I am very sad because a few days ago the SDK I was using called Marmalade was announced to be shutting down. I was using that SDK to bring my game to the iOS and Android platforms with great ease.
I am considering switching to Unreal Engine 4, however I have 0 experience working with it. How simple would it be to port my C++/OpenGL codebase to it?
I know there is a million ways to work with unreal, like blueprints and so on, but let's say I already have an engine, what steps would I take to port it?
If anyone could provide a rough step by step process of how you would do it and possibly link me to some learning materials I would be very greatful!
Thanks all
The question is too broad but I'll try to answer it anyway.
The low level part of your engine (input, rendering, serialization, file operations, etc) is taken care of by UE4. You pretty much won't be able to use parts of your engine in that regard.
GUI is also something that you are going to have to remake the UE4 way.
Your gameplay logic can be reused. But UE4 has its own approach for gameplay handling as well so you should familiarize yourself with it. Blueprints are very powerful and to use it you gonna have to carefully go through all of your gameplay classes, reparent them from UE4 basic classes (UObject, AActor, AController etc), then mark methods and class members with UFUNCTION and UPROPERTY so it would be exposed to Blueprints.
I would recommend to try making a simple project to get a hang of how things are done in UE4 and only then to try to reimplement your game in UE4. UE4 has a good documentation so study it.
I personally had an experience to switch from a different engine to UE4 and it took our team around 4 month, but our project is big. We pretty much used none of the code from our old engine. We followed the same approaches and same logic, but we pretty much reimplemented everything.