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Babylon.js
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7
Experiences
Pros
4
Cons
2
Specs
Top
Pro
Small (but helpful) community
Thanks to the increasing popularity of Babylon, it has a growing community of helpful developers. It's easy to find help on their forum.
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Con
Young project
Babylon is quite young compared to many of it's competitors (released in 2013). The community is still somewhat small, however growing quickly.
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Pro
A good amount of easy to understand resources to learn from
Babylon provides a playground where you can explore examples and play with the code. The official documentation offers a wide variety of well-written tutorials on topics from beginner to advanced. Additionally, there are many tutorials written by the community available that you can find by doing a google search.
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Con
Still evolving
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Pro
Great base shader material
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Pro
Actively developed
Babylon has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features.
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Specs
Rendering:
Physically based rendering
Tech:
WebGL1/2 + JavaScript or TypeScript
Special FX:
particles, postprocesses, lens, glow, etc..
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Experiences
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PlayCanvas
All
17
Experiences
Pros
13
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Real-time collaborative online editor tool
PlayCanvas has an online editor that lets you build scenes and work with other people in your team in real-time. This is all done through the web browser without having to install any additional software.
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Con
Private projects are only available for premium users
The free tier does not support any private projects. Instead, all the code and assets will be hosted openly. While not a problem for open source games and for developers who intend to make an open source game, it can be a deal-breaker for teams who want to keep their code and assets private.
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Pro
Powerful assets pipeline
Assets and content delivery is very different on a web platform comparing to native. So PlayCanvas challenges best practices to allow developers decide how their content is delivered and in what form. Async Assets download allows developers to load content as the app goes, instead of asking to download all assets in advance risking users to simply navigate away while staring at loading screens. Formats for 3D models and textures support covers all the popular tools. And the workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping your files right into the Assets Panel. The cloud will do the rest of the hard work optimizing and converting your files into runtime-friendly and compressed data.
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Con
No collision offset
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Pro
Rendering engine runs on the browser
Has an advanced WebGL renderer that runs in the browser.
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Con
Not many tutorials
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Pro
Avoids having to download lots of textures for lightmaps
Lightmaps are an efficient way to deliver lighting to your scenes for a long time. But they come with the cost of large textures. PlayCanvas offers a unique solution for a web platform, it renders lightmaps when an app is loading in runtime. This is faster than downloading MBs of textures. And it's much more convenient: simply switch your light sources to bake, and static models to be lightmapped, and the engine will do the rest.
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Pro
Friendly and active community
PlayCanvas has Feed as homepage for registered users, listing Dev Logs of other developers. This allows to socialize with other developers like yourself in a twitter-like environment. More to that, there is also an active forum, where developers help each other to solve their challenges. Developers of PlayCanvas itself are always looking forward to chat and help the community with any problems that may arise.
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Pro
Integrated physics engine
PlayCanvas lets users integrate physics in their game rather easily, using the powerful Bullet Physics Engine (ammo.js). Should also be noted that the physics engine is delivered as an optional library, so by default being disabled it does not add any extra download size to your apps.
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Pro
Has a free tier
Engine is free for projects under 200MB and with no more than 2 people on a team. The free tier has no engine restrictions. Tools are totally free too. There are no special limiting features behind any paywalls, and free users have all the features as paid users. There are no royalties associated with publishing your apps and games - you've made them, you own them. It is free to publish to playcanvas.com as well, just by one click in Editor.
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Pro
Cross-platform support
PlayCanvas lets you build games that run in mobile, desktop browsers, and native mobile apps. PlayCanvas can even make games that can run inside mobile social media and instant messenger clients like Twitter and WhatsApp.
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Pro
Small app size
The engine itself weighs just under 150Kb, and it's always challenged to stay small. There is no extra weight that has to be carried with your app, just your assets and scripts in a runtime-friendly compressed form. This allows users to engage with your content in matter of seconds, and even just under a second on a good connection.
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Pro
Open source
PlayCanvas is fully open source and is under active development.
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Pro
Very easy to use
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Pro
Loads extremely fast
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Pro
Has hot code reloading
Real-time link between your launched app and the editor allows the developer to preview and play with their scene without needing to refresh the game after every change in the code to see the updated result.
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Specs
Price:
Free to Use & Open Source
Supported platforms:
Any Browser on Windows, MacOS, and Linux
Dev platforms:
Windows, Linux, MacOS
Mobile targets:
Android, iOS
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12
Three.js
All
12
Experiences
Pros
10
Cons
2
Top
Pro
Feature rich
Effects: Anaglyph, cross-eyed and parallax barrier. Scenes: add and remove objects at run-time; fog Cameras: perspective and orthographic; controllers: trackball, FPS, path and more Animation: armatures, forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, morph and keyframe Lights: ambient, direction, point and spot lights; shadows: cast and receive Materials: Lambert, Phong, Standard, smooth shading, textures, PBR and more Shaders: access to full OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) capabilities: lens flare, depth pass and extensive post-processing library Objects: meshes, particles, sprites, lines, ribbons, bones and more - all with Level of detail Geometry: plane, cube, sphere, torus, 3D text and more; modifiers: lathe, extrude and tube Data loaders: binary, image, JSON and scene Utilities: full set of time and 3D math functions including frustum, matrix, quaternion, UVs and more Export and import: utilities to create Three.js-compatible JSON files from within: Blender, openCTM, FBX, Max, and OBJ Support: API documentation, public forum Examples: Over 150 files of coding examples plus fonts, models, textures, sounds and other support files
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Con
Lack of versioning system means that the API changes frequently
Three.js releases a new revision about once a month, and the API can change at any time. This means that a lot of third party help found online is out of date.
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Pro
Well documented
The documentation is detailed, providing clear explanations and code samples of the various features. There are also hundreds of examples available.
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Con
Weak visual tools
Three.js has its own editor but it has been weakly developed. It does not support a lot of engine features.
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Pro
Helpful and friendly community
Thanks to the recently introduced forum, it is easy to find a community of helpful developers.
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Pro
Support for physically based rendering
With the introduction of the new MeshStandardMaterial, three.js support physically based rendering (PBR) out of the box allowing for real life quality material and lighting.
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Pro
Support for most industry standard file formats
Three.js has importers for most of the industry standard files format (obj, mtl, fbx, 3ds, gltf, collada, babylon, playcanvas, stl, vrml, draco and many more), making it easy to author assets in your favourite modelling software and import them for use them in three.js.
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Pro
Actively developed
Three.js has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features.
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Pro
Fallback canvas rendering
Three.js offers a canvas renderer as a fallback when WebGL is not available.
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Pro
Support for special effects and postprocessing
Three.js support many special effects and post-processing filters including particles, lensflare, sprites, real time reflection and refraction and even area based lighting.
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Pro
Hundreds of officially maintained plugins, extensions, control systems, importers, exporters and special effects
The core of the three.js system is kept to a minimum to reduce file size, however there are also hundreds of extensions maintained in the offical repo on github, along with many free textures, fonts and models. You can find them all here.
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Pro
Plenty of tutorials and examples
Three.js official documentation provides plenty of well-written examples with a wide variety of tutorials written by the community available that you can find by doing a google search.
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Experiences
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18
Unity 3D
All
45
Experiences
Pros
22
Cons
22
Specs
Top
Pro
Lots of resources to learn from
Unity3D provides an exhaustive documentation where everything is given a full description supplied by a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions to understand the ins and outs of the engine. In addition there's an ever-growing community that can offer advice to help resolve any situations that may arise. Along with the official Unity resources, there are many high quality (and often free) third party tutorials available.
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Con
Very bad terrain
Native terrain creates a lot of draw calls which is bad for performance.
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Pro
Easy learning curve
The way the editor is structured, by setting scripts on objects, and the use of a high-level language, C#, makes it easy to learn.
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Con
Adds too many features without fixing earlier issues, rapidly increasing number of bugs that will never get fixed
Unity continues to add many new features without fixing earlier issues. Unity is either understaffed, overambitious, or both, resulting in a continual increase of problems and degraded experience across a number of platforms. Many bugs are reported daily and never get addressed, and there are many bugs from previous versions that are never looked at or fixed.
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Pro
Lots of assets can be found in the Asset Store
For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
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Con
Bad UI tools
Way of creating UI is uncomfortable and inconvenient.
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Pro
Very popular
Unity is a proven game engine. It is used by a wide range of developers - from small indies to triple-A companies such as Microsoft, Paradox, Square Enix and Sega.
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Con
Hard to maintain projects due to vendor lock
Unity3D is proprietary, closed source game engine. Unity asks money for features like basic version control support, etc. It is impossible to migrate a game from Unity3D in case performance does not satisfy growing requirements of a project.
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Pro
Allows for rapid prototyping
Unity's modular system and usability allows for quickly developing a prototype of an idea. It has features like drag & drop editing, shaders, animation and other systems already in place to allow diving right into developing a game.
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Con
Asset store is required to replace engine functionality
You will need to, for example, buy an input manager asset off their asset store in order to replace their own terrible inaccessible input manager.
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Pro
Great community
Great Community support through the Forums and Unity Answers.
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Con
Moderators on forums are sometimes arrogant
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Pro
Great editor
The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time as well as progress gameplay frame by frame. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
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Con
Weak memory management
.Net libraries are slowing it down, memory safety is compromised, classes have to be implemented to manage objects in memory, like object pooling.
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Pro
Can be used for free
As long as the development company makes $100k or less, it can use the free version of Unity to release games.
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Con
Garbage collection can't be turned off
Given the use of C#, the memory control is out of the developers control, this can be good, but not controlling memory means that the garbage collector can trigger at any time and ruin performance.
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Pro
Works with 3rd party IDEs
You can use any C# IDE for it, but the ones tested which have Unity integration are: Microsoft Visual Studio MonoDevelop Visual Studio Code (much faster than VS, but a bit harder to set up for Unity development) JetBrains Rider (very fast, has lots of functionality and best Unity integration, but it is not free)
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Con
Bad batching support
Draw Call Batching is done automatically and does not include Skinned Renderers (eg. characters). Also for dynamic batching, meshes need to have less than 900 vertices.
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Pro
Has a great animation system
Unity provides a great state machine animation system called Mechanim allowing to separate animation from the model and assign the same animoations to different models.
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Con
Very self-centered engine
Unity3D uses very unique approach for doing things. Most of the knowledge acquired while using it, would be completely non transferable to other engines. Advanced Unity3D programming is really dealing with Unity3D bugs, and finding loopholes around engine issues - nothing to do with graphics, etc. Skills which would be valuable with other engines.
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Pro
Over 20 platforms
Unity offers over 20 platforms for publishing including mobile, console, web, VR, and more.
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Con
Dark UI theme not available in the free version
Dark theme, which is a must for prolonged work without eye strain, is only available with one of the paid monthly plans.
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Pro
Versatile
Not tailored for specific types of games (like Unreal...), so it won't get in your way if you want to make something unique.
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Con
Encourages bad coding practices
A lot of Unity code feels like a hacked blur of arguable coding practices. C# and .Net usage in Unity is questionable. A lot of the API is done in "C Style" (public static methods, available at all times), encouraging the use of public fields for everything, a lot of questionable implicit casting. The list goes on.
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Pro
Powerful standard shaders
The built in standard shader in Unity 5 is incredibly optimized and supports PBS/PBR.
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Con
Increasing number of bugs
With each new version things may stop working ,for example with Android, some bugs are never getting fixed, like the freeze bug with adb.
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Pro
Very optimized
Unity runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards.
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Con
Mobile builds (Android, iOS) take about 18MB at least
Even a Blank Project, Needs 18MB for the APK file (on Android).
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Pro
Well structured
Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually do not read the docs, like the one that describe orders of execution, or specific functions hooks and such. Some like to say it lacks raw power where people who are used to standard optimizations have no problem. For example It is not uncommon to encounter users who complain about low FPS but forgot to activate occlusion, flag static elements, activate animations culling, and so on. As for complaints about C#, people who are transitioning from C++ were already bad at C++ before being bad at C#. They often come from the PC world where the sheer power of today's machines is very forgiving compared to the platforms we had to develop for in the 80s~90s. One of their errors is for example to never read this doc.
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Con
Asset bundles can be cumbersome
Asset bundles are a way to load external resources that are not packed with the game or application and offered as a separate, optional package. However, they may not be compatible between versions or even platforms (you have to create them separately). Asset bundles need to be loaded and unloaded, avoid concurrent loads from web or cache or a naming collision can happen. You can find workarounds with static objects (load obj files and textures by code), but for animated game objects you are pretty much stuck with this.
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Pro
Can create custom forms and tools
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Con
Price is very high
Cost is based on Revenue: less than $100K = Free between $100K and 200K = $35 a month per seat greater thank 200K = $125 a month per seat
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Pro
OUYA support
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Con
New il2cpp script backend is show stopper to some iOS projects
Il2cpp script backend is required to build arm64 app, but it's still very buggy and not production ready.
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Pro
Flexibility is provided by a strong component programming model
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Con
Waisted resources
Slow, buggy, expensive and 1000 other problems.
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Pro
.NET functions can be used
ReactiveX,async/await, etc. .NET functions can be used in Unity.
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Con
Comparatively high learning curve is putting it nicely. Expect to spend days upon days researching basic functionality.
Although C#, JS, and Boo have documentation available online, it can still be difficult to understand the library and Unity's component based system.
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Pro
Great extensions are updated daily on GitHub
GitHub has a lot of extensions.
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Con
Bad model importing
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Pro
Has awesome plugins
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Con
Bad input
Their input manager cannot be accessed via code. If you want to update controls at runtime (which any PC game should be able to do), you'll have to roll your own. Except joysticks are also not available via code.
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Pro
Free for mobile development
Unity allows free mobile development. There are some limitations.
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Con
Bad raycasts
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Specs
API:
DirectX 10, DirectX 11, DirectX 12
Dev platforms:
Windows; OSX; Linux
Desktop targets:
Windows; OSX; Linux;
Mobile targets:
Windows Phone; iOS; Android; BlackBerry 10; Tizen
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