Unpopular opinions about TU?

General
88

Several factors were considered:

  • Unreal 4

    • royalty payments are cheaper
    • came with full source code access
    • art tools are really easy to use and has modern lighting & PBR
    • is a much more mature FPS engine and since Tower is mostly an FPS we needed that
    • networking tools are fantastic
    • out of the box integration with several APIs, including Steam
    • has blueprints which allowed more developers to work on the game quicker

  • Unity

    • was generally considered not a mature engine at the time
    • did not have a built in networking system like Unreal 4 does
    • art tools were not user friendly nor did the engine look good compared
    • did not come with full source code access

I’m pretty sure there were a few more points we talked about early on, but these were the ones that were the most important.

5 Likes
89

Interesting. Now that UE5 is fully out, have you guys reconsidered maybe making the switch. I actually finally chose to start at least attempting to make games thanks to how incredibly simple UE5 is. I never could even begin to wrap my head around UE4 (or Unity for that matter) but UE5 is sooooooooooooooo much easier to use. I’m doing a Udemy course on it right now and I’m just now getting into blueprints and I’m not sure yet if I’ll make it through this part, but the whole interface itself is ridiculously easy to use and it way more powerful than UE4 and it actually has a lot of improvements specifically designed for open world games that could really benefit Tower. I have a massive beast of a rig, yet I struggle to even get 60 fps on Tower, so performance improvements would definitely be very beneficial.

90

Unreal 5 is not really production ready yet, and upgrading from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5 is a huge amount of development cost. It would halt production on all our projects and introduce countless unknowns and bugs. A lot of core code was changed in the engine that would break our game when migrating.

1 Like
91

A big unpopular opinion. The devs imo should spend the big time necessary in optimizing the game or even better spend the time porting the game from blueprints to a code base like C++. That would go a long way with optimizing the game as blueprints aren’t made for making a game as big as tower unite. Their made as a building block that you remove later.

NOTE THIS IS NOT ME HATING, I JUST WANT TO SEE THE FUTURE OF THIS GAME COME TRUE. SO THIS WOULD BE A GOOD START TO WORKING TORWARDS THAT FUTURE.

1 Like
92

Ah, ok. Makes sense. Just thought I’d ask.

93

Maybe I’m misremembering, but I could’ve sworn that they said on here that they stopped using blueprints a long time ago.

1 Like
94

We just recently did a huge push on optimizations to the game in the last update, 0.15.1.0. We continue to do optimizations every update.

We don’t use blueprints for any core/major gameplay code that would effect performance negatively. The game is mostly C++. We use blueprints for simple logic or to prototype with.

4 Likes