Unreal Adventures - Part 3

26 Mar 2020

I woke up ready to get after Unreal Engine 4 this morning and when I entered my office there it was, ready and waiting for me! I was so happy, even though it was only a small measure of success. I completed creating a simple blueprint project as prescribed in the install document, ran it, and rejoiced! Everything was working. So I shut down the engine.

Then I started it up.

And…it…took…forever…to…start…back…up….

So I shut it down and started it up. Again, it takes about 5 minutes to start up. This is not ideal performance, but I decided I can worry about perfomance later, I’m ready to get into the course material. I spent a couple hours working through some of the course and I got a good feel for how the rest of the course is going to go if I stick with Linux.

The bottom line is this: I don’t think this is going to work for me.

Here are my reasons why I won’t sick with it:

1. The perfomance on my system is terrible. This is not opinion, this is a fact. I should have done some searching around the internet to find out what other peoples experiences with running the engine on Linux have been, becaue it is universally agreed that UE4 performance on Linux is garbage. The performance problem is more than just annoying it actually hinders work a great deal. I’ve used the Unity and Godot game engines on Linux and never experienced anything as poor as this. When you work with Linux you get used to quirkiness and certain issues with SDL, but this is different. This feels like there is something wrong with my system and I just don’t have the will to try and figure it out.

2. The integration with CLion (my C++ editor of choice) is bad. It simply doesn’t work. I did get it to work with Visual Studio code so that intellisense worked as expected and I could launch the editor from the engine, but I’m not a fan of VS Code. I pay good money to use CLion, so that was more than mildly disappointing.

3. I worry about wasting time. If the perfomance of the editor is this bad, how bad will a game running on the engine work in Linux. If I am going to make a game, it is going to have to run on Linux. There is a wikipedia page that lists all the professional games written using UE4, and only a few run on Linux. I have no real desire to become a professional game developer, but I am not going to ignore a huge red flag either. There is a reason they aren’t targetting Linux.

I believe that my Unreal Engine 4 adventure has come to an end. This is not the tool for me. As with any good adventure lessons have been learned and knowlege aquired.