are there any remotely decent unreal engine tutorials in existence? i dislike it greatly but i have to learn it for work. by "remotely decent" i mean:
- text, not video
- actually starts from scratch instead of making you download some template project that it never explains
- preferably oriented towards people who already know how to program, though i'm flexible on this
- i would prefer C++ over blueprints but i'll take either at this point
the dream is basically something like catlike coding's unity tutorials but for unreal.
i really cannot comprehend any aspect of the unreal engine interface or architecture. it's one of the most confounding pieces of software i've ever encountered and all their official documentation is absolute dogshit from a dumpster.
i've gotten some responses to this that seem to misunderstand where i am coming from. i want to be clear: i am not a beginner. i have been making video games for a decade. you will not sell me on the unreal engine, i will never use it by choice. i have been there and done that with the big monolithic black box game engines, and i am never going back. i am extremely happy with my current completely custom workflow for personal projects and i have written extensively about why.
unreal engine wants you to think you'll never have to touch a line of ~scary~ code. it wants you to think that everything you ever want to build a game is just in the engine, or on the marketplace, and all you need to do is tie it together with duct tape and string and you have a video game. this is nonsense. this thought process is the primary reason why people think making video games is so miserable, because they build black boxes out of black boxes and nobody knows what's going on and then there's a problem and you suddenly have to, in the best case scenario sort through thousands of lines of other people's code in order to fix what's wrong.
and for what? to allow people to endlessly churn out identical video games, because the path of least resistance is always to just make the same shit people have made before? when you assemble a video game out of prefabricated parts, you get a prefabricated video game. and i know why people do this. video games are more expensive to make than ever, gamers demand ever-increasing graphical fidelity, nobody can afford to make anything even remotely original. even in the indie space, the only way you're getting funding is if your game is fundamentally the same as a game that has sold a lot of copies in the past five years, and the only way you're selling copies is if you have the funding to meet people's sky-high expectations for "indie" games or you hit the lottery and northernlion gets obsessed with streaming your game.
the reason i am learning unreal is not because i want to, or because i think it's powerful. it's because i have bills to pay, and the industry i started my journey in ten years ago because i wanted to push boundaries and make something truly great is now just a machine for churning out endless copies of copies of copies and i am trapped here. people keep telling me that my skillset is really valuable, people have told me my whole life that learning these skills would be able to get me some great jobs. well i'll tell you what, anyone who doesn't know how to program: i've climbed the mountain, i'm an expert in my field, and all i've found at the top is a fabulously expensive coffin.
I guess this is my short-form writing for last week.
Okay, with the flippant title out of the way, I relate hard to Cass here. Their situation sounds like one of my nightmare scenarios. The bigger abstractions you make, the easier it is to cater to the common case, but it becomes more difficult to figure out what is wrong if or when something goes wrong.
For better or worse, there's no substitute to having time to spend to peer into internals. I may bitch about how it's not possible to understand all the software/hardware layers due to lack of time, but that doesn't mean I won't try. A black box like Unity gives me no recourse to even try.
I've been lucky enough professionally to have the time to stare into the internals of the many software suites (mostly open source FPGA tooling). I've been able to exchange that time into a service that people actually pay me to kickstart their own digital designs; they pay me to "know where to hammer the nail", so to speak. It pains me to see very technically competent people like Cass have struggles with their craft because the tools are so damn big, so damn opaque, yet still somehow so damn leaky.
Getting institutional knowledge about a software suite's internal quirks via commercial support or forums pales in comparison to having time to study the internals and figuring out how to laser-focus on patching a leaky abstraction. I've been fortunate; I wish everyone had my opportunities here.
And this isn't even getting into:
- Cass' observation that games are becoming "assemble a video game out of prefabricated parts". You can make beautiful things in Unity. But there's def some truth to their statement.
- I know secondhand that Unity the company has (or had) a sexual harassment problem and drove out a friend. So I have some bias there.