If you've been here for a while, you know this blog as the place for Unreal beginner posts. Every Sunday one stumbling block: casting, soft references, save games, the GameMode question. Those posts stay. They move into their own Unreal Engine tab, and the main page now belongs to something new: Wicked Engine.

This post is the why.

Where it started

Like most people, I started with the samples. Open the Third Person template, press Play, and a character runs across the screen that you didn't build. That moment hooks you. Then you open the Character Blueprint and find a graph you don't understand yet, and you start pulling it apart node by node.

That's the path this blog followed. Every post was a problem I had run into myself, usually more than once. Somewhere along the way the problems turned into tools: 13 Blueprint plugins on Fab, from FoxSound to FoxEasySave. Each one exists because I built the same thing by hand for the third time and had enough.

The part nobody puts in a tutorial

Unreal gives you an enormous amount. It also decides an enormous amount for you. Over time I noticed how much of my day went into working around the engine instead of with it:

  • waiting for the editor to start, for shaders to compile, for a C++ change to hot-reload or not
  • reading forum threads to guess what a system does, because the answer sits somewhere in millions of lines I'd never realistically read
  • building plugins against several engine versions, each with its own renamed APIs

None of that is a complaint about Unreal. It's a huge, capable engine made for huge teams. I'm one person, and I want to understand what my game is doing when it renders a frame.

Then came Wicked

Wicked Engine is an open-source C++ engine under the MIT license, written largely by one developer, Turánszki János. It's small enough to read and fast enough to take seriously: modern rendering, DX12 and Vulkan, path tracing, a built-in editor, Lua scripting.

The test I gave it was a hard one. I wanted to bring the world of Two Worlds, a game from 2007, into a modern engine, read straight from the original game archives: terrain, houses, light, characters. In Unreal that would have meant importers, conversion pipelines and a lot of asset wrangling. In Wicked I wrote the importer directly into my fork of the engine, because the engine is just code I can open.

Within days the hero was running through the original landscape. Combat, enemies with AI, dungeons, grass, water. Not because Wicked does all of that out of the box, but because nothing stood between me and the place where it had to happen.

What changed day to day

I read instead of guessing. When lighting looks wrong, I open the shader. When something crashes, I step into the engine code and see why. The answer is in a file, not in a five-year-old forum thread.

Iteration got faster. Shaders compile at runtime. Change one, call ReloadShaders() from Lua, and the new version is on screen without restarting the editor.

Everything is code. I added a small bridge to the editor: Lua over a local socket. Scripts can load scenes, move the camera, spawn units and take screenshots. I test whole features without clicking through a single menu, and I can repeat every test exactly.

I own the engine. My fork has DLSS support, SpaceMouse navigation and a complete Two Worlds importer. When I need something, I build it. Nobody has to merge it first.

What it costs

Fair is fair: Wicked has no Marketplace with thousands of assets, no Blueprint graph, and far fewer tutorials. If you want visual scripting and a huge community, Unreal is still the better start. You need to be comfortable with C++ and Lua, and you have to build more yourself.

For me that trade is the point. I'd rather build something small that I understand completely than assemble something big that I only half understand.

What happens on this blog now

  • The main page covers Wicked Engine: the fork, the Two Worlds port, rendering, tooling and the mistakes along the way.
  • All Unreal posts stay where they are, in the Unreal Engine tab. Links keep working.
  • The FoxToolkit plugins are still on Fab.

Next up: a first look under the hood of the fork.

— Marco