Unity vs Unreal

[rado907]

Is this Godot Engine good? For 2D projects. What 2D alternatives are there? Unity added decent 2D capabilities over the last few years, but Unity is commercial. Back in the day Microsoft used to have a package called XNA, but they killed it off. What else is there?

---
Edit: I found a list of engines if anyone is interested:
http://www.slant.co/topics/341/~2d-game-engines
Don't know which ones are good, though.

 

[Destroid]

There are tons of free 2d engines around. I've used Love which is basic but easy to use.

 

[Khorne]

It's true what Hirato said about performance, it's engine specific not game specific.
Any attempts to design a proper strategy game in this engine, have not delivered so far. They all suffer from the same problems.
There is This War of Mine made in unity, might be the only game in this engine that I liked. It isn't a large, complex game, but very resource hungry and demanding.

Never seen similar performance issues with unreal engine games, it might be the fact they made it for PC, not mobile ports.
I've played Might&Magic, Postal, SWAT, Thief, UT, Splinter Cell, Borderlands, Tony Hawk, XCOM, etc.

 

[Destroid]

It's true what Hirato said about performance, it's engine specific not game specific.
Any attempts to design a proper strategy game in this engine, have not delivered so far. They all suffer from the same problems.
There is This War of Mine made in unity, might be the only game in this engine that I liked. It isn't a large, complex game, but very resource hungry and demanding.

Never seen similar performance issues with unreal engine games, it might be the fact they made it for PC, not mobile ports.
I've played Might&Magic, Postal, SWAT, Thief, UT, Splinter Cell, Borderlands, Tony Hawk, XCOM, etc.

How many strategy games have been made in UE? I think the strategy genre will be much more biased towards individual developer ability and budget since the computationally expensive parts of a strategy game are going to be the game logic, areas which cannot be generalised and made efficient by third party engine vendors. It's probably not helped that many devs are using scripting languages to code this part of the game which are slower than the C/C++/ASM used in the old days by a factor of 10 or more, combined with the generally higher complexity of the games.

 

[Alchemist]

Is this Godot Engine good? For 2D projects. What 2D alternatives are there? Unity added decent 2D capabilities over the last few years, but Unity is commercial. Back in the day Microsoft used to have a package called XNA, but they killed it off. What else is there?

---
Edit: I found a list of engines if anyone is interested:
http://www.slant.co/topics/341/~2d-game-engines
Don't know which ones are good, though.

I'm no expert (merely a hobbyist) - but here are my thoughts based on personal experience with some of these:

I think Godot is a strong choice for 2D if you want 100% free and open source, no strings attached. But with some caveats:

• It's still in active development and documentation needs some fleshing out.
• The community is still small - so finding answers to questions and 3rd party resources is not as easy as something like Unity / Unreal / GameMaker who have huge established user bases. What community is there is very active and helpful though.

GameMaker is pretty solid (and many successful 2D indie games were made with it) but the fully functional version is not free, and it's kind of showing its age. I like the IDE of Godot much better than GameMaker's - it just feels more modern and smooth.

Construct is interesting and easy to use - but as far as I know, it's limited to HTML 5 export - no native export. Also you can only use a visual scripting system (kind of like Scratch), it's not based on typed-out code / scripts. Some may prefer this, but I find it faster to type things out. There ends up being a lot of clicking and mousing around to get things done with Construct.

 

[Roguey]

WL2 doesn't run so poorly, except for some sand cloud effect in the Citadel that causes the game to start choking up. oh and Ag Center entrance causes my GPU fan to sound like a jet engine.

I didn't have any performance issues, but Wasteland 2 runs much too hot for what it puts out.

 

[Khorne]

How many strategy games have been made in UE?

There isn't much, only a few. Most RTS devs build their engines in-house for best results.
However, unreal does power a lot of military sims, and is used for training in the army and the airforce.
These things need to be reliable, and I'm sure the engine got through extensive QA testing before they decided to use it.

 

[Davaris]

A question that came up often at the Unreal forums when I was there, was where are UE4's finished indie games? The answer was silence. For me that's a dead give away, an engine's tools are not productive.

As for Unity being slow, it would not be ideal for hyper realism or anything that requires a huge amount of creatures on the screen, because C# obviously. If you don't have those requirements, Unity has everyone else beat on development speed, because tons of indie games have been made with it. So if you're making a top down RPG on your own, with indie graphics and you ever want to finish it, Unity would be something you would look at.

And don't forget to investigate Stingray as well. If Stingray has high performance, usability, shiny graphics and good documentation, it could be the front runner if you're making a game with AAA graphics. If I was teamed up with a Russian artist with insane 3DMax skills, that makes everything themselves & quickly I would look into it, but like that's ever going to happen.

 

[deuxhero]

Wasn't Source 2 supposed to be free with the requirement you release your game on Steam (not even requiring exclusiveness)?

Given Valve Time I doubt it will be released in our lifetime though.

 

[Bester]

where are UE4's finished indie games? The answer was silence

I noticed this as well. With UE4 there are two communities:
- Professional developers who post their questions on UDN, which is behind a pay wall of $25'000 per year. If they can't get an answer there, they just phone Epic basically. And they don't post the solution afterwards.
- The amateur guys who move cubes.

As soon as you start going further than moving cubes around, you encounter problems for which there are no answers on the answerhub or anywhere else. There may be an answer on UDN, but you can't get there. Definitely not indie-friendly.

I've been given access to UDN for a few months. Parsed it and saved it for later. 50000 questions. It's a goldmine of information that is unavailable to the world unfortunately.

 

[rado907]

I have a bit of experience with Unity, and my impression is that when it comes to creating prototypes (or even complete small projects) under extreme constraints, Unity is matchless. You can produce good-looking demos quickly alone.
So for an amateur, or for a very small outfit, Unity is decent.

Never used UE.

 

[Lurker King]

Unity and Unreal are both shit. Underrail's engine is the best!

 

[abija]

Literally 10s on google: http://www.indiedb.com/engines/unre...=t&kw=&released=1&style=&theme=&indie=2&type=
And don't back down now and talk about scope or quality, it's been 8 months since UE4 changed pricing.

 

[Davaris]

http://www.indiedb.com/engines/unre...=t&kw=&released=1&style=&theme=&indie=2&type=
54 indie released
http://www.indiedb.com/engines/unre...=t&kw=&released=1&style=&theme=&indie=2&type=
99 indie released
http://www.indiedb.com/engines/unity/games?filter=t&kw=&released=1&style=&theme=&indie=2&type=
4254 indie released

However Unity has been affordable for a lot longer.

 

[Immortal]

http://www.indiedb.com/engines/unre...=t&kw=&released=1&style=&theme=&indie=2&type=
54 indie released
http://www.indiedb.com/engines/unre...=t&kw=&released=1&style=&theme=&indie=2&type=
99 indie released
http://www.indiedb.com/engines/unity/games?filter=t&kw=&released=1&style=&theme=&indie=2&type=
4254 indie released

If only that meant anything at all - other then.. even a retard can get a ball bouncing in Unity.
More people eat Mcdonalds then a sirloin steak - what's your point?

Also Note: Unreal 4 has twice as many games as Unreal 3 in 6 months under their new license.

Can't help it that people are scared of C++ and would rather make their games in BOO script.

 

[Davaris]

Actually I should say Unreal 3 was cheap for a long time. I remember trying it a few years
ago. Wasn't it free until you made 5 grand? So they don't have any excuses.

If only that meant anything at all - other then.. even a retard can get a ball bouncing in Unity.
More people eat Mcdonalds then a sirloin steak - what's your point?

Also Note: Unreal 4 has twice as many games as Unreal 3 in 6 months under their new license.

Can't help it that people are scared of C++ and would rather make their games in BOO script.

My point is something any moron could understand, but apparently you are having a lot of difficulty. The numbers of completed games are very low.



I also notice the Indie games on Unreal, look just as shit as the Indie games on Unity.

 

[Immortal]

I also notice the Indie games on Unreal, look just as shit as the Indie games on Unity.

You just need your unreal fanboy glasses and they start looking amazing, here borrow mine.

 

[abija]

Actually I should say Unreal 3 was cheap for a long time. I remember trying it a few years
ago. Wasn't it free until you made 5 grand? So they don't have any excuses.

It was 50k, then 25% and it still was highway robbery.
Are you that out of touch with reality to not realize the costs for even a small team?

 

[Davaris]

It was 50k, then 25% and it still was highway robbery.

Yeah that's right, 50 grand + 25% after that which is still dirt cheap, since the vast majority of indie games wouldn't make anywhere near that, especially now.

You would only think it was robbery, if you didn't make the engine yourself. These engines used to go for hundreds of thousands 10 years ago. Now they can't give 'em away. Funny stuff.

Are you that out of touch with reality to not realize the costs for even a small team?

Your time is worth as much as people are willing to pay you for it. Doesn't matter how much you spend making your game. If it doesn't sell, then your time isn't worth much.

 

[Neckbeard Shitlord]

Eh, it's definitely too much money for UE back then. It was pretty ridiculous.

If you are not making something that will make or that you desire to make 50k there is absolutely no benefit to UE.

I used UE2 back in the day and a little of UE 3. There is really not much to make a hubbub about unless you are utterly retarded. It's always been finicky as shit and taking a long ass time to do anything at all, and atrocious on the programming side. I had hoped UE 4 would solve the issues, but instead they doubled down on the idiocy.

Something useful for corporation making AAA crossplatform game is not necessarily going to be any use to someone making a million dollar budget game let alone a zero dollar budget game.

Unreal was never really trying to seriously get money from the indies and hobbyist, they just wanted to stifle any competitors without having to lower the price on the engine to their competitors. Being a customer of someone who doesn't want your business, is just a recipe for disaster.

 

[J1M]

I have a bit of experience with Unity, and my impression is that when it comes to creating prototypes (or even complete small projects) under extreme constraints, Unity is matchless. You can produce good-looking demos quickly alone.
So for an amateur, or for a very small outfit, Unity is decent.

Never used UE.

This is the deceptive problem with Unity. It is very easy to create prototypes. Creating complex systems that are re-usable is a mess. As is creating the type of UI you would require for an RPG.

Unreal Engine 4 is a similar trap. The blueprints workflow is also something that sells well to non-technical executives who see dollar signs when Mark Rein tells them that untrained non-programmers can program levels by dragging around boxes and arrows. This is a complete joke, of course. If no programming knowledge was required, blueprints wouldn't involve casting between different object types, etc.

The older Unreal engines were worth the $300,000 per game. The productivity, documentation, and workflow justified the price tag.

I say these things as the creator of a total conversion mod for UT2003, and a mod for Unreal 3 that changed the armor system to work like Halo. I wanted to use Unreal 4 to build an indie game, but found that it was not a wise choice.

 

[Destroid]

J1M what mod for 2k3?

 

[J1M]

J1M what mod for 2k3?

Sadly, that would involve doxing myself.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I didn't have any performance issues, but Wasteland 2 runs much too hot for what it puts out.

Same with everything else that runs this poor excuse for game engine.

 

[Excidium II]

So the conclusion is both are shit for serious development but for differente reasons?