Switching Game Engines Halfway Through Development 127
An anonymous reader writes: Third-party game engines are wonderful creations, allowing developers to skip a lengthy and complicated part of the development process and spend more time on content creation. But each engine has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be apparent at the beginning of a project. If you realize halfway through that your game doesn't work well on the engine you picked, what do you do? Jeff LaMarche describes how he and his team made the difficult decision to throw out all their work with Unity and start over with Unreal. He describes some technical limitations, like Unity's 32-bit nature, and some economic ones, like needing to pay $500 per person for effective version control. He notes that Unreal Engine 4 has its problems, too, but the biggest reason to switch was this: "Our team just wasn't finding it easy to collaborate. We weren't gelling as a cohesive team and we often felt like the tools were working against us."
Re:Unity is 64 bit now (Score:5, Informative)
Unity has had the ability to create 64bit executables for a while but the editor is still a 32bit program, which can be very limiting if you are developing a large game. A 64bit editor is scheduled for Unity5 and indeed one of the biggest selling points of the new version. There's no release date for Unity5 yet though and I imagine it is at least 6 months out, considering there is at least one more big update to 4.x coming (4.6, which will include the new GUI tools).