UnityUnrealInvestigation.txt

Documentation and Learning:
	Unity:
		Very detailed documentation with C# functions and exmaples
		Tons of youtube tutorials for just about everything
	Unreal:
		Documentation is usually either in C++ entirely, or in blueprints entirely and can be annoying to find what you
		want. People online reccommend looking through the engine's source code to understand some things.
		Tons of youtube tutorials for just about everything
	Unity wins
	

Performance:
	Data oriented design:
		Unity: DOTS - Farther along in development, more usage and stability
		Unreal: has Mass Entity System - Not as far along, but it exists and is being worked on.
	Unity wins

	Optimization/Auto-LOD: Optimizing polygons by automatically applying LOD based on camera distance to a mesh.
		Unity: Nano-Tech, not sure if its fully released or what, but it looks decent.
		Unreal: Nanite, highly developed and well optimized, one of the selling points of UE5
	Unreal wins

	Lighting:
		Unity: HDRP
		Unreal: Lumen
	No clear winner, both look really nice depending on the scene

	Graphics:
		Unity: URP, BuiltIn, and HDRP
			URP optimizes performance, built for platforms where performance is critical
			BuiltIn is a balance of both URP and HDRP, but has mostly been phased out
			HDRP optimized visuals and is built for high performance hardware
			The pipelines support DirectX11 and 12, Metal (macOS), and OpenGL Core
		Unreal: DirectX11 and DirectX12
			Very high quality, built for high performance hardware
	No clear winner, depends on the usage

	Code Speed:
		Unity: C#
			Unity has access to interesting features like IL2CPP which compiles C# into C++, then to machine code
			Unity also has the Burst Compiler which can greatly improve code, but comes at the drawback of
				requiring that you use a subset of C# (A SMALL SUBSET)
		Unreal: C++
			Fairly standard
	No clear winner. Unreal5 uses C++17 which has lots of modern C# features, and Unity has many features
	to reduce any drawbacks from C#.
			

Ease of Use:
	Unity: Unity's flavor of C# is fairly straightforward and easy to use.
	Unreal: Unreal's flavor of C++ is pretty complicated, however they also have Blueprints
		Blueprints make coding very easy, but might come at a fairly large performance cost.
No clear winner

Compatability:
	Platforms:
		Both are fairly comparable Linux, Windows, MacOS, Mobile (Mobile might be better in Unity), etc
	No clear winner

	VR:
		Both have solid VR support however Unity is used widely in the VR space with games like
		VRChat being built on Unity, therefore there is tons more documentation and resources
	Unity wins

Developer Tools:
	Visual Studio:
		Unity: One can install Unity tools for visual studio in the VS installer.
			You can do mixed C#/C++ debugging to step from C# code to a C++ dll
		Unreal: One can install the "C++ game development" kit in the VS installer.
No clear winner