Unreal Engine would be nice. It is so much smoother, crisper and less limited than Unity. But if you really want to stretch your imagination legs... EGS built on the Decima engine. With that thought alone, EGS on Unreal becomes 10,000 times more likely.
Unreal is an just an Engine. Its does not make the game creation fundamentally different. Just watching a nice enclosed demo scene with some graphical gimmicks does not translate directly to an open world sandbox game. Especially not when the landscapes are procedurally generated and not handcrafted in an editor. There is nothing "smoother". A "smooth" game is mostly due to the shaders used, and for the performance: the skill of the programmers, the technical art, the scope of the project ... and your computer. Where Unreal has advantages is for really large productions (PC and consoles), and the related workflow. And for hobby developers that slap something together, it has some nicer looking Defaults. But that nothing that cant be done in Unity also.
Well Unreal has Nanite and Lumen which would both be game changers for a game like this. Unity doesn't have anything close to it, as far as I'm aware. Plus the recent announcement from Unity puts any Unity game's future in question as it's entirely possible Unity based games will no longer be able to use new versions of Unity to create games, assuming old versions even remain available for licensing. Empyrion and other older games will probably be fine as long as they don't update Unity, but no legitimate game will be able to make use of the latest versions of Unity due to this merger.
Yeah, I am still shocked to hear that Unity and Ironsource are merging. Nothing quite gets you more hyped for the future than learning Unity is merging with a known malware creator..... For those that don't know Ironsource is the ones that created InstallCore which is one of the most well known malware installers there is. Future is looking bright (sarcasm). I see nothing good about this merger at all, IMO. Even if it remains business as usual with Unity after the merger I will never trust them again if this goes through.
Lol, yeah... several times in the past I had to halt the antivirus to install Empyrion That will just get even worse....
While it is true, both Unity and Unreal are engines, there are some fundamental differences. Most engines, like Unity, are additive, meaning the world is a vast, empty place, in which a player character will simply fall forever. Unreal differs, in that it is subtractive. The world is a solid place, and everything must be "cut out". This has some inherent advantages - no "tearing" issues, or "holes", as we have seen from time to time in EGS, where you can faill into a hole in the map. The workflow is also quite different. UE was created in 1998 Unity was created in 2005 UE is sn older engine, which has simply had more time for revision and optimization, and has been done quite well. Unity is getting there, and has also come quite a ways since it first appeared on the scene. While both do have their limitations, UE generally speaking, is more flexible, with a greater array of options ready-to-go, whereas Unity, while it does have a very large selection of modules, does not have quite the same level of options without either addtional purchases or additional coding time. It has also been my experience that there is a certain "feel" to games, especially finished, released versions, and games built on Unreal "feel" smoother, less rigid, and more fluid. Unity feels a little stiffer, less "analog", and while neither of these are, in and of themselves, bad, it does make a difference in the final feel of the game.
Since Unreal Engine 3 (UDK 2011 and up) the world space starts up empty, no need to carve out an empty space to add stuff anymore.
The reason players might fall though a hole are collision issues due to too fast movement, intersecting colliders, terrain chunks not loaded, floating point imprecision when far from the origin, bugs in the movement code, altered colliders not updated in time etc. That can happen in Unreal also. And the "feel" of a game: that wholly depends on the skill of the developers. A small hobby developer or Indy team will not have the time (or skill) to polish everything. So the defaults in Unreal might feel more polished out of the box. But thats since Unreal is very focused on first/third person direct character control games (eg FPS) running on powerful devices (PC, consoles). Unity is much more focused on being a general purpose engine for all types of games, be that a platformer, FPS, strategy game, match-3 or card game, also for a wide range of platforms (mobile, web, PC, consoles) It would be wrong for such an engine to have performance demanding presets, if the game is going to be build for phones. Unreal has a specific usecase, but it would not be a good choice for a small mobile game, and is not custom-engeneered enough to make a game like MSFS2020
I have seen games with terrible performance on UE as well just as I have seen excellently produced games on unity and of course many visa versa. On balance I have to admit I have seen more better looking games and better modelled games on UE, but I feel its down to whether the dev team using each engine has the skills, experience and pride in their work/time to make the effort to do a good job. I do wonder if maybe UE tends to be favoured by real developers with hobby wannabes choosing unity. To many of them do tend to look and play like school science projects and in this respect unity engine seems to be behind more of these. These days I think it isnt really helped when most of our gaming experience tends to be with partially done so called early access games where there is the understood excuse of poor fit and finish during that phase, but often that never changes when they decide one day out of the blue to take it out of early access. Looking over my current steam library - most of the games are indies in early access and some (like this one) are not but damn well should be. That said, the quality of even the few AAA games that I have bothered with in recent years has been utterly appalling on initial release to the point where I dont trust any of them to create a playable release any more until they have had a couple of years to bug fix / abandon it.
