It blew up because Unity changed their TOS overnight at the same time they pulled the SpatialOS license keys, so the SpatialOS guys made a big deal about it, which spread into major tech news sites. But it's larger than SpatialOS - even though Unity's blog post about it says you can run your built Unity app on any cloud server you want, that their beef was about SpatialOS being its own cloud server with a Unity SDK to access it, the TOS does *not* say that, and from Unity's actions they aren't going to change it.
Epic is involved, at least in part, because Impropable Edmonton, now led by the former BioWare GM, works in Unreal 4 so they already have a pipeline for Unreal and Epic is supporting that, transitioning all other Impropable studios over to that same framework, at least that is what it looks like to me.
Unreal 4's C++ support also sucks. If your code has faults in it, it's not just throwing errors or exceptions, the whole UE4 editor goes in lockdown. Besides that, documentation for Unreal is horrendous. Nobody, particularly not indies are going to use Unreal 4 without some face-to-face guide to make them understand how the engine works.
Unless Epic has done some major optimisation work on BP compiling, BP, even when cooked, is too slow to be viable for anything other than PC. I've seen numerous stories of devs needing to completely rework their BP code into native C++ for the sake of porting to platforms like consoles.
I've been out of the game for a while now but around 2015ish when I was last actively using both toolkits and both languages, I had a far easier time working with C++. Unity was a little easier to get started with but Unreal let me do what I wanted to do with less resistance at the time. There were a bunch of pros/cons to both pieces of tech, but I will fight people who say C# is easier to work in just because it hides some of the memory management from you lol
Fight me!
I appreciate the abstraction, personally. It's not something I want to worry about. It's the same reason I don't program in Assembly hehe.
It was always hard for me to get into C++ because whenever I tried, I noticed there's so many toolchains and environments, and also a billion ways to do any one thing. Plus there's .h files that I found cumbersome. Pointers and memory management are no big deal to me, I actually want those features.
pretty fast and beginner friendly. The free assets they give from Paragon and their other titles have helped me and my team immensely since you can experiment freely with already rigged and animated models. They are excellent for testing, although some Paragon models are big boys that weigh over 1GB lol. I still strongly recommend Unreal to anyone who wants to get into game development or anything else. Unless they wanna get into the nitty gritty, that's where Unity > Unreal, because C# is sooo much easier compared to C++
BP is converted into c++ automatically with the option to do so enabled, completely bypassing the vm. It's not as fast as user-written c++, but the difference is negligible.
I should probably also point out that, unless that's changed, you can't get parity in terms of what you can do with BP compared to C++ - for instance, option menu interface functionality is significantly more painful to implement than it should be in BP, and good luck implementing something like fucking key rebinding.
Out of the box this is accurate. However a free plugin from the forum member Rama adds this functionality to Blueprints. If your game is very simple the entire thing can be done in BP, but I'd say most developers would want to write at least a little bit of C++. The amount depends on your comfort level and how much you're willing to spend on plugins that do the work for you, but it's really not hard to add a new class and write a few lines of code. People have this mental block when it comes to C++ which I can understand, but it's not the insurmountable obstacle people make it out to be. UE's layer of abstraction makes it very user-friendly. Just don't expect very good documentation for that layer of abstraction.
