6 ms·

Ask HN: What Engine Is Better for games: Unity, Unreal or Unigine?

50 points by OrphanDragon 8y ago

kd5bjo 8y ago
Questions of this kind often boil down to specifics, as the various competitors all have strong and weak points. As such, It will be hard for anyone to answer meaningfully without more context: What kind of game do you want to write, what skills do you currently have, what do you want to learn from this project, etc.
- OrphanDragon 8y ago
  We are the team of developers, actually and we are trying to create game like Dual Universe but more in a fantasy world...
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Surely the best engine in this case is that one that your developers have the most relevant experience in? Unless you want to add the challenge of learning a new workflow on top of actually building a game.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    I second the other comment. The best engine is going to be the one your devs are familiar with. And if nobody on your team has any prior experience in any engine, that's a huge problem which makes the risk of failure much bigger.
  - r41nbowdash 8y ago
    The main advantage of using Unity is its out of the box support for multiple platforms, and garbage collected runtime, other than that it's slower, and graphics are on the ok-ish side (the best looking Unity game i've seen is Battletech), and i'm not sure about its open-world capabilities (Firewatch and The Long Dark world sections were rather tiny), possibly there's a way around it. It seems that Unreal Engine is a better choice (Mass Effects, for example), but its pure C++ (with lua scripting), which means x3-4 as much of code, and trickier interoperability. I dunno, tough choice. Good luck with your project!
    - calferreira 8y ago
      I don't think graphics are only engine related. This game was made with unity and it looks awesome https://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/Ori_and_the_Blind_Forest/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/Ori_and_the_Blind_...
      - r41nbowdash 8y ago
        Yeah, nice assets can really make a difference, the thing is you can pull twice as much polygons in the same scene with Unreal Engine (oversimplyfing) http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/projects/pacman-benchmark/thesis-compressed.pdf http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/projects/pacman-benchmark/thesis-co...
        esistgut 8y ago
        I would really like to see some more recent tests as Unity before the 2018.x releases had a "ux/easy of use/developer first" approach but they did significant improvements on rendering quality and efficiency on the 2018.x versions.
        r41nbowdash 8y ago
        Technically, they're wrapping a native library, so it's possible to create a benchmark where there's no performance gap whatsoever. The bottleneck is at the intersection of the runtime enviroment with the library, which makes comparison difficult. FWIW it's a good piece of code, and i like it.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - cpv 8y ago
        Not related to the engine, but this one has also some awesome soundtracks. Album on bandcamp, but feels much better in the game: https://garethcoker.bandcamp.com/album/ori-and-the-blind-forest-additional-soundtrack https://garethcoker.bandcamp.com/album/ori-and-the-blind-for...
v4n4d1s 8y ago
There's no simple answer to your question. It all comes down to your use case: Are you trying to learn game development or are you developing the next AAA-Title with hundreds of developers? Which platforms are you targeting? Are you willing to pay for the engine and/or the assets?
- OrphanDragon 8y ago
  If it worth it - I will pay, why not? My goal is performance and we are going to have a pretty big map. Maybe the biggest ever...
  - philippz 8y ago
    Sounds like "Open World", then you might also want to take a look at Improbables "Spatial OS" - they raised ~550 mio.
krapp 8y ago
The one you can afford, run, build the game you want to build, and export to the platform you want to target. Popular games like Undertale and Spelunky were made in Game Maker, FFS. There is no "better or worse" only "more or less appropriate." Also consider Godot. It's open source and you can compile support for multiple scripting languages into it.
- shoo 8y ago
  the game i've enjoyed the most this year is "slay the spire", which is a single player roguelike deck building game. it has a bit of nice art but in terms of whiz-bang graphical effects it only needs to handle a 2D UI for a turn based card game with some bonus effects when actions happen. in this case, the game isn't really about the graphics, it's about the gameplay, which is great. there was another fantastic turn based strategy game released around a decade ago -- "solium infernum" -- i think this was implemented in some kind of commercial multimedia thing (an adobe product?) by one developer. it had a fascinating system of diplomacy and warfare -- each player was a competing prince of hell, and you weren't allowed to just attack people, you had to have an appropriate pretext (e.g. another player had insulted you, or had refused your unreasonable demands to give them tribute) and set limits to how long the war would run for, and declare up front what your goals for the war were (e.g. capture a particular enemy city). it was fascinating game with a great theme, and crazily enough supported multiplayer via play by email. i played a game with some people that was great fun but took about 3 months to complete, with a few occasions where i'd spend hours before taking a turn trying to grind out the different odds to figure out the best tactics for a particular engagement, or if it was worth taking a certain gamble. from a tech perspective, the engine wasn't really worth discussing, but it let one developer implement and ship their vision, and the result was pretty great. edit: there's a pretty good old "programming in the twenty-first century" blog post - "Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program" https://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html (not to argue that either of the games i've mentioned are technically inferior, but the engine tech is entirely secondary to delivering a high quality game with a good experience)
  - chupasaurus 8y ago
    AFAIK Slay the Spire is running in JVM.
zengid 8y ago
I don't know but Unity looks more compelling now that Mike Acton works there: https://youtu.be/p65Yt20pw0g https://youtu.be/p65Yt20pw0g
bitL 8y ago
Unity is easier to learn, Unreal has a cool ecosystem AAA developers love, Unigine has some bleeding edge stuff with great performance not found elsewhere, CryEngine can destroy any GPU you throw at it...
- ratsimihah 8y ago
  > CryEngine can destroy any GPU you throw at it... As in it's so poorly optimized it will eat any GPU, or it can do bleeding edge stuff no GPU can support?
  - mijoharas 8y ago
    I think it's the latter.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Bleeding edge. Since DirectX 10 they have the tradition of being one of earliest supporting new DX versions.
- madeuptempacct 8y ago
  This is the only post that mentioned Unigine and CryEngine - is there a reason for that. I.e. are there significant drawbacks to these compared to the "main" ones?
  - OrphanDragon 8y ago
    I have mentioned UNIGINE cause I've heard that Dual Universe powered by that engine. It isn't free, which seems interesting, cause the best things aren't free. And best things and "widely advertised" and "common" are not necessarily the same
  - bitL 8y ago
    Unigine used to be very expensive, CryEngine difficult to master. In the meantime Unigine got cheaper and there was a lot of work to make CryEngine more accessible, so that might explain popularity of Unity (easy to learn) and Unreal ("golden standard" allowing AAA games with great developer backing).
moron4hire 8y ago
Having good visual assets is far more important to the look than the choice of engine. Having good audio assets is fundamental to making an app feel complete. Pick the engine that uses the programming language you know best.
sanatgersappa 8y ago
Defold.
- OrphanDragon 8y ago
  isn't it for 2d only or am I missing something?
philippz 8y ago
You'll encounter more breaking changes with Unreal while it gives better graphics. For our in-game integrations for STOMT, we have to create a new branch for any new released Unreal version: https://github.com/stomt/stomt-unreal-plugin https://github.com/stomt/stomt-unreal-plugin
thexa4 8y ago
If you want multiplayer you're most likely better of with Unreal. Implementing multiplayer on Unity is possible but relatively tricky to get right. Other than that, it really depends on your team.
- esistgut 8y ago
  Unity is reworking the whole network stack and they did significant investments in this area. So at this point implementing multiplayer using UNET or external libraries is possible and tricky but it is not really a good or future proof idea.
bbayer 8y ago
It really depends on your need, budget and skill set of your colleagues. Unity is easy to learn and provides better support for mobile. Unreal has better rendering capabilities if you want to develop for PC and consoles but has more steep learning curve. I haven't used Unigine but it looks promising for serious games and simulation. So every engine has its pros and cons.
huffmsa 8y ago
Source 2
opless 8y ago
None are 'better', some have workflows subjectively better than others. For example the C++/drag and drop scripting in Unreal I dislike. Where I dislike unity's subscription model, and some of the newer features don't quite work as nicely as they could. (I've been using unity since the early days) CryEngine/Lumberyard looks horrid (IMHO) when I last looked at it. So while YMMV, I'd suggest that you do a "proof of concept/minimal project" that covers some significant features of your game, and get a feel of the workflow, and go with the one that everyone can get along with. .oP
everyone 8y ago
I wish I could dowvote this. Pointless question that for some reason gets asked fruitlessly every day on every game-dev group. If you're asking this question you need to learn more, think more, do the minimum research.
- malux85 8y ago
  Please don't discourage people from asking questions, there's 48 upvotes on this submission and personally I would have liked to come in here and seen a succinct summary and comparison of the engines from a programmers perspective. The hacker news community tends to be more programming/math focused and the summary we get here will likely be unique and insightful.
jason_slack 8y ago
The best game engine is the one that YOU feel comfortable with and can learn what you need to to create the game you want. I took one day and tried to make the same game with Unreal, Unity and Cocos2d-x. See which engine I could get the farthest with. It turned out it was Cocos2d-x. (http://cocos2d-x.org http://cocos2d-x.org) If I decide to start a new game in the future I will repeat the same test adding GoDot into the mix and see how I feel about each one.

50 points by OrphanDragon 8y ago

Questions of this kind often boil down to specifics, as the various competitors all have strong and weak points. As such, It will be hard for anyone to answer meaningfully without more context: What kind of game do you want to write, what skills do you currently have, what do you want to learn from this project, etc.

OrphanDragon 8y ago
We are the team of developers, actually and we are trying to create game like Dual Universe but more in a fantasy world...
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Surely the best engine in this case is that one that your developers have the most relevant experience in? Unless you want to add the challenge of learning a new workflow on top of actually building a game.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  I second the other comment. The best engine is going to be the one your devs are familiar with. And if nobody on your team has any prior experience in any engine, that's a huge problem which makes the risk of failure much bigger.
- r41nbowdash 8y ago
  The main advantage of using Unity is its out of the box support for multiple platforms, and garbage collected runtime, other than that it's slower, and graphics are on the ok-ish side (the best looking Unity game i've seen is Battletech), and i'm not sure about its open-world capabilities (Firewatch and The Long Dark world sections were rather tiny), possibly there's a way around it. It seems that Unreal Engine is a better choice (Mass Effects, for example), but its pure C++ (with lua scripting), which means x3-4 as much of code, and trickier interoperability. I dunno, tough choice. Good luck with your project!
  - calferreira 8y ago
    I don't think graphics are only engine related. This game was made with unity and it looks awesome https://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/Ori_and_the_Blind_Forest/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/Ori_and_the_Blind_...
    - r41nbowdash 8y ago
      Yeah, nice assets can really make a difference, the thing is you can pull twice as much polygons in the same scene with Unreal Engine (oversimplyfing) http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/projects/pacman-benchmark/thesis-compressed.pdf http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/projects/pacman-benchmark/thesis-co...
      - esistgut 8y ago
        I would really like to see some more recent tests as Unity before the 2018.x releases had a "ux/easy of use/developer first" approach but they did significant improvements on rendering quality and efficiency on the 2018.x versions.
        r41nbowdash 8y ago
        Technically, they're wrapping a native library, so it's possible to create a benchmark where there's no performance gap whatsoever. The bottleneck is at the intersection of the runtime enviroment with the library, which makes comparison difficult. FWIW it's a good piece of code, and i like it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - cpv 8y ago
      Not related to the engine, but this one has also some awesome soundtracks. Album on bandcamp, but feels much better in the game: https://garethcoker.bandcamp.com/album/ori-and-the-blind-forest-additional-soundtrack https://garethcoker.bandcamp.com/album/ori-and-the-blind-for...

v4n4d1s 8y ago

There's no simple answer to your question. It all comes down to your use case: Are you trying to learn game development or are you developing the next AAA-Title with hundreds of developers? Which platforms are you targeting? Are you willing to pay for the engine and/or the assets?

OrphanDragon 8y ago
If it worth it - I will pay, why not? My goal is performance and we are going to have a pretty big map. Maybe the biggest ever...
- philippz 8y ago
  Sounds like "Open World", then you might also want to take a look at Improbables "Spatial OS" - they raised ~550 mio.

krapp 8y ago

The one you can afford, run, build the game you want to build, and export to the platform you want to target. Popular games like Undertale and Spelunky were made in Game Maker, FFS. There is no "better or worse" only "more or less appropriate." Also consider Godot. It's open source and you can compile support for multiple scripting languages into it.

shoo 8y ago
the game i've enjoyed the most this year is "slay the spire", which is a single player roguelike deck building game. it has a bit of nice art but in terms of whiz-bang graphical effects it only needs to handle a 2D UI for a turn based card game with some bonus effects when actions happen. in this case, the game isn't really about the graphics, it's about the gameplay, which is great. there was another fantastic turn based strategy game released around a decade ago -- "solium infernum" -- i think this was implemented in some kind of commercial multimedia thing (an adobe product?) by one developer. it had a fascinating system of diplomacy and warfare -- each player was a competing prince of hell, and you weren't allowed to just attack people, you had to have an appropriate pretext (e.g. another player had insulted you, or had refused your unreasonable demands to give them tribute) and set limits to how long the war would run for, and declare up front what your goals for the war were (e.g. capture a particular enemy city). it was fascinating game with a great theme, and crazily enough supported multiplayer via play by email. i played a game with some people that was great fun but took about 3 months to complete, with a few occasions where i'd spend hours before taking a turn trying to grind out the different odds to figure out the best tactics for a particular engagement, or if it was worth taking a certain gamble. from a tech perspective, the engine wasn't really worth discussing, but it let one developer implement and ship their vision, and the result was pretty great. edit: there's a pretty good old "programming in the twenty-first century" blog post - "Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program" https://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html https://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html (not to argue that either of the games i've mentioned are technically inferior, but the engine tech is entirely secondary to delivering a high quality game with a good experience)
- chupasaurus 8y ago
  AFAIK Slay the Spire is running in JVM.

zengid 8y ago

I don't know but Unity looks more compelling now that Mike Acton works there: https://youtu.be/p65Yt20pw0g https://youtu.be/p65Yt20pw0g

bitL 8y ago

Unity is easier to learn, Unreal has a cool ecosystem AAA developers love, Unigine has some bleeding edge stuff with great performance not found elsewhere, CryEngine can destroy any GPU you throw at it...

ratsimihah 8y ago
> CryEngine can destroy any GPU you throw at it... As in it's so poorly optimized it will eat any GPU, or it can do bleeding edge stuff no GPU can support?
- mijoharas 8y ago
  I think it's the latter.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Bleeding edge. Since DirectX 10 they have the tradition of being one of earliest supporting new DX versions.
madeuptempacct 8y ago
This is the only post that mentioned Unigine and CryEngine - is there a reason for that. I.e. are there significant drawbacks to these compared to the "main" ones?
- OrphanDragon 8y ago
  I have mentioned UNIGINE cause I've heard that Dual Universe powered by that engine. It isn't free, which seems interesting, cause the best things aren't free. And best things and "widely advertised" and "common" are not necessarily the same
- bitL 8y ago
  Unigine used to be very expensive, CryEngine difficult to master. In the meantime Unigine got cheaper and there was a lot of work to make CryEngine more accessible, so that might explain popularity of Unity (easy to learn) and Unreal ("golden standard" allowing AAA games with great developer backing).

moron4hire 8y ago

Having good visual assets is far more important to the look than the choice of engine. Having good audio assets is fundamental to making an app feel complete. Pick the engine that uses the programming language you know best.

sanatgersappa 8y ago

Defold.

OrphanDragon 8y ago
isn't it for 2d only or am I missing something?

philippz 8y ago

You'll encounter more breaking changes with Unreal while it gives better graphics. For our in-game integrations for STOMT, we have to create a new branch for any new released Unreal version: https://github.com/stomt/stomt-unreal-plugin https://github.com/stomt/stomt-unreal-plugin

thexa4 8y ago

If you want multiplayer you're most likely better of with Unreal. Implementing multiplayer on Unity is possible but relatively tricky to get right. Other than that, it really depends on your team.

esistgut 8y ago
Unity is reworking the whole network stack and they did significant investments in this area. So at this point implementing multiplayer using UNET or external libraries is possible and tricky but it is not really a good or future proof idea.

bbayer 8y ago

It really depends on your need, budget and skill set of your colleagues. Unity is easy to learn and provides better support for mobile. Unreal has better rendering capabilities if you want to develop for PC and consoles but has more steep learning curve. I haven't used Unigine but it looks promising for serious games and simulation. So every engine has its pros and cons.

huffmsa 8y ago

Source 2

opless 8y ago

None are 'better', some have workflows subjectively better than others. For example the C++/drag and drop scripting in Unreal I dislike. Where I dislike unity's subscription model, and some of the newer features don't quite work as nicely as they could. (I've been using unity since the early days) CryEngine/Lumberyard looks horrid (IMHO) when I last looked at it. So while YMMV, I'd suggest that you do a "proof of concept/minimal project" that covers some significant features of your game, and get a feel of the workflow, and go with the one that everyone can get along with. .oP

everyone 8y ago

I wish I could dowvote this. Pointless question that for some reason gets asked fruitlessly every day on every game-dev group. If you're asking this question you need to learn more, think more, do the minimum research.

malux85 8y ago
Please don't discourage people from asking questions, there's 48 upvotes on this submission and personally I would have liked to come in here and seen a succinct summary and comparison of the engines from a programmers perspective. The hacker news community tends to be more programming/math focused and the summary we get here will likely be unique and insightful.

jason_slack 8y ago

The best game engine is the one that YOU feel comfortable with and can learn what you need to to create the game you want. I took one day and tried to make the same game with Unreal, Unity and Cocos2d-x. See which engine I could get the farthest with. It turned out it was Cocos2d-x. (http://cocos2d-x.org http://cocos2d-x.org) If I decide to start a new game in the future I will repeat the same test adding GoDot into the mix and see how I feel about each one.