with Frostbite and another five in various custom engines.

I absolutely love both Unreal and Unity. Unreal is amazing from a technical perspective and having worked with a talented team in Unreal the stuff we were able to make were mind-blowing given the resources we had.

Unity is way easier to work with if you aren't focused on high fidelity graphics. In fact, I've never tried any engine that felt as easy to work with as Unity. I would absolutely not call it a monster. Even with a fairly green team you can hit the ground running and get really productive with Unity.

My issue with Unreal is that Epic puts little effort into improving the developer experience, focusing instead on churning out tech demos, flashy visuals and half baked features that only become usable after several major releases (if ever). The artists at my company love it, the developers not so much.

And blueprints take forever to wire up in my experience compared to just writing the C++ directly.

That's extremely unfortunate given that Unity is becoming financially hostile gouging enterprise customers, and apparently Godot is not quite mature enough to compete. Game engines are quickly becoming a problem

Is Cryengine still relevant at all ?

I'm also always surprised we don't see more games on the current gen id software engines

I think UE is so good at graphics that there is no reason to use it for most of the developers. I don't understand why many indie developers chose to use it.

Blueprints can be a great learning tool, if you double click a node it will open a VS window with the actual C++ code function.

NEW QUEST: "These New Gaming Requirements Are Unreal"

OBJECTIVE: Any project that demands HDRP and Nanometric Mesh

BONUS: Find the happy path

Dare me to say costless leaky abstraction. Then I'll point to the thread next door using Chrome profilers to diagnose Chrome internals using Scratch. Then I'll finish saying that at least Unreal has that authentic '90s feel to it.

I remember solving this problem before. These are both global components, so you create a single global instance and control them with a global context or function.

You basically have a global part of the component and a local part. The global part is what actually gets rendered when necessary and manages current state, the local part defines what content will be rendered inside the global part for a particular trigger and interacts with the global part when a trigger condition happens (eg hover timeout for a tooltip).

That breaks the out transition.

Alternatively, how many modals can be open at any given time? And is it a floating element? May be an option to make it a global single instance thing then, set the content when needed. Allows for in/out transitions, too, as another commenter pointed out. See also "Portals" in React.

In the Blazor space we use factories/managers to spawn new instances of a modal/tooltip instead of having something idle waiting for activation.

The tradeoff is for more complicated components, first renders can be slower.

It's just like your computer and IDE, you start it up and never shut it down again.

Wouldn't it taking the whole afternoon be because it's downloading and installing assets, creating caches, indexing, etc?

Like with IDEs, it really doesn't matter much once they're up and running, and the performance of the product has ultimately little to do with the tools used in making them. Poorly optimized games have the reputation of being poorly optimized, that's rarely down to the engine. Maybe the complete package, where it's too easy to just use and plop down assets from the internets without tweaking for performance or having a performance budget per scene.

It took that long because it had to compile shaders for the first time. After that it would open in seconds.

Yet it is the engine dominating the industry and beloved by artists of all kinds.

To get UE games that run well you either need your own engine team to optimise it or you drop all fancy new features.

> It's no wonder UE5 games have the reputation of being poorly optimized

Care to exemplify?

I find UE games to be not only the most optimized, but also capable of running everywhere. Take X-COM, which I can play on my 14 year old linux laptop with i915 excuse-for-a-gfx-card, whereas Unity stuff doesn't work here, and on my Windows gaming rig always makes everything red-hot without even approaching the quality and fidelity of UE games.

To me UE is like SolidWorks, whereas Unity is like FreeCAD... Which I guess is actually very close to what the differences are :-)

Or is this "reputation of being poorly optimized" only specific to UE version 5 (as compared to older versions of UE, perhaps)?

It is not the text data. It is that every tool tip gets made into an UI element.

"Firstly, despite its name, the function doesn’t just set the text of a tooltip; it spawns a full tooltip widget, including sub-widgets to display and layout the text, as well as some helper objects. This is not ideal from a performance point of view. The other problem? Unreal does this for every tooltip in the entire editor, and there are a lot of tooltips in Unreal. In fact, up to version 5.6, the text for all the tooltips alone took up around 1 GB of storage space."

But I assume the 1GB storage for all tooltips include boilerplate. I doubt it is 1 GB of raw text.

No idea why you're getting down voted but that was my thought as well.

With immediate mode you don't have to construct any widgets or objects. You just render them via code every frame which gives you more freedom in how you tackle each UI element. You're not forced into one widget system across the entire application. For example, if you detect your tooltip code is slow you could memcpy all the strings in a block of memory and then have tooltips use an index to that memory, or have them load on demand from disk, or the cloud or space or whatever. The point being you can optimise the UI piecemeal.

Immediate mode has its own challenges but I do find it interesting to at least see how the different approaches would tackle the problem

Unity uses an IMGUI approach and it makes all the difference in the universe. Overriding an OnDrawGizmos method to quickly get at an editor viz of a new component is super efficient. There are some sharp edges like forgetting to set/reset colors, etc, but I much prefer these little annoyances for the convenience I get in return.

AFAIK, UE relies on a retained mode GUI, but I never got far enough into that version of Narnia to experience it first hand.

How does this compare to React-like approach (React, Flutter, SwiftUI)?

It seems like those libraries do what IMGUI do, but more structured.

At most one instance at start up. Asynchronous creation or lazy creation on first use are two other potential options. Speaking generally, not Unreal-specific.

"Together, these two problems can result in the editor spending an extremely long time just creating unused tooltips. In a debug build of the engine, creating all of these tooltips resulted in 2-5 seconds of startup time. In comparison development builds were faster, taking just under a second."