I'm normally skeptical of tech demos, but normally they don't actually talk about the tech. Assuming the actual promises aren't misleading, this is extremely impressive.
> Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.
Unity still has a big edge on usability. Unreal is very much a AAA tool: you have to use C++, all the built-in systems have a much steeper learning curve, etc. Even as a professional dev who's tried a few times to get into it for fun, it's just too much headache for my level of project. Whereas I can whip something together in Unity really easily. All that said, this definitely widens the gap for actual studios. If you have the time and know-how to use Unreal, you have even less reason to consider Unity now.
For a non-programmer getting into games, C++ isn't that much larger leap than C#. Also, as others said, you have blueprints. They're not bad - though hopefully there will be some investments made into ergonomics of their use.
Which kind? Most of the memory problems (in particular leaks and null pointers) happen just as much in managed languages, so you'll have your fair share of those bugs in C# games as well.
Trying to find a GC-related crash on a stale pointer that is only reproducible in a Shipping build on a single platform is fun (depending on your definition of fun)
(Shipping in UE4 means release mode with full optimization enabled, most logging & profiling stripped out, etc)
That's not entirelly true, there are for instance Python bindings, and I think some work exists on bindings for other languages. I just think they don't always have a lot of support until a case exists where it ends up being really valuable. Film studios in the case of Python.
Unreal's Python integration is incredible. I made some modifications to it at work to run a version of WinPython (both for loose scripts outside the engine and pip access)
It's great for complex asset pipelines and quick one-off editor scripts, at least in my experience.
The only thing that felt a bit wonky to me was attempting to use bitflag enums.
I looked at unity and unreal 4 before starting to learn an engine. Unreal is great, but the massive amount of tutorials and documentation is why I started with unity. I really hope unreal 5 can do something similar in the distant future. Before unreal 6 is released.
> Not sure how Unity can keep up with this.
Unity still has a big edge on usability. Unreal is very much a AAA tool: you have to use C++, all the built-in systems have a much steeper learning curve, etc. Even as a professional dev who's tried a few times to get into it for fun, it's just too much headache for my level of project. Whereas I can whip something together in Unity really easily. All that said, this definitely widens the gap for actual studios. If you have the time and know-how to use Unreal, you have even less reason to consider Unity now.