Why the hate against certain game engines? (especially Unity or Unreal)

[baneini]

99% of the time I play unity or unreal title I get the feeling the game would be better on another engine.
They never use the engine to do anything special, it seems more like they're practicing the engine for their day job or something.
The gamers suffer as a result, the retarded uncapped framerates on unity, the random keybindings because getting space bar to work for skipping text is just so difficult you know? The garbage visuals + stupid pc requirements combo is a real issue. That baseline 3d movement system on unreal used to move minimum effort desert environments that are fugly.
All the bugs that don't get fixed before the dev drops the project.
Who doesn't like seeing changelog of the garbage 3dcg models having an animated sex scene, woow.

 

[kytee]

Honestly, OP's purpose for this thread is significantly less interesting than the actual topic being discussed by the people in this thread. If I'm reading this right, OP is not asking for reasons why people might be turned off towards other game engines, but instead why people will go in the page of the games that utilize those engines and make their preferences known. I think its a stupid topic of discussion that ultimately boils down to people like to let others know what they don't like so they don't have to see it again.

 

[Story Anon]

It might sound kinda petty but Unity just makes it unnecessarily difficult to program UIs for. Frustratingly so, especially when a VN is mechanically 99% UI and screens.

 

[ThisIsMe88]

Just to throw my 2 cents in here, and hopefully keep it short since most people have already largely touched on reasons of the why :

1/ first, and most importantly to me, user habit. I strongly dislike (and this seems to get worse with age) games (or any other piece of computer soft/hardware) trying to change what has proven to reliably work in the past, and most notably interface conventions or keyboard hotkeys. I'm used to my WASD or ESC for options, for example, why the f*ck would you forcefully remove this from me ?

2/ lack of proficiency of game authors with the "new" engines, which is painfully obvious in most cases, and reasonably so, since they are much more complex than these authors care to explore or admit to themselves. If in 2020 you still believe in the "plug & play" paradigm while programming, or think it should be mostly effortless and never a time-consuming task, I'm sorry to say that you're probably sitting on the wrong side of the fence.

3/ "mis-calibration", or should I say picking the wrong tool to reach a given target. I'm not suggesting one can't cut a delicious piece of meat with a fork, but you'll probably struggle more than if you used the proper tool for the intended purpose. My mind is that specifically designed tools will always be the best and safest bet when achieving a task, so you as game author better have a *very* solid reason to stray from that path (say, not picking Ren'Py for the VN that you're presenting to me as player).

 

[dookie85]

... but instead why people will go in the page of the games that utilize those engines and make their preferences known. I think its a stupid topic of discussion that ultimately boils down to people like to let others know what they don't like so they don't have to see it again.

Obviously, you can talk about whatever you want, but you don't have to be an asshole about it. We already covered most the issues you guys are bringing up, so now it's just piling on. In other words, you aren't contributing much to the discussion, and it's really getting repetitive. Now, that's what's actually boring here.

As to your point, it's clearly dumber to express your preferences in a thread for a game you won't even try. If you don't want to see it, why'd you click a game tagged as such? It's definitely not going to let the devs know how/why their UI design sucks or that it's a resource hog for particular systems.
By your logic, if we all just complain enough without specifics, then people will stop making shitty games and posting them here, haha

Just to throw my 2 cents in here, and hopefully keep it short since most people have already largely touched on reasons of the why ...

You bring up some good points. Again, I wasn't talking about VNs and Ren'Py. (Although as previously mentioned, Droid Productions has made a great VN-like game with additional mechanics using Unity) The first thing I said was how I was seeing this in other genres besides VNs though.

The issue with a proven control scheme, tried and true UI design, etc. is something new developers have to learn to accept, I agree.

Also, I never heard of a "plug and play" method of software development. It's usually a term used for hardware devices. That said, I understand your meaning in that some devs try to plug unsuitable pre-made assets and shamble together games with bad scripting quickly.

Again, it might be easier to screw up in certain engines, but it's not something that's inherently the game engine's fault.

 

[Rythan25]

of course its not the engine's fault if the Dev didnt utilize it correctly, but most of the time when you see someone complain about one of the more criticized engines, its because the dev didnt take the constructive criticism well... Telling someone "hey your game isnt complex enough to need Unity much less Unreal" isnt shitting on him, its telling him the truth !

look at the game Lucky Mark by Super Alex.. its a damn free roam VN, would have been perfectly at home in Renpy, instead he kept it on Unity, kept pushing fucking stupid sized image files to bloat the game to 32GB, and thanks to fucking Unity the game cant be compressed, most modders here have said as much... I am not having a 32GB porn fucking game on my harddrive, unless its modded fucking Skyrim !! If it had been in Ren[y I could still have the game on my system as any compressor here could have made it a 1.2GB game at most !

Unreal I hardly ever see people crap on, unless they are playing on a toaster, in which case its their own damn fault. Just about every game on Unreal is a FULL blown 3D game... (Breeders of Nephylym, Kalyskah, Wild Life, Shades of Elysium, etc) those games are not for a little crappy laptop !

Also while I get devs wanting to players to spend hours on their game, making grindfests does them no favors... this is another reason a lot of people prefer Renpy, rollback and the "command console" feature are lifesavers !! Whats that I need 1,000,000 to get a kiss from the landlady ? ok *hits shift+O and types in money = 1,000,000*... there we go, lets get on with the nudes !! Unity doesnt have that feature, and most game devs refuse to put a fucking cheat mode for players that dont want to grind through their BS but still enjoy his art.... I dont mind if its a little grind, but Foot of the Mountains level grind is total BS... repeating an event 50 times in correct order before something new happens (ohh an only once per day at a certain hour ?) yeah fuck that...

 

[Crimson Delight Games]

For some people, game engines are like sports teams - it's in vogue to hate specific ones from time to time.

On a more objective note, Unity has a poor track record even with professional devs, let alone amateur ones. It's a clunky suite that tries to do everything at once, and fails abysmally at all of it. Still, content is king, and there have been plenty of good games made on it. Would they have been even better on something apart from Unity? Who's to say - maybe.

 

[dookie85]

Rythan25: LOL. breh, you got me laughing with your hyper writing style.

I wasn't lying about seeing posts where damn near the only thing they mentioned was the engine being Unity or Unreal (and yes, I really did see complaints about Unreal), and based on that alone, they weren't going to play.

I've also seen some Ren'Py games get pretty big (e.g. over 10GB).

Only when used improperly (At least in Unity's case, I do not know about Unreal).
When used properly, Unity's file size will actually be smaller than Ren'Py.

But then again, that's also probably the dev's fault and not ren'py necessarily. I mean, they could always compress the images a little with minimal degradation, for instance. That's just the example you gave; I don't mind larger file sizes, if it's within reason.

In any case... yeah, I don't have a problem with people complaining if there's a relevant critique in there somewhere.

 

[kytee]

As to your point, it's clearly dumber to express your preferences in a thread for a game you won't even try. If you don't want to see it, why'd you click a game tagged as such? It's definitely not going to let the devs know how/why their UI design sucks or that it's a resource hog for particular systems.
By your logic, if we all just complain enough without specifics, then people will stop making shitty games and posting them here, haha

But see, the thing is, it clearly does work. Not on a preventative level, as anyone who has aspirations to be a dev think their game is hot shit until they get feedback. The moment they get flooded with hate comments, they reconsider their engine of choice or remove the pedestal they place their games on and a lot of them realize it's not worth the trouble with such vocal haters. Go look at the many v0.1 games that are now marked abandoned, you'll find no shortage of people trashing their game and it's easy to assume that's what contributed to the dev's abandonment. I think deep down you understand this as well as you wouldn't be here complaining about people complaining if you thought they had no sway.

 

[khumak]

I think the default settings for the interface in renpy is generally more satisfying to players than most other engines. I've played Unity games that I like and that have good interfaces and I've played bad ones. With Renpy usually when a game is bad it's not the interface that's bad, it's the story, writing, renders that are bad.

With Unity those things can be bad as well but it's pretty common for me to also hate the interface. I find RPGM even worse. I have yet to find even 1 RPGM game I was able to force myself to continue playing due to the crappy interface. This includes games where I actually like the concept and the renders. It may be possible to make a fun RPGM game but I have yet to find one so I suspect the default interface is horrible and requires significant tweaking to fix but nobody bothers to.

RenPy is the only engine I have any development experience with and it's definitely easy to develop for. I have no idea how it compares to other engines from a newbie developer standpoint.

 

[dookie85]

Go look at the many v0.1 games that are now marked abandoned, you'll find no shortage of people trashing their game and it's easy to assume that's what contributed to the dev's abandonment. I think deep down you understand this as well as you wouldn't be here complaining about people complaining if you thought they had no sway.

Nah, you're wrong about my motivation and making assumptions there. I genuinely couldn't understand why people would post about refusing to play games because of their engine, instead of just avoiding threads with that engine's tag, especially seeing as it is no indication of whether the game is good or not.

You made a reasonable assumption, I suppose. However, I said earlier that I read posts and ratings, so engines some dislike tend to have a good track record for me on this site. Clearly, I'm not talking about abandoned v0.1 games with threads full of valid criticism in that case. I found this type of complaint about engines pretty much everywhere. The ones I saw were mostly one-offs when I was scrolling threads trying to find out what a game was about, and it annoyed me a bit seeing them since it didn't tell me anything about the game at all.

While I agree with your specific point, criticism assigned to a particular game can potentially influence its creator. Of course, feedback can have an impact on the developer. That being said, I'm not sure if you're trying to overgeneralize and stretch that argument because it doesn't stop them from making another shitty game with a different engine, considering the posters talked shit about the engine and not how the devs were bad at using it, nor does it help keep other devs from making the same kind of mistakes.

So in general, this type of complaint obviously doesn't curb the flood of mediocre and bad games from showing up here. What they can do is possibly influence decent developers who are more aware of things like quality, feedback, and target audience; I would hate for those folks to stop innovating features/mechanics and just churn out yet another basic VN, with an adequate story and nice art, made with Ren'py. Even then, that's a bit of a reach, now that I think about it.

It's doubtful these complaints have any effect besides perpetuating the misconception that you can somehow tell whether a game is good based on its engine alone.

 

[Rigetsu]

Since everyone shit on RPGMaker , this type of post make me laugh.

 

[SliveEmerald]

People are biased toward their own experiences. If someone hated most of the RPGM games they've played for one reason or another they will have the idea that RPGM is just not a good engine. Same thing happens for Unity, Unreal and Renpy.

Most adult game dev projects are tiny teams or one person teams. Generally speaking, Unity and Unreal are capable of basically anything you can code. They are designed to cast a very wide net on what they can make, but in doing so are considerably more complicated and less efficient in terms of necessary development time so small teams often don't get very far or take A LOT of time. In comparison, Renpy and RPGM are specialized engines, designed to make a specific genre of game and they sacrifice the ability to easily stray too far from the confines of what they specialize in, in order to make development extremely efficient. You can make a game in RPGM without ever writing a line of code and Renpy coding can be learned very quickly.

This is why Renpy and RPGM generally create more 'complete' adult games because small teams can work with it very efficiently to deliver on a better experience. People play these 'complete' games and they associate that experience with other similar looking games. I won't discount an adult game made in Unity or Unreal off the bat, but I will be wary and quite frankly expect a very bare bones experience.

I will also add, for adult games, adult content goes on top of every other aspect of making a game. This is, in part, why we see more shallow gameplay from adult games when compared to indie mainstream games of comparable size of dev teams. Because tons of dev time goes into making the adult content that a regular game doesn't need. This is also why these very efficient, specialized engines are better suited to adult game development as either gameplay is virtually non-existent, like a VN or is built into the core infrastructure of the engine, like RPGM.

 

[dookie85]

SliveEmerald:
You made good points, and I agree with just about everything you said, except perhaps the last part about adult content.

Yes, if you are using Ren'Py or RPGM, perhaps you have to spend more time making the naked models and genitalia for the images, but it's not as if regular non-erotic games don't need a story, dialogue, and graphics. It's debatable if you were making animations and images for a mainstream indie game, whether you would also be spending a similar amount of time.

It depends on what the developer was aiming for. For instance, if you were making a 2D RPG, and you don't mind using sprites for everything with no custom backgrounds, avatars, or cut scenes; then it would save a lot of time to leave that out. However, if you were making some Visual Novel style game, then you would still need to do most of that, and it would probably wind up only being slightly less intensive than if you were making erotic images instead or in addition to it.

This is why I think we shouldn't discourage devs from using tools which are capable of utilizing in-engine models and animations to make erotic scenes. That way, you wouldn't have to render every image or draw each one of them. For example, if you look at adult mods for Skyrim/Fallout or The Sims, there are tons of custom models and animations for erotic scenes. The modders have tools which make creating sex animations fairly straightforward, which is why there's so many of them. I'm not sure about the specifics, but I assume making still images is much harder if you're rendering each scene separately, especially if you're drawing them externally.

On this site, there's a stigma against animations since folks assume it's low fidelity, either in the framerate or resolution, or that it's extremely time consuming and bogs down development. I think this is actually because of the tools devs are using in conjunction with the limitations of the common engines here, rather than a function of it being inherently difficult to make. Like you said, they "sacrifice the ability to easily stray too far from the confines of what they specialize." Nowadays, there's more open-source engines like Godot, which I heard is pretty powerful, that devs can use without buying a license.

Of course, in-engine graphics is likely never going to be as nice as handdrawn images or photographs, but they can come close to rendered still images if artists created detailed models in the engines. I can't say for certain because I haven't done enough research, but I think there's great potential in graphical design and creation, just like there's potential for greater variety of gameplay mechanics and genres if devs and players weren't afraid of different game engines.

 

[SliveEmerald]

SliveEmerald:
You made good points, and I agree with just about everything you said, except perhaps the last part about adult content.

Yes, if you are using Ren'Py or RPGM, perhaps you have to spend more time making the naked models and genitalia for the images, but it's not as if regular non-erotic games don't need a story, dialogue, and graphics. It's debatable if you were making animations and images for a mainstream indie game, whether you would also be spending a similar amount of time.

It depends on what the developer was aiming for. For instance, if you were making a 2D RPG, and you don't mind using sprites for everything with no custom backgrounds, avatars, or cut scenes; then it would save a lot of time to leave that out. However, if you were making some Visual Novel style game, then you would still need to do most of that, and it would probably wind up only being slightly less intensive than if you were making erotic images instead or in addition to it.

This is why I think we shouldn't discourage devs from using tools which are capable of utilizing in-engine models and animations to make erotic scenes. That way, you wouldn't have to render every image or draw each one of them. For example, if you look at adult mods for Skyrim/Fallout or The Sims, there are tons of custom models and animations for erotic scenes. The modders have tools which make creating sex animations fairly straightforward, which is why there's so many of them. I'm not sure about the specifics, but I assume making still images is much harder if you're rendering each scene separately, especially if you're drawing them externally.

On this site, there's a stigma against animations since folks assume it's low fidelity, either in the framerate or resolution, or that it's extremely time consuming and bogs down development. I think this is actually because of the tools devs are using in conjunction with the limitations of the common engines here, rather than a function of it being inherently difficult to make. Like you said, they "sacrifice the ability to easily stray too far from the confines of what they specialize." Nowadays, there's more open-source engines like Godot, which I heard is pretty powerful, that devs can use without buying a license.

Of course, in-engine graphics is likely never going to be as nice as handdrawn images or photographs, but they can come close to rendered still images if artists created detailed models in the engines. I can't say for certain because I haven't done enough research, but I think there's great potential in graphical design and creation, just like there's potential for greater variety of gameplay mechanics and genres if devs and players weren't afraid of different game engines.

You're right, what we add as adult content is in place of something like in engine models, their animations and everything else that goes into making a modern 3d game. Perhaps I was looking at it from the lens of my own experience. And once you have the framework of having in engine models and animations, creating animated sex scenes is considerably easier than creating renders from scratch including doing posing, environment, lighting, rendering and post-work.

I actually think the current 'holy grail' of adult games would be to have modern 3d graphics and having every sex scene use in-engine scenes using the same models as in the gameplay. But there are, I think, only two games in development atm that are trying for that, but they've been in development for years and are quite frankly no where.

I personally would love to see a game like that succeed, hell, even just get made to completion, but it still seems like creating that necessary framework is beyond the scope of most adult game developers currently.

 

[Netori Popeye]

Engine is never the problem with these games, I've played some amazing RPGM games and some god-awful Ren'py games despite this forum's bias towards Ren'py. It's like people who hate on Gamebryo without realizing Bully and Catherine were made in the same engine and suffer none of the issues that plague Bethesda's games.

 

[dookie85]

... And once you have the framework of having in engine models and animations, creating animated sex scenes is considerably easier than creating renders from scratch including doing posing, environment, lighting, rendering and post-work.

I actually think the current 'holy grail' of adult games would be to have modern 3d graphics and having every sex scene use in-engine scenes using the same models as in the gameplay. But there are, I think, only two games in development atm that are trying for that, but they've been in development for years and are quite frankly no where.

I personally would love to see a game like that succeed, hell, even just get made to completion, but it still seems like creating that necessary framework is beyond the scope of most adult game developers currently.

You're totally right about the current state of the development landscape. There's more games like what you described if you include Japanese titles (although their gameplay and story can be shallow too, but that's a different, perhaps related, issue) and there aren't very many of those either. You're correct in your assessment: there aren't many adult games being developed the "conventional" way.

I don't think it's beyond the capabilities of indie developers though. Or perhaps, that's only one factor of the problem. While it's likely that experienced developers end up working for larger companies, who aren't interested in marketing adult games, there's also plenty of successful indie games made by small teams and individuals.

See, I brought up the Bethesda and Sims in-engine adult mods as just an example. Devs don't have to start with creating fully 3D open-world games with interactive environments. In fact, my preferred genres are city-building and town/colony management simulations, which vary greatly in graphics and mechanics; but that's besides the point. My point is devs are perhaps being too ambitious with their use of bare game engines without the necessary development tools.

I think we've inadvertently found a possible solution by discussing this. What we actually need is people making middleware frameworks and collaborating with fools. You have to assume big game studios are keeping this stuff close to their chest. But, there has to be similar or simpler development frameworks made for open-source and licensed game engines somewhere, as opposed to only proprietary shit for bespoke studio engines. I mean, modders have found ways to hack those together as well, but that doesn't help devs who are making brand new games.

Conclusions:

• Talented, experienced developers are unlikely to make adult games for various reasons. I still think this isn't the main part of the problem.
• Players are used to seeing more 'complete' games made with highly specialized game engines, and this creates feedback loops, both positive and negative.
• There's a lack of middleware development tools and frameworks, OR devs haven't found them since they're only familiar with ones for the engines popular here.
• Some developers are either too ambitious or stuck in a box when utilizing whatever game engine.

 

[lawfullame]

I have no problem with any engine. I just don't like it when someone uses a wrong engine for a certain type of game. For example, to play a VN using unity, it must be a really good and unique VN. Why would I play some average VN using Unity if it doesn't have a rollback, a convenient and fast save and load system, hiding the UI, skipping text I've seen before, etc., when there are hundreds of Ren'Py VNs? Well, I think I've seen some Unity VN that contained these features, but then I think the developer is wasting effort trying to make Unity VN look like Ren'Py VN. Why not use Ren'Py instead of trying to implement Ren'Py features in Unity?

Unity and Unreal are great for 3D games, but usually a terrible choice for visual novels. Ren'Py's user comfort for VNs is incomparably greater In most cases.

RPGM games in 90% of cases waste too much of my time, because the ratio of time spent walking and other content is terrible. RPGM makes sense when a lot of the elements on the maps bring some meaningful interaction but adult games using RPGM this way are rare.

 

[Donjoe81]

I´m not a dev so I can only talk from a gamers' perspective.
I started to ignore some games based on their engine like RPG Maker, Unity, Godot or even Html games.

RPG Maker games often times have the issues that the RPG elements don´t seem important at all and are just grindy filler when the VN is more important. You also have no options like the skip function which can be really annoying.

Unity: VN games often times don´t need that engine and could’ve just been made on ren´py and it would also be easier to make it more compatible on other devices.

Godot engine games seem to have lots of annoying bugs and crashes which is why I completely ignore games with that engine for now.

 

[Morte Dara]

I just prefer using Unity because I want to make an open world game that will use different gameplay mechanics. It is easy to implement on Unity and the user interface is so clean.