Regarding the editor, unreal is pretty amazing. It really shines in the tools department. Check out the landscape editor, materials editor, and animation tools on youtube. Pretty fantastic stuff.

The game engine itself is better than unity in almost every way with a few big exceptions:

1) multiplayer map size. unity can pretty easily support large online worlds 2) support for mobile/tablets. unity is the dominant platform on those devices. 3) community support. unity has a much larger community, better documentation, and a much more populous online store (though unreal is catching up)

According to this thread, as of version 4.6, the maximum supported multiplayer map size out of the box is 20km x 20km. Is this the limitation you were referring to? That wouldn't accommodate an MMORPG or Minecraft, but otherwise seems quite big.

Of course, what matters more is what you do in that 20km, but it's also a limit coupled tightly with distant mesh performance and float accuracy issues.

    Regarding the editor, unreal is pretty amazing. 

...and that's a big IF. The editor ran like absolute rubbish originally on macs, to the point where it was actually unusable.

They've done a lot of work on that, but it's still miles away from the unity editor.

I think it's really hard to argue the unreal editor is better; it's a lot slower, but it does have some nice tools.

You also can't create extensions as easily (if at all?) as you can for unity.

As you say, they're two different things, and the unreal editor is actually not bad... but if you were to compare them, the unity one would certainly rank more highly.

Now, the multiplayer map size limitation seems odd nowadays.

I believe there's also some hard coded limits around the number of simultaneous players (16?), though it seems fairly easy to work around. Again, not sure about performance.

Evaluation of software, be it library, framework, sdk or a whole engine+tools is much much harder than writing actual software, especially when royalties, copyright and other legal issues are involved.

In reality there is no way of knowing what would do your best, so you can look at specific bad parts and take that into decision making, for example, for what I've heard (and possibly it could be wrong):

- Unity is not really good when lots of people have to edit the same files, merging is not really good, and the server option does not really cut it. (For example Quake's engine .map text files are not so bad to merge in cvs/svn/p4/etc.)

- Unreal had always had the bad "fame" of 30-only fps game, while this is okay for certain shooters, or 3rd person games, it would've never worked for "Call of Duty" where the brand was simply established with 60fps. To some people this might sound a bit pedantic, but 60fps matters! (And >60fps does not really, unless you need to swap frames for a 3D VR device of sort)

That to be said both engines surely have really good parts. From little I've explored in Unity, what got me first was the ability to extend the editor while it's running - I could add menus with functionality while it was running - this is super cool.

Unreal on the other side is well known engine with lots of people from the AAA game industry familiar with it, and while the editor might seem completely foreign to people starting in the game industry, it's pretty well known by many others (I guess they don't advertise it much).

The hidden gem of Unreal for me, was it's internal UI system, which could be used as a separate project - it has docking, controls, etc. - it might be a good replacement for Qt, MFC, wxWidgets, etc.

I can think a lot of games that are ue1-4 that are not bound by fps limits at all.

Editor in UE4 is streamlined from what UE3 was. Its now quite easy in the end.

Now I'm a generalist, that ended up as tools engineer, so I might be talking complete non-sense, but again when I've talked to anyone from my previous studio or others that was the overall sentiment - Unreal can't give us 60fps unless Epic are directly involved and custom version for a game is done.

(Obviously you can do 60fps always, but it may not be up to the visual quality of other 60fps games).

Looking at UE4 and blueprints, it seems that they've understood their weak point and worked aggressively on fixing it. So it could be that UE4 would deliver 60fps just fine matching visual quality of other products at the same fps. (aaah, now someone would add - what about resolution? heh, I dunno - I think upscaling is just fine, but then you have all these crazy journalists digging up... frame rate is much more important though)

I am confused, so is Unreal unable to do 60 Hz?

Do you have any experience with the UI system or know about any projects using it? I wonder what Gotchas or limitations may exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFZCp4xsPmo : Unreal Engine 4 Blueprints in Solus (1h)

Of course that can be interpreted many ways (Are there active email lists? Are there active forums elsewhere?) and raises other questions (What's the best way to learn a tool/technology?) but it's at least one useful metric for checking in on my FOMO.

I really like this easy 5% above X model. Seems fair enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6PQ19BEE24&t=15s

How could a company so successful not turn profit?

[0]: http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/06/24/crytek-reportedly-in-...

I recommend everyone interested in the two try both. I personally prefer Unreal Engine, but everyone is different.

Unreal Engine is also moving quite quickly, adding new features, marketplace content, improving the UI, etc.

Unreal Engine's built in networking systems are suitable for 64 players, maybe 128 tops. It's replaceable, but I wouldn't recommend delving into that.

I will say this though, if you have 1 C++ programmer with UE4, they can create functionality not builtin to the engine and expose it via Blueprint (the visual scripting language) for non-programmers to use. Blueprint is a fantastic and very easy to use tool. Take a look at the forums to see the incredible things people have built with ZERO programming knowledge.

And talking about Blueprint code is done through screenshots https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?60637-Unable-... I guess there is still no auto generated text representation you could copy paste.

https://mono-ue.github.io/about.html

If you want to code in C# it is the primary language for Unity, and a commercial third party unsupported add on for UE4.

[0] At least that is how I read the whole situation

I love the way their engine renders water and had ideas for it.