Ask HN: What Engine Is Better for games: Unity, Unreal or Unigine? - OrphanDragon
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krapp
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
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
AFAIK Slay the Spire is running in JVM.

~~~
castlecrasher2
Yeah STS is a pretty interesting case because it's a game from a Java dev who
wanted his own thing. So he programmed it by hand (using libraries like
LibGDX, of course). The part that impressed me the most is how he mentions he
spent two weeks getting the played cards part working, and it shows; I've
played a few "card game" video games and STS' has, by far, the best and most
fluid playing. As in, when I click and let go it does exactly as I would
expect it to.

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everyone
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
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.

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kd5bjo
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
We are the team of developers, actually and we are trying to create game like
Dual Universe but more in a fantasy world...

~~~
r41nbowdash
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
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_...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/261570/Ori_and_the_Blind_Forest/)

~~~
r41nbowdash
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...](http://dcgi.felk.cvut.cz/projects/pacman-benchmark/thesis-
compressed.pdf)

~~~
esistgut
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
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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opless
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

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bitL
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
> 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?

~~~
pjmlp
Bleeding edge.

Since DirectX 10 they have the tradition of being one of earliest supporting
new DX versions.

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bbayer
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.

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

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v4n4d1s
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
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
Sounds like "Open World", then you might also want to take a look at
Improbables "Spatial OS" \- they raised ~550 mio.

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jason_slack
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.

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philippz
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)

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moron4hire
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.

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thexa4
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
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.

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huffmsa
Source 2

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sanatgersappa
Defold.

~~~
OrphanDragon
isn't it for 2d only or am I missing something?

