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Is Opengl worth it (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been going through a course on udemy and learning unreal engine first time ever consistently for the past month, but haven't finished a game just yet, and I don't think I care enough to put any effort on anything other than gamedev. It has been my passion since like 6 years, that's why I left my old job as an Ops engineer; should I continue and work on different projects simultaneously (opengl and unreal) or just stick to one. FYI, I'm not employed atm and would hope to work on gamedev professionally. I appreciate any advice to build my portfolio or any keypoints to get better at gamedev.

tl;dr would learning unreal and opengl simultaneously benefit me to get hired in a gamdev studio or should i stick to unreal and finish some games first?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

OpenGL has much more permissive licenses so you can sell a finished game without licencing fees. From a technical standpoint, OpenGL is much more general, while unreal makes a lot more assumptions about your game.

Unreal tries to be a "Instant game, just add content" including almost everything you need, but that makes things very annoying whenever you violate one of its assumptions about the game. OpenGL is just a graphics library, its job is to quickly draw 3d polygons to a 2d screen, allowing fast shading. (texturing, lighting, etc) With OpenGL, it is your job to provide the polygons, to animate them, to nicely light them etc.

If you are making a standard FPS or side scroller, unreal will be easier, but as soon as you start doing weird stuff, like massive procedurally generated worlds, fully destructible environments, portals, lighting at massive scales (millions of light sources, like in Terraria or Minecraft) OpenGL is often easier.

TLDR: OpenGL does less handholding then Unreal, but you do weird stuff, you will not have to fight it unlike Unreal