Learning Unreal Engine Be Like

Just a quick video about some of the most common struggles (in my opinion) when learning Unreal Engine.
To be clear, I'm pretty new with Unreal Engine but I've been enjoying the jurney a lot so far. Remember that you are not gonna learn everything in a day. It takes time and practice.

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Songs I used in this video:

#Mults

[HawkTeevs]

Having worked in Unreal for the past 4 or so years, I can confirm that at least half of the process is either:
1. Waiting for the code to compile
2. Waiting for shaders to compile
3. Waiting for the level building to be finished
4. Smashing your head on your desk trying to find out why it's crashing
5. All of the above

[alabaster]

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder but, when you do, it blows your whole leg off"- creator of C++

[illegaloli]

Every game engine developers: We made the most creator friendly engine ever. You don't even need to program anything.

Reality:

[anispinner]

very well describes my short experience with Unreal Engine:
1) install
2) launch
3) crash
4) uninstall

[alperenozturk]

Fun fact I'm a full time UE4 developer. And a proper game project takes a lot of time while loading, compiling, bulding, automated testing and existing. I learned Finnish and Spanish also switched to ironman polyphasic sleep. It gives a weird sense of superiority and inferiority complex. You can't get any more unhealty mentally without Unreal Engine.

[NaldinhoGX]

Me: Oh, let's make a game!
Me, after watching a tutorial on literally every possible game engine: Never mind.

[MultsElMesco]

Hello there! I hope you enjoy this video of the "Learning X Be like" Series. Learning Unreal has been really good so far, I hope I'll use this new knowledge one day hahaha.


As always the songs I used are in the description and go follow me on Twitter if you want.

[AJProbably]

I feel like more people recommend Unreal than use it for longer than even 200 hours.

[PepijnLinden]

I've recently been learning Unreal Engine after starting out with Unity and even though working with C++ wasn't as scary as some people made it out to be, I was NOT prepared for all the compiling and having to close and restart the engine that often. Blueprints are pretty straightforward and all other aspects of the engine feel really intuitive to me, but the programming in cpp part has been very unwelcoming so far. Also, I can't imagine having to work without JetBrains Rider anymore.
Unreal is a beautiful engine with a ton of great features though and I hope it'll get as comfortable as working with Unity someday soon.

[Fezezen]

I really hate when people say "Oh just use X engine instead!" as if changing to another engine isn't a massive undertaking if you've already spent years learning to use a different one.

[marxydev]

I can't even install unreal, it's too powerfull for my pc lol

[fangxu]

I have never learned any programming language and Blueprint is my boat to sail the ocean of game development

[tiltmodex]

Haha I went through the same, but its rewarding once you know how it works. I started with unreal and i learned a formidable amount of c++ outside of unreal and in because unreal has its own c++ environment since you use the functions available from the classes they've implemented. Keep it up, Don't get discouraged, and don't count any other things out like engines and other languages. They all help in the grand scheme of things and your just increasing your toolset to get these things done. :)

[Fighter]

Unity has C# exist as a scripting language; it is compiled on top of the engine. C++ for Unreal is compiled directly into the engine. You need to understand the differences between the two. Blueprints = C# for Unity. C++ exists as a way for you to write code into the source build of your game. This exists because studios are say building an MMO. They are using Unreal 5 for the client and have a completely custom server backend. Or if you have game logic that is so sensitive you need it to run at a very low level for performance reasons. Something like netcode for a big multiplayer game. So if you used to use C# for a bouncing ball, you should probably just use Blueprints for a bouncing ball. But if you're designing a big multiplayer game with 900 players in a city, the server replication code for that bouncing ball should probably be written in C++.

You're having issues building your game because Play In Editor does not reflect real world performance or real world logic. You have issues with how your code is structured. A reference to something that does not exist in memory will crash. You need to use a soft reference, or a if you're going to use a hard reference then you need to make sure that at some point you told the engine to load it. Pay attention to the warnings you are getting in the console or your IDE of choice.

Unity does this by loading all objects in a referenceable state. This is really good for 95% of games, just like Blueprints are good for 95% of games. But there are lots of reasons why Unreal is structured the way it is. Its is why so many AAA studios with probably over a billion USD in investment combined in 2021/2022 have all switched to Unreal Engine 5 and have never once considered Unity. Square Enix, Obsidian Entertainment, Disney, Sony, Microsoft, CDPR, Ninja Theory, Focus Entertainment, Codemasters, RARE, 2k Games, GearBox, Tesla, Nvidia, Intel, AMD, Ford, General Motors, BMW, Tencent Games, Mercedes, NASA. Just to name a few.

It is because the engine allows people to do whatever they want. Unity is not open source. Unreal is.

I can't wait till you release the 30, 000th 2d platformer on Steam built in Unity. The mobile game ads appear from China with location tracking data, contact data scrubbers and there is an ad for Weta Digital and an Amazon Prime ad for the new Lord of the Rings. Then you buy art assets off the marketplace and SteamAI blocks it was a another asset flip based on the fact there have been so many shitty Unity games released that they are now protective on who gets promoted.

Steam literally has a system where if you can't get 1000 Wishlist adds in a set amount of time they will probably block you from the promotion algorithm. If your game is built in Unity then its 500 adds.

Look man, I was a Unity developer for over 10+ years. The CEO of Unity now... sucks ass. I remember when Mike Acton was kicking fucking ass as the Unity boss and adding features to the engine.


He has a grey beard now but what made Unity great is long fucking gone. Its a struggle sometimes because I am trying to get Unity developers jobs and none of them seem to want to change from their workflow. They are for all intensive purposes, Unity Developers. They do NOT want to learn any new languages, they DO NOT want to learn new Shader workflows.

It just sucks, because sometimes I feel like there are shifts in our industry and as professionals we need to be willing to learn new workflows. Its like Blender vs Maya. Open source vs closed source. So many people just cannot get away from Maya. Just like Unity developers cannot understand that games are made in different ways.

Blender has come a long way in the past 4 years. We should open up applications from Blender artists for diversity reasons. Lets be real. A lot of young kids today on the bottom end of the socio-economic ladder are not going to be able to afford Maya and have been trained on Blender. Its free and open source, from a company perspective we can even save money on SaaS fees.

Its just that you need to be realistic.

[thenodecamp]

Not sure if anyone mentioned this, but most added textures and meshes need to be selected one by one and ctrl + s saved because save all and save just doesn't save. If UE crashes, nothing was really saved in the end :)))

[habibpines]

Me trying UE : "I think that's my 4th crash and recompiling today..."

[Tea-ocgh]

Unreal is a weird engine, When you first start its a impossible mess to work with, but after a couple of mouths of usage, i found that it became a bit more user friendly in the long term

[Phenix]

i thought blender was tough this is going to be on a whole new level

[Daniel-qtib]

First time I used Unreal, I thought it was being quite sluggish. Not long after, I get a pop-up message;

"Unreal has been running <20 fps for the past 10 minutes. Would you like to lower your graphics settings?" lmao

[AnimatedLines]

These are my current problems with unreal engine, glad someone shares them. I'm not alone.