For Real, Fuck Unreal
(Apologies in advance, but this is loooooooooooooong, so grab some popcorn if you're interested in a novel)
For all the shit Epic Games gets from this sub, I don't see anyone give criticism to the Unreal Engine. Could it be true that it's this diamond in the rough, good enough to redeem Epic Games, or is it that anyone who knows Epic Games well enough simply knows to stay away from it?
Well, recently through a series of unfortunate real life events, I found myself in the position of having to use the Unreal Engine for a week, and GOD do I need to rant about this.
Guess what? The only way you can even get Unreal Engine is through the Epic Games Launcher. You can't even download from the website! To people unfamiliar with this sub, this might not seem like a big deal, but the Epic Games Launcher has pretty much been proven to be full of spyware, affects your computer's performance, and its malware sticks around even after you've uninstalled EGS, and is pretty much impossible to get rid of, short of reinstalling windows. After Googling around, I came across some Epic fans/employees saying that Unreal Engine is available on Github, but really... it's just not. First, you need to have an Epic Games account (you've kind of already lost at that point), a Github account, and link them to each other, then you get an email that links you to find out that it's an old version of Unreal! It's UE4! Still interested? Don't worry - you won't be when you find out that once you download it, all you get is god... damn... SOURCE FILES!
I looked around on this, and I found out there's apparently a way to "fork" the source files back into being an application, but to do that you need to download something called "git". I didn't even try this: I was told Unreal Engine was available on Github, but it was an old version, it was only for people with Epic Games accounts, and it's not even in a usable state. That's pretty much 3 lies in 1 and it's before you've even downloaded it. At this point, the writing's on the wall that Epic are going to make your life as hard as possible for not downloading their precious launcher, and this mythical Github release is just a carrot on a stick. Holy shit, why does Epic Games need to make everything as hard as possible for their consumers? You know how to download Blender? You go to the website, and click the download button! It's a miraculously simple process for both the consumers and the company! It's almost like people don't like to go through hell just to not get spied on! Imagine that! Next time you hear someone say Unreal Engine is on Github, do me a favour and call them a twat!
Maybe Epic Games fans could defend this by saying you likewise need to download Steam to get Source Filmmaker, but here's the thing, Steam doesn't come with intrusive malware! And it actually performs well and doesn't turn your computer to sawdust for trying to do the most basic thing! And it's not a 4-hour download!
edit A ton of people in the comments have pointed out to me that this procedure is standard practice on Github and this is a bad point. I'm willing to admit that this is my first time using Github and I screwed up here, but at the end of the day, Unreal Engine has a dedicated website. There's no good reason they can't host a download on their own website, and don't tell me that Epic Games doesn't have the money to host the server for it! It's so frustrating thumbing through page after page of why Unreal is the best thing ever, only to be met at the end with "wait, you actually want to download it? Uuuuh, we don't really do that, we're only its dedicated website. go see Epic Games about that."
In the end, I decided to create a system restore point on my PC, and at the end of my time with Unreal, I'd back up any files I'd saved since then and take my PC back to the system restore point.
If you're in a similar situation to me, and for some ungodly reason need to use Unreal for something but don't want to install the Epic Games Launcher - here. That's a link to a Google Drive folder I made where you can download the Unreal installer without needing the Epic Games Launcher. I can't guarantee Unreal itself won't install anything shady, but at least you won't need to download the Epic Games Launcher for it and will hopefully avoid the spyware that comes with it. I've just saved you from wasting the ENTIRE DAY of fruitless searching I wasted trying to find that exact file before giving up. May you have a less frustrating time with it than I did! And to Epic Games, I would say I just did your job for you, but your job isn't really to give/sell people software, it's to spy on customers, sell their information to whoever wants to buy it, maybe give it to the Chinese government, and do everything in your power to spite Valve like a crazy ex-girlfriend.
Upon installing Unreal Engine, you may notice it takes a long time to install. That's because the final entire folder of Unreal Engine is 114 GB. That's right, ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEEN GIGABYTES! Just for reference, it's main competition is Unity, which is 4.64 GB. Source Filmmaker is 2 GB. Blender is less than one gigabyte. Is Epic Games that badly optimised or is Unreal just 96% bloatware/spyware? You know Skyrim? Well, Unreal is about 8 Skyrims worth of memory! I started to experience worse PC performance almost immediately after installing it.
Bear in mind, all of this is literally before I've even opened Unreal Engine. Every time I do open it, I'm immediately greeted with a window saying my GPU is out of date for Unreal. Most functions still work if I ignore it, and it's not a big deal, but this is a computer that has run the Adobe suite, Blender, Maya, 3DSMax, and Unity no problem. If it struggles to run Unreal, maybe it's not my computer that's the problem... The computers that helped put man on the moon couldn't run Unreal.
Oh, and before I forget, I googled to see if Unreal Engine would still work without the Epic Games Launcher, and saw a few Epic fans/employees saying it's not recommended, and everyone else saying Unreal still works fine without EGL. I deleted the launcher, and yes I can confirm, it works without the launcher just fine. In other words, locking Unreal Engine behind the Epic Games Launcher is a completely arbitrary decision. Unreal Engine 1 is exactly 20 years older than the Epic Games Store, so this was clearly not always the case. I wonder if people will start to move away from Unreal if Epic keep getting more and more aggressive with shoving their shitty malware on everyone?
If you're wondering whether Unreal Engine actually functions as a modelling/texturing/game engine, then... yeah, it works fine. Most things are intuitive enough for people who have used 3D software before, and if anything's not clear there's loads of tutorials all over the internet. That being said, I don't see any fancy functions that justify Unreal's reputation as being so much better and more professional than Unity and Unity as this toy for indies and hobbyists comparatively. Unreal has this fancy new lighting system called Lumen, but apparently my GPU wasn't good enough for it. One thing's for sure, I DEFINITELY don't see anything in it that justifies a 114GB download, plus the Epic Games Launcher and its associated bloatware.
To anyone who's been on this sub for a while, you already know that Epic Games pull anti-consumer practices and this is nothing new. Rocket League's been taken off Steam, and Fall Guys is too. However, even despite ALL that, at VERY LEAST you could say that those are just video games. If you don't like it, there's nothing to stop you from picking up a Switch instead, but when it comes to Unreal, this is a level of disgusting that makes Fall Guys and Rocket League look like saints. This is a game engine - developers rely on this for their jobs and careers, and they're being so buggered around by Epic's aggressive exclusivity, false advertising, hypocrisy, weaponization of their products, privacy breaches, and general lack of care for their consumers.
I guess I want to finish this by saying that Unity's come under a lot of fire for partnering with a literal malware company and announcing they want a piece of the cake of anyone who makes games using Unity. Imagine being an artist, buying paint from a guy, and when you've finished your painting the paint salesman thinks you owe him extra money for it. If they actually follow through with this, I'll be disappointed, but I wouldn't say Epic Games are above this kind of behaviour. As it stands, I'd say the fact that they're comparable should be an insult to both of them. It's easy to think that there's a grim future ahead for indie game devs, but I say look no further than Source 2 and Godot! You may need to learn them from scratch, but it's better than clinging to Unreal in its current state!
TLDR: I had to use Unreal Engine, and I don't get the excitement about it. You artificially need the Epic Games Launcher to download it, it's a 114GB download, it takes 4 hours at least, it thinks it's too good for most GPUs, and it's Epic Games so fuck it.
Posted Aug 18, 2022, 12:42 AM UTC · edited
Valid post, but it's very common for git sites like GitHub to require you to use git.
This guy clearly has no experience in programming. Every programmer has git it's an essential tool.
Cheers, and yeah, this is moreso a rant for me to blow off some steam than any kind of expert technical opinion