The big issue, in addition to speed, I had with UBT was how difficult it was to debug when it did the wrong thing. Often this was when having to adopt new Xcode versions, where CMake gave a lot of escape hatches to adapt it whereas UBT required spelunking.
At some points, there’s multiple layers of historic cruft that just seem arcane.
Last year, epic released a video where an engineer went through it and even they hit points where they said: “I have no idea what this area of code does”
No disagreements there. Spelunking is a great word for it, but spelunking is a requirement for most "deep" unreal engine development. On the other hand, its incredibly empowering to switch your ide to build UnrealBuildTool, and put "My project Development Win64" as the arguments and be able to debug the build tool there and then to see what it's actually doing.
That’s true. I should give it a go again now that Rider is available. It’s been a huge QoL improvement in the rest of my Unreal/Unity development work.
At some points, there’s multiple layers of historic cruft that just seem arcane.
Last year, epic released a video where an engineer went through it and even they hit points where they said: “I have no idea what this area of code does”