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

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

#21
post #4

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.

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

(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)

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

#22
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.

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

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are the team of developers, actually and we are trying to create game like Dual Universe but more in a fantasy world...

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…

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_...

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

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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_...

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-co...

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

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are the team of developers, actually and we are trying to create game like Dual Universe but more in a fantasy world...

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…

There is no out-of-box support of Lua in UE4.

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

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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_...

[deleted]

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

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

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-co...

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.

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

#29
post #6

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...

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?

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

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-co...

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.

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.

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