What is the best alternative to&#x20;jMonkey3?

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux; HTML5

Godot has a mature 2D engine with many features used by modern 2D games. See More

634 171

score 2148 · Answer 2

Godot

Top Pro

Fully dedicated 2D engine, no hacks

Top Con

Primarily supports own language (GD Script)

Although C# is also supported by Godot, it is only supported by a separate version, and Mono must be downloaded separately. While GDScript is very accessible, and if you know Python you'll pick it up fast, having to learn a new language to fully make use of the platform can be a bit discouraging. And for those learning to code as well as learning Godot for the first time, many would rather learn a language they can 'take with them' when they explore other platforms in the future. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

The executable is portable and less than 40 MB in size. See More

Top Con

C++ Engine API not very friendly

The base C++ code from Godot is not documented, it's hard to set it up, to compile and hard to extend, it could use better programming standards. See More

Top Pro

Under constant development

This engine barely released one year ago has more than 1000 forks on github and about 100 developers. Not only that just a bit of browsing trough issues you will quickly find out the dev community loves new esp free technology and does not shy away from completely rewriting parts of the engine. The audio engine is being completely rewritten to use threads and so forth. See More

Top Con

Annoying minor bugs

Minor bugs can go unaddressed for some time, due to it being a free program. See More

Top Pro

User friendly UI for all your team

Non-programmers (musicians, artists, etc) can join the development easily. See More

Top Con

GDScript is quite immature language

GDScript is copy of python and the real problem is, it is not python. Which means it cannot have all the power and new features that is available in Python or other programming language. It does have some good features but it is not good enough for what you need if you want to deep dive into game development. You can just feel that by the godot team is solving that matter by supporting mono version. Because C# is popular in other game engine and it contains all the new features that is available from new programming language. If i give you very simple example for why GDScript is immature, GDScript does not support asynchronous programming. Which is very efficient for performance of your game. You may mention about multi-threading because asynchronous programming is one way of multi-threading. However If you try that in Godot, you cannot multi-threading where you want to implement asynchronous system. For example, Autoload (Fake singleton) where you want to manage data in real time. Autoload is not real singleton. It is not a separated thread that manage data. Therefore everything is synchronous in autoload. Even though you create new thread from Autoload script, your game will just stop and wait for your thread to finish its task... See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Godot is licensed under MIT license. Anyone can grab the source from here, and compile the engine themselves. See More

Top Con

Godot 3/4 split

The recent release of Godot 4 brings new features, but isn't yet fully documented, and performance may not be as optimized. See More

Top Pro

Editor and runtime are fully cross-platform

You can run Godot on all 3 major operating systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) and build your game to all available platforms from each without any platform-specific work needed. All platforms including Linux are supported first class. See More

Top Con

No console targets

Given that you can target both desktops and consoles with the same code base in other engines, the lack of support for consoles in Godot is pretty hard to get past if targeting desktops for a game. But asking for an open-source engine to target consoles is probably too much to ask. But it would be interesting to see some legacy consoles targeted even if current ones cannot be. See More

Top Pro

Drag & drop interface

Many parts of the editor allow you to drag & drop, which makes working with assets and scene trees a joy. See More

Top Con

It's hard to learn

Top Pro

Can be deployed to multiple platforms

Deploy games to desktops (Windows/OS X/Linux), smartphones (iOS/Android/BlackBerry), and the web (HTML5 via Emscripten). See More

Top Con

Difficult to optimize

Godot has an OOP architecture. Everything is an object internally and data is spread among many classes, thus it's difficult to optimize (i.e. not cache friendly, difficuly to vectorize or paralellize, etc). Read about "Data Oriented Design" for more info about the problems and solutions. See More

Top Pro

The list of supported languages is growing

Officially, Godot supported languages for now will be GDScript, C#(Mono), VisualScript and C++. See More

Top Con

Strange terminology at its base

Scenes can be made up of other scenes. That makes some sense. But even the smallest object (or prefab or asset) in a scene -- such as that spoon on the table or the marble on the floor -- is still called a scene... except when it's called a node. This is a bit odd for those coming from other engines. With all the great decisions behind the basic design of this engine, the choice of this term from all the potential other terms out there seems really out of place and only serves as a constant reminder that not everything about Godot is great. See More

Top Pro

Integrated animation editor

Every property can be animated. See More

Top Con

No built-in way to import atlases

Godot does not have an easy and automatic way to import atlases created by other tools. However, there are plugins that can be used to import atlases from other engines. See More

Top Pro

Built-in physics

Add physics to 2D and 3D scenes, through rigid and static bodies, characters, raycasts, vehicles and more. See More

Top Con

2DPhysics is weak compared to Box2d

Box2d has much more features. See More

Top Pro

Unified game editor interface

All the game development work is done inside one program: the engine editor. The scripting is done in the same program. No need for Eclipse or other front-end editors. See More

Top Con

NoAdmob or other AdNetwork support

Godot has no native support for implementing advertisements into your game. See More

Top Pro

Instancing and node concept makes sense

The node and the instancing concept work very well and helps developers to structure content efficiently. See More

Top Con

Many buggy and half-finished features

Top Pro

Fun to use

An important aspect that can't be grasped without using the engine for a few days. The Interface is evolving nicely and making games is just fun. See More

Top Con

Hard for a Unity user

Coming from a Unity background, Godot engine is hard. See More

Top Pro

Internationalization of the editor

You can change the language shown in menus. Godot translations can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn scripting language

Godot has their own scripting language called GDScript. The scripting language is easy to learn with Python-like syntax, but it is not Python. It's very powerful, easy to learn, and it's free of unnecessary things because it was custom built for optimized integration with the Godot Engine. It can be used to add custom behaviors to any object by extending it with scripting, using the built-in editor with syntax highlighting and code completion. A built-in debugger with breakpoints and stepping can be used and graphs for possible bottlenecks can be checked. See More

Top Pro

Really good community

The community is great and really cares about the engine. It is easy to get help and to be part of Godot's future. See More

Top Pro

Creating editor tools is a breeze

Godot Engine is itself a Godot game. By adding the "tool" keyword to the top of a script, you can design extensions for the editor itself INSIDE the editor. Integrating these editor scripts into a bundled plugin for sharing is extremely easy to do. See More

Top Pro

Friendly towards Version Control Systems

The engine is build not only to support version control but to really use it. Scene files for example which usually get compiled into some sort of unreadable data stay in a text format - that way you can actually see your changes in a version control system like Git. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't need to be installed into the system

Godot is very portable, you can download the file from a website then put it on a USB and run it on your other computer without any troublesome errors. See More

Top Pro

Easily expanded scripting system

With 3.0's addition of NativeScript and PluginScript via GDNative, developers can easily define bindings for new scripting languages. In addition to the primarily supported C++, GDScript, VisualScript, and C# languages, the community has contributed D, Nim, and Python as well with more on the way. See More

Top Pro

Incredible documentation after 3.2.2 beta

The documentation used to be weak, but now we have nathen with his help the documentation is the strongest advantage. See More

Top Pro

Scene Based editing

Godot gives you the ability to create scenes to make your life easier, with reusable objects and things you want to incorporate in your games. This makes the game making processvery streamlined and organized. See More

Top Pro

Built-in documentation linked to the internal ScriptEditor

The editor has a fully searchable index of class API documentation for everything the engine offers (NOT just a web interface). You can easily open the documentation for any class by Ctrl-clicking the class's name in the in-engine text editor for scripts. See More

Top Pro

Simple and readable codebase

The engine's source code is easy to read and understand with a self-documenting approach to code design. You don't have to wait months or years for other people to fix an engine bug that is important to your game. Often times, you can spend an hour or two of your own time to fix whatever problems you encounter yourself. See More

Top Pro

Easy to get involved

No need to learn anything with node, you can build a game without typing a line of code + has visual scripting. See More

Top Pro

Engine is yours

There is no royalty and the game you made + engine itself is yours. See More

Top Pro

Can be installed on Steam

You can easily install Godot via the Steam store. See More

Top Pro

Comprehensive tooling

In addition to the scene editor and the script editor (with debugger), the engine also provides a tile map editor, an animation editor (not just for rigs), a performance monitor, a network profiler, and an audio bus console. See More

Top Pro

It has a visual scripting tool (Godot 3)

It has a great visual scripting tool. It's a great choice if you don't like to code. This was however removed in Godot 4, so you will need to use the (still supported) Godot 3 branch for visual scripting. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android

Popular Language Bindings:GDScript, C#, C++

Corona SDK is completely free. That includes pro-tier plugins. See More

2148 325

score 394 · Answer 3

Solar 2D (formerly Corona SDK)

Top Pro

Very simple to use

Top Con

Free, but not completely

Top Pro

Free

Top Con

Making a device build requires internet connection

To build your app for the device (iOS/Android/AppleTV) Corona requires to fetch resources from online. This would include base application template and plugins. This allows not to perform local build or use Xcode or Android Studio to do a build. Even Large games/apps would build very fast with good internet connection. Your code never leaves computed. Corona SDK would transfer some information to determine which plugins and pieces has to be transferred in order to make a final steps in build. As a bonus - you get basically one button press to get from your Corona Simulator game to game on a device. See More

Top Pro

Corona Simulator

Corona SDK ships with Corona Simulator, which runs your game/app directly on your PC/Mac and updates every time you make changes. It provides immediate feedback to your actions, you can see your changes right on the screen, without necessity to make build to device. Getting instant feedback really boosts tenfold prototyping and development speed. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation and lots of tutorials

Top Pro

Content scaling

It's easy to create a game that looks good on many different sized mobile devices. See More

Top Pro

Live builds - update builds running on a device automatically

With the live build feature, once you have created a build and installed on a device, you get lightning fast turnaround times because any change on the code or data is updated to the devices running the game (within the local WiFi) immediately. So changes can be tested on the real hardware within a very few seconds. What's even more impressive, this even works flawless with multiple devices running the game. You have to use it to learn how good of a feature this is while development and even more, while doing QA. Imagine fixing bugs and everyone of your QA team/friends/whoever helps to get your game done, has all changes on his device without doing anything but waiting 5 seconds - outstanding. See More

Top Pro

Lua syntax

Uses the great and easy-to-learn Lua programming language. See More

Top Pro

Very comprehensive API

It's very quick to get things up and running with Corona SDK. The API is extensive and while it's not 100% feature-complete with the iOS API, it's close enough that you could create tons of games and never run into a roadblock. The API docs can be found here. See More

Top Pro

Amazing learning curve

Corona does not throw photoshop-like madness full of buttons editor. You can go as fast as you want, learning and building game from ground up. Eventually, you'll learn how much corona is doing for you. But to start you don't have to master complex editor software. It's a great tool to learn to start game development if you want to learn how to program and make games. Your experience will be 100% transferable to any other Pro game engine. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform desktop and mobile

Corona works on OS X, Windows and Android (including Kindle Fire & Nook). See More

Top Pro

Marketplace for 3rd party plug-ins

Top Pro

Great community

Top Pro

Ability to call any native (C/C++/Obj-C/Java) library

Top Pro

Completely free

Since Corona SDK became Solar2D, it's completely free, as only some third-party plugins are paid. See More

Top Pro

Open Source

Since Corona SDK became Solar2D, it's completely open source under MIT license. See More

Top Pro

Well supported

Specs

Price:Free

Languages:Lua

Dev platforms:Windows; Macintosh

Desktop targets:Windows; Macintosh

The liberal license allows use of the engine for any purpose without restrictions or royalties. See More

394 50

score 205 · Answer 4

Panda3D

Top Pro

Free, open-source, and permissive license

Top Con

No unified editing program

Unlike Unity and Unreal, Panda3D doesn't currently offer a single, unified editing program in which objects can simply be dragged in and assigned properties (although third-party solutions are available). Developers are expected to design their scenes in a modelling program like Maya or Blender instead, and import them into Panda3D using Python code. See More

Top Pro

Will be very easy for developers already familiar with Python

Although it's possible to use only C++ to program in Panda3D, all its power is available to the Python scripting language, while not trading in performance since the performance-critical parts are implemented in C++. It has a powerful binding layer that exposes the vast majority of the API via Python-based interfaces. See More

Top Con

Limited tutorial

Step by step tutorial is limited. Manual is too general and short without examples. Samples are too complex for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Supports most popular physics engines

Panda3D has in-depth integration with industry standard physics engines such as Bullet, NVIDIA PhysX and ODE, but also offers a simpler built-in physics engines that will cover more basic needs. See More

Top Con

Direct3D support is behind

Direct3D support not up to par with OpenGL support, only version 9 is supported. See More

Top Pro

Flexible scene and object hierarchy system

Creating weird world constructs is generally a breeze. The node system the engine runs with allows to build self-looping worlds and, on large scale, non-Euclidean scenes without having to introduce a huge amount of custom code. See More

Top Con

Terrible compilers support

Does not support any other compilers then MSVC on Windows, neither Clang nor MinGW. See More

Top Pro

Powerful profiling and debugging tools

Panda3D has a suite of powerful tools to help track down performance bottlenecks, memory leaks and examine internal state. See More

Top Con

Developer isn't very competent

Panda3D only has one developer and he utterly fails to fix problems with his engine, instead focuses on style guidelines and breaking code. See More

Top Pro

Supports browser deployment

Panda3D offers web plug-ins that allow deployment of an application to all major browsers. A WebGL port is in the works as well. See More

Top Con

Loading Pandas3d will change your builtins to contain non explicit references to non-standard helper functions

A lot of the pollution comes from storing global state. Instead, you can store and update the global state of a namespace instead. As for the built-in pollution, you can make a wrapper that backs up builtins, imports pandas and then restores builtins, though this may not work as pandas almost certainly uses it's extra builtins to work. The best thing to do would be to explicitly import the same objects that are in the builtins over the top of the modified builtin namespace, although it doesn't remove the code smell, it helps to make things look less (if not at all) magic. See More

Specs

License:BSD-3-Clause

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux; FreeBSD

Mobile targets:-

Looking nearly as good as Unreal Engine 4, but rendering significantly faster. See More

205 37

score 170 · Answer 5

Stride

Top Pro

Good looking and fast

Top Con

No terrain editor

Unless you like working on planes, there is no terrain support. See More

Top Pro

No royalties or licensing fees

Top Con

Editor is Windows only

Since version 1.7, Linux can be targeted for runtime. The editor for the engine is available only to Windows though. See More

Top Pro

Projects are normal Visual Studio solutions

No proprietary project format, so it works with all the official .NET tooling. See More

Top Con

Small user community

Unity and UE have a vast amount of user community. See More

Top Pro

Supports Visual Studio

Top Con

Does not currently support Playstation or Switch games

Top Pro

Very modern render engine

Top Con

Iteration may be slower than with other engines due to longer "build" times when certain changes are made

Top Pro

Powerful 3D Rendering Engine

Supports Vulkan. You can achieve good quality as in Unity3d and Unreal Engine See More

Top Con

Shader system require's overhaul

Shader's are not easy to get to grips with and Stride's shader system. Needs overhauling for easier use. See More

Top Pro

Straightforward editor

Stride provides a simple and clean working environment for designing games. See More

Top Pro

Community seems friendly and is growing

Top Pro

Engine AND Scripting are both C#

Since the engine is written in the same language as the scripting, there is no weird mix of technologies as other engines have. See More

Top Pro

Supports Vulkan

Currently the only well known open-source game engine that supports Vulkan, and probably one of the only. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn and use C#

Top Pro

Multiple Starter Templates

The engine comes packed with multiole example projects to help you get started. See More

Specs

API:Vulkan, DirectX 11, DirectX 12, OpenGL

Languages:C#

Dev platforms:Windows

The entire engine is open source and makes use of other open source libraries. Source code is licensed under MIT and available on GitHub. See More

170 39

score 136 · Answer 6

Urho3D

Top Pro

Free and fully open source

Top Con

It has been stopped developing

The owner has moved to build new 3D engine, however, that is also experimental stage, not for production. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

The documentation for Urho3D can be split in two parts: auto-generated from class references and documentation written to cover the various aspects, features and systems of the engine. The written documentation is pretty good. It covers most of the aspects of the engine in clear and understandable English. See More

Top Con

Little documentation and small community

There are some high-level design docs and a bunch of examples, but code is poorly commented and nothing much more can be found. See More

Top Pro

Includes a lot of samples

There are a lot of sample projects included with the engine for both C++ and Angelscript. They are mostly very simple applications built to demonstrate the engines capabilities and features. See More

Top Con

The UI can be hard on the eyes

Urho3D's UI could cause eye strain. See More

Top Pro

Fat-free codebase

Only use what you need. See More

Top Con

There is no support for reflections

Neither SSR nor cubemap parallax correction are implemented in engine. See More

Top Pro

Small turnaround times while developing

Builds are quite fast, aids in rapid development. See More

Top Con

Bad Android support

You can not compile this engine using latest Android Studio. See More

Top Pro

Very high code quality

Urho3D is written in a modular and super-clean way, so that it can be integrated into the other parts of your game seamlessly. See More

Top Con

May be a bit hard to get started

To install Urho3D you need to get the archive from GitHub (be careful to download the master branch) and extract it. After that, you need to compile the engine with CMake. If all the dependencies are installed, then it should be a straightforward process, otherwise you will need to track down and install all the missing dependencies. For people who don't have much experience with CMake this whole process may seem a bit like magic. For people who do have experience with CMake, the whole installation will be relatively easy. See More

Top Pro

Good 3D level editor

Top Pro

In constant active development

Bugs are usually fixed that same day. Core devs are very active on forums. New features are always being worked on. HTML5, DirectX11, and OpenGL3.1 support have recently been added (as of 4/15/15). See More

Top Pro

Does not require an editor to get going

Top Pro

Flexible rendering pipeline

You can configure rendering pipeline. See More

Top Pro

Multi-Lights

There are no lights limits per mesh. See More

Top Pro

Unofficial Oculus Rift support

Information on enabling OR support can be found here. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:iOS; Android

You can spin up a server and work with other people at the same time. See More

136 24

score 28 · Answer 7

Superpowers

Top Pro

Collaborative

Top Con

Not frequently updated

Although it's got very nice features as is, and the team does respond to issues at a pretty good rate, the engine itself takes a little while to get updates. It's a 3-4 person team, and they need to work jobs on the side in order to bring in income. Even though the updates come out a little slower than other engines, the team is still very much committed to the project and still support it well. See More

Top Pro

Supports both 2D and 3D

This isn't a 3D with 2D on the side type of engine. The scene-editor supports both 3D and 2D views, allowing ease of use no matter what type of game your making. See More

Top Pro

Plugin based

The community can develop and release their own plugins to add additional features making game development easier. All of these plugins can be easily downloaded in the app. See More

Top Pro

Lots of handy built-in editors

It's got a scene-editor, cubic-model creator, text-editor, 2D image / animation importer, and a very useful tile-map editor. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use programming language

Games can be published to the web with good performance, and the game-framework utilizes TypeScript to make programming games a little bit nicer. See More

28 8

score 824 · Answer 8

Unreal Engine 4

Top Pro

A visual scripting system for non-coders enables quick prototyping

Blueprints are authoring tools designed for non programmers so designers and other team members can help tweak and prototype. UE4's Blueprint scripts resemble flowcharts where each box represents a function or value, with connections between them representing program flow. This provides a better at-a-glance indication of game logic than a simple list of events, and makes complex behaviors easier to accomplish and games a lot faster to prototype. See More

Top Con

Very high build size

A blank project will build in to a minimum of 200 MB. See More

Top Pro

Lots of resources to learn from

Epic provides multiple official video tutorials, lots of free example projects and content, an extensive wiki and regular streams showing how to use latest features. See More

Top Con

Slow

Compared to other engines, UE4 seems to perform various actions considerably slower. Actions like starting the engine, opening the editor, opening a project, rebuilding shaders, updating references, calculating lightmaps, saving projects, etc take long enough to get irritating and end up wasting precious development time. See More

Top Pro

Powerful material/shader system

Allows a texture/material artist or VFX artist to create amazing effects from the ground up. See More

Top Con

Extremely long build times

Making a full rebuild, including engine can take a good 30minutes. If you plan to use Unreal professionally, you better get some licenses for Incredibuild as well. See More

Top Pro

Free development license, including source code

The engine, including full access to source code, is free to use; a 5% royalty is due only when you monetize your game or other interactive off-the-shelf product and your gross revenues from that product exceed $1,000,000 USD. See More

Top Con

Hard engine for beginners

This engine not easy for beginners See More

Top Pro

Realistic graphics

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Especially when compared to its primary competitor, Unity. See More

Top Pro

Developers have full control of the engine and source code

UE4 gives full access to the C++ source code allowing editing and upgrading anything in the system. See More

Top Con

No drawcall batching, performance is very bad on mobile

There's no dynamic batching support to minimize drawcalls. There's InstancedStaticmesh concept in UE4, but it's 3d only, functionally limited and requires hardware support which rules out most mobile devices. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic global illumination with voxel cone tracing decreases the computational power needed

Voxel cone tracing is a similar algorithm to ray tracing, but uses thick rays instead of pixel thin rays to be able vastly decrease the amount of computational power needed. See More

Top Con

C++ - oriented development cycle: slow turn-around times

The Unreal Editor is the main place to do stuff (of course), so if someone wants to do a lot of C++ stuff, the compilation and linking turn-around times can be painful. Still they probably are quite fast in comparison to the provided featureset.. Still ,they are far from optimal. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use animation blueprints

Unreal Engine 4 is one of the best game engines. It is super easy. It dosent require any use of coding due to Animation Blueprints See More

Top Con

Poor documentation

Most of the "documentation" for code is actually just automatically generated from the source. If you're interested in knowing how things are supposed to work, you must either go to their answers site or pay for UDN. Often their examples won't even compile, since they were written for now outdated versions. See More

Top Pro

Spectacular lighting visuals

Top Con

Royalty based

5% of profits will go to Unreal after $3000 earned in a quarter. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform editor and export

This engine exports for a big range of platforms including Linux. The editor can be run on Windows, MacOS, and Linux (Early Access). See More

Top Con

They spend more time adding features than fixing existing ones

Top Pro

Active community

Forums have many active and friendly members that are quick to respond and help out. Even staff is very active on forums. See More

Top Con

C# not natively supported

UE4 does not support C# natively, but this can be achieved through MonoUE, although it requires using the MonoUE fork instead of UE itself. See More

Top Pro

AAA Ready

This is ready to make the next AAA game. See More

Top Con

Poor source control support

Merge tool is not working. See More

Top Pro

Fast compilation for quick iteration

Recompiling an entire game to test a small change takes up a lot of time. UE4 quickly compiles in seconds instead of minutes improving iteration time by an order of magnitude. See More

Top Con

Poor quality assurance on their releases

After each release they almost immediately release a hotfix. And another one. And another one. See More

Top Pro

Quick release-cycle

New feature releases can be commonly expected about once a month. See More

Top Con

Unreal Engine crashes a lot if you don't have the required system requirements

Top Pro

Professional feature set for all aspects of game development

Almost everything a game developer wants has a deep and sophisticated tool waiting for them in UE4. No external plugins are needed to make powerful materials, FX, terrain, cinematics, gameplay logic, AI, animation graphs, post process effects, lighting etc. See More

Top Con

Sparse Resources for C++

C++ happens to be the main suite for Unreal, yet the documentation is very, very sparse. See More

Top Pro

Proven track record

Top Con

Extremely poorly designed

The code is a mess. Everything is connected, a single Actor is 1500 bytes, because it contains a million things that Epic once needed in a game. Inheritance for AActor: AActor > UObject > UObjectBaseUtility > UObjectBase See More

Top Pro

No coding experience needed

Top Con

Difficult for Mac users

If you're installing it on Mac, you simply download Epic games launcher and watch it download nothing endlessly. See More

Top Con

Tutorials do not go in-depth enough

The blueprint tutorial just teaches how to turn on a light when you press f. See More

Top Con

Proprietary

Top Con

Not available on Linux

Top Con

No Terrain Editor included

Top Con

Bad support

The epic games team only assists with billing and account issues, not bugs. See More

Top Con

Terrible physics

Top Con

Frequent crashes

Often the editor crashes interrupting your work. See More

Top Con

Poor error messages

Top Con

Rarely works

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Mac OS X, Linux

Languages:C++, Blueprints (Visual Scripting)

Desktop targets:Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, SteamOs, HTML5

Mobile targets:iOS, Android

Tombstone gives full access to the clean and professional C++ source code allowing editing and upgrading anything in the system. See More

824 181

score 17 · Answer 9

Tombstone Engine

Top Con

Only available to big studios

Top Pro

Complete access to high quality C++ source code

Top Con

Small community

Top Pro

Reliable, fast and well optimized

Top Con

Lacks D3D support

Top Pro

No royalties

Top Pro

Lots of learning resources

Including extensive documentation both in code as well as online along with a wiki, tutorials and a demo game. See More

Top Pro

Extending engine's functionality is straightforward

Due to the well-organized, highly modular design of the engine adding custom functionality is easy. See More

Top Pro

Full-featured and modern

Comes integrated with support for physics, audio, networking, input devices, resource management as well as modern features such as real-time shadows, horizontal mapping, voxel-based terrain, dynamic lighting, post-processing effects and much, much more. See More

Top Pro

Lifetime engine updates

Top Pro

Supportive community

Tombstone has a small, tight-knit community that's well educated and professional. Eric Lengyel, the main developer, can often be found giving thorough advice to users on the forums. See More

Top Pro

Proven to be a capable engine

Specs

Obsolete over 5 years ago. While the engine is being worked on with plans for new features and support, the movement is slow, leaving many engines far more advanced in certain areas. See More

17 9

score 14 · Answer 10

Irrlicht

Top Con

Outdated

Top Pro

Lots of examples and docs

Many working examples to study and learn. You can easily experiment modifying an example code to grok in full how the engine works. In the beginning of your learning curve, the example code will offer you many useful code snippets. See More

Top Con

Not a game engine

This is a 3D graphics engine similar to Ogre3D. Thus, it doesn't provide any pathfinding or physics support. Support for those will have to be added by the dev. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Top Pro

Good polymorphic design

If you are considering writing your own engine with openGL, you might want to consider Irrlicht instead. It makes many features of any engine worth its salt easy, including events, serialization, nodes, animators, materials, logging, and animation. Bring your own sound and networking. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Especially if you compile it yourself, it can be very light in memory usage. See More

Top Pro

Easy to entry level C++ experience

If you want to start game developing with C++, then Irrlicht is a good candidate since it removes most of the complications in game making in C++. It will let you obtain experience in programming and games at the same time. See More

Top Pro

Support for multiple formats

This engine supports multiple formats for 3D objects and textures. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:iOS; Android

Supported languages:C++

The whole interface is intuitive and easy to learn: each part of the game can be designed using visual editors. The objects editor is used to create the objects of the game, the scene editor help you to build the levels of your game and the events editor allows to give life to the whole game without programming. See More

14 11

score 758 · Answer 11

GDevelop

Top Pro

Easy to use

Top Con

No support for atlas/tilemap and sprite sheet

At this point, you need to separate the tileset maps or character animation sprite sheet before importing it to the engine, but the developers are working on this feature. See More

Top Pro

Free and open-source

GDevelop's runtime libraries are MIT licensed. It can be used freely for projects of any type and there are no royalties associated with publishing games developed with GDevelop. See More

Top Con

GUI is slow to load

This makes doing the simplest things, like looking at one of your maps, hard to do. In looking into this program, it can stall a PC while trying to load a sample map. See More

Top Pro

Powerful events system to create games without programming

No need for coding using this system which is clear and powerful: events are composed of conditions and actions. Actions are launched when conditions are fulfilled. This is a very friendly way of making games and is still efficient for advanced usage, contrary to most other "block"/"drag'n'drop" systems. See More

Top Con

No 3d, not even fake 3d

This is a 100$ 2d-only game engine. You could of course use pre-rendered 3d graphics, but your games themselves will exist only in the x and y axes. See More

Top Pro

Open source plugin SDK

The plugin SDK is open source, so if you want to extend it, you can. See More

Top Con

It's very slow

Although suggested otherwise, GDevelop doesn't compile the games - it just adds wrappers so each OS can run the HTML5 game it creates. That means it runs much, much slower than other engines that do compile games. See More

Top Pro

Lots of features to build games

The engine includes pathfinding, physics engine, multitouch support, custom hitboxes, platformer engine, tiled maps, multiple layers and cameras out of the box. All of these features can be used without programming knowledge, using the visual editors. See More

Top Con

No cross-compiler

The Windows and Linux versions of GDevelop can each compile a native application; but the Windows version cannot compile for Linux, nor vice versa. See More

Top Pro

Quickly add behaviors to objects

Prebuilt behaviors can be added to objects. This is a very efficient way to add a physics engine or make a platformer game. Lots of behaviors are included, from the most advanced (Physics, platformer, top-down movement) to really simple one (like the behavior to destroy objects when outside the screen or the one to drag objects with mouse or touch). And you still have full controls over your game as behaviors can be modified using the events! See More

Top Con

Optional subscription not mentioned on main site

While the engine is free and open source as stated on the main website, it does not mention that some optional features and services are actually activated through a paid subscription (two tiers: 2€ and 7€). Those features are: no nag screen shown when debugging, additional metrics available on games dashboard, access to more than 2 cloud exports per day (unlimited local export can be done without subscription, provided the right packaging tools are installed and configured), easy removal of GDevelop splash screen (can be done manually without subscription). See More

Top Pro

New documentation for gd5 is good for starting

A new doc is improving for gd5 that is nice for beginners and after that you can learn more from examples. Also, gd4 wiki is still there. See More

Top Con

Behaviors of Objects are rather generalized

Since it has a fully GUI editor, the objects you are allowed to add in your game are pretty generalized (PhysicsObject, TiledSprite, PlatformerObject, etc). This limits the freedom of a game developer while making a game, as the object msut follow the preset behaviours imposed on it. See More

Top Pro

Constant updates

New releases and bug fixes are consistent. New updates are released anywhere within 2 weeks or 1 month from the last one. Its auto-updater also does it job very well making life a lot easier. See More

Top Pro

Online version available, compatible with iOS and Android

Thanks to its open source nature, GDevelop-App.com was built over the GDevelop engine. GDevelop-App.com is a complete game creator similar to GDevelop, available directly in your browser and compatible with iPad and most Android tablets and phone! The app is perfect for making games directly from your sofa and you can even start a game on GDevelop-App and export it to open it inside GDevelop. See More

Top Pro

Multilanguage support

GDevelop is available in many languages and even community can help in translations. See More

Specs

Languages:C++, JavaScript

Dev platforms:Windows 7+, macOS 10.11+, Linux, Web

Desktop targets:Windows 7+, macOS 10.11+, Linux

Does everything in the same application. No exporting-importing assets, make a cube, hit run, cube appears, make a character, hit run, the character appears! See More

758 64

score 47 · Answer 12

Armory3D

Top Pro

Runs inside Blender

Top Con

Lack of documentation

Top Pro

State of the art physically based rendering

Physically based Cycles material nodes Voxel-based global illumination Temporal anti-aliasing Tessellated displacement Screen-space raymarching HDR pipeline See More

Top Con

Not many developers use it

Armory3d seems to be quite exotic and it should be hard to find developers to help in projects. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Top Con

Still in development

Top Pro

Easy to use

Top Con

Slow development

Focus from the developer has shifted to another project, so development of this has slowed considerably. See More

Top Pro

Node based programming and materials support

Top Con

Good looking but a terrible choice for any serious development

Terrible lack of support and lack of a serious delivery strategy. Multiple breaking changes to the master branches (usually the only branch actually) from the core projects as well as the myriad of dependencies it uses make it a nightmare to have something stable to create with. Might be good for prototyping if you stick to the releases, but stay away if you are planning to create something serious. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Top Pro

Export to multiple platforms

Export to all platform that Kha supports. See More

Top Pro

A good community

Although the is an obvious lake of community help, it is still there if you look on the Armory forum or there discord your sure to find help for any problem you have. See More

Top Pro

A growing community with more tutorials and documentation.

Although Armory has been a little slow in the development, tutorials on YouTube are being released almost daily and the documentation is also being updated regularly. See More

Top Pro

No programing experience needed

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows; OSX; Linux;

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux;

Mobile targets:Android; iOS;

Blender is licensed under the GPL. Some Blender modules such as the Cycles rendering engine are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See More

47 9

score 663 · Answer 13

Blender

Top Pro

Free and open source

Top Con

Too many possibilities, no unified workflow

The operations are not optimized enough for specific tasks. See More

Top Pro

Wide import and export format support

Support lots of modern 3D formats including DAE and FBX - ideal for game developers. See More

Top Con

The physics engine is a bit lagging behind, especially the destruction physics

Top Pro

Has a powerful rendering engine

Blender runs the Cycles path tracing engine under the hood. Cycles is a very powerful rendering engine capable of full path tracing (light fall off, caustics, volumetrics). It is mostly compatible with OpenCL and CUDA rendering, and is implementing mycropolygon displacement features. The upcoming release has a viewport engine called EEVEE whereby you can see and interact with your work in render mode in real time! See More

Top Con

Difficult learning curve

Blender has a history of being unintuitive, but the 2.8 overhaul made the program far easier for beginners to pick up, and changes continue to be made to further improve the experience. However, there is still a learning curve. See More

Top Pro

Python extensibility

Blender embeds Python 3, which can be used to write add-ons, tools, extend the interface, rig characters and automate tasks. See More

Top Con

Not good for Industrial Design because it uses average vertex normals

You can not create a hard surface with a radius continuity degree along a surface using a specific radius value. See More

Top Pro

Powerful animation suite

Blender provides a full rigging system, and automates animation by interpolating between keyframe positions. See More

Top Con

Vertex normal issues on edges after boolean operations.

After creating a simple boolean operation the vertex normals are broken. A lot of work to fix the issue and you loos surface continuity. See More

Top Pro

Supports both low-poly and hi-poly modeling

Top Con

Bad vertex normal after boolean operations

Does not handle well polygon intersections. And need tweaking by hand points or adding average vertex normals via modifiers. See More

Top Pro

Regular release schedule

Releases are made every ~3 months. See More

Top Con

Does not handle NURBs

Is not capable of real hard surface for industrial design because is not able to reproduce surface continuity degree as a NURBs does and average vertex normal destroy surface radius. See More

Top Pro

Sculpting and 3D painting features

Although Blender's 3d painting and sculpting tools (mostly painting) are not at par with specialized software like Substance Painter, ZBrush, or Mari, it is more than capable of getting most jobs done if the user takes the time to learn and understand it. See More

Top Con

Poor particle system

The Blender particle system can at times be a little limiting and finicky (and buggy) to get working. Even if it can get most straight forward jobs done, it is far from the most advanced system, and could benefit largely from advancements. See More

Top Pro

Includes video editing & compositing tools

Blender's node-based compositor has comprehensive video sequencing and post-processing features. See More

Top Pro

Node based modeling support

Top Pro

Keyboard shortcuts

Good keyboard shortcuts for everything. Keep your left hand on the keyboard and your right hand on the mouse. See More

Top Pro

Very useful for a freelancer

It offers a round solution (it covers many areas and professional fields) for a freelancer, for free, constantly updated, very polished, and allowing high quality results that clients do require. After some learning, it becomes very useful for professional work. See More

Top Pro

Has a large community

There's a huge community to help you get started immediately. See More

Top Pro

Coherent and streamlined workflow / internal use logic

The trick with Blender is to get used to its usage philosophy, as it keeps consistent through all the application. Once you get it, every feature or addition is learnt naturally, almost effortlessly. See More

Top Pro

Very versatile

You don't have to switch between software when you want to do different things. Because modeling, sculpting, composting, video editing etc can all be done in blender. See More

Top Pro

Generative geometry using nodes

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, FreeBSD

663 95

score 345 · Answer 14

Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator

Top Pro

A proven engine for mobile development

25% of iPhone games are made using Cocos2d-x. This means you will not be alone in development, and will have access to a large community. You'll know you are developing for an engine that works. See More

Top Con

Poor support and non-existent community

Up until 2013, this was one of the best engines around. However, since then it was bought by a Chinese company and began stagnating - it's virtually in a slow death. Most developers abandoned Cocos in favor of more modern solutions leaving the community weak and the forums with little or no traffic. Although the Cocos2d-x Forum seems to have a decent community going. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Documentation includes a programming guide, API reference, video tutorials and massive reference test code project showing all functions and giving working code to the user. See More

Top Con

No Graphics user interface

Top Pro

Supports 3D models with skeleton animation

A new feature since Cocos2d-x v3.1 is support for 3D models (in your 2D game), not only this but support for skeleton animations is included too! This awesome feature allows for impressive characters in your game along with easier, more fluid and realistic animations. See More

Top Con

Modest functionality

Almost all free alternatives are more convenient, faster, and more functional. See More

Top Pro

Great script language support

It supports Lua and Javascript with full feature support. Especially with Cocos2d-JS you can develop games cross web and native, and the native solution have great performance with JS Bindings, much better than hybrid solution. See More

Top Pro

Highly active community for questions and support

Cocos2d-x forums are active. See More

Top Pro

OpenGL hardware acceleration

Top Pro

Future-proof

Cocos2d-x is not only open source but also supported by Chukong Technologies of China and USA. Regularly updated and adding support for the latest technologies. 2014 has already seen the release of Version 3, a new Cocos Studio development toolkit (optional) and support for new technologies like skeleton animation systems Spine and Adobe DragonBone. See More

Top Pro

Greater performance than high level APIs

Cocos2d-x is C++ based engine and it has CPU advantages for most platforms because of that. It uses polygonal mesh methods for sprite rendering for using GPU advantages. (You also use quad methods for benefit CPU). See More

Top Pro

No external dependencies

Because it is based on Pyglet. See More

Top Pro

One code for all platforms

On top of supporting pretty much all existing platforms (except consoles), Cocos Creator (Cocos's IDE) allows you to write 1 code that runs on Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS and HTML5 (not Linux though). See More

Top Pro

Easy integration of 3rd party plugins

Through the use of SDKBox you can easily integrate 3rd party SDKs and plugins for each version of Cocos2D (Lua, C++ or JavaScript), you just choose the SDKs to integrate and SDKBox will do the rest. For example, if you want to add a rating plugin, you use sdkbox::PluginReview::init(); and if you want to add the Vundle Ad Network SDK, you use the one packaged in SDKBox SDKBOX sdkbox::PluginVungle::init();. See More

Top Pro

Allows for easy debugging

It has a built-in Python interpreter that allows for easy debugging. See More

Top Pro

Very good IDE

Cocos Creator (Cocos' IDE) comes with scene editing, UI editor, animations & particle editors and whatnot. It's also easy to use and pretty intuitive if you read the official documentation & tutorials. Way way better than the old CocoStudio. See More

Top Pro

Great video tutorials

Hundreds of video tutorials available. See More

Specs

Languages:C++; Lua; JavaScript; TypeScript (Creator only)

Dev platforms:Windows; macOS

Desktop targets:Windows; macOS; Linux; HTML5 (Creator only)

With the Developer edition of the product, there are absolutely no limits or requirements when selling your creations. You are free to make as much money as you want (this applies to the Standard edition too), and you don't have to include any logos or credits in your creations. See More

345 61

score 366 · Answer 15

Clickteam Fusion 2.5

Top Pro

Permissive runtime license agreement

Top Con

Some features are really outdated and major updates are few and rare

There are some features that could make the software a lot more powerful but Clickteam does not have the staff resources to handle updating the software to be competitive with similar software. See More

Top Pro

Upgrade discounts

If you buy Fusion 2.5, and later decide you want to upgrade to the Developer version, or in the case of moving from MMF2 to F2.5, the company offers upgrade discounts. See More

Top Con

Its Event Editor can be cumbersome if you are working on complex projects

While Fusion's visual programming event system is great to simplify things, it can be much more cumbersome to work with it than reading lines of code when you are working on a complex project. Especially if your events involve many nested conditions and lots of objects on the frame. You are able to group events and objects, but it doesn't help at all if there's lots of conditions on an event and it becomes pretty hard to read. See More

Top Pro

Export native runtime for all platforms

Be it Windows EXE, Android APK, iOS, HTML5 and Flash SWF, Fusion 2.5 is able to export your game to fast, truly native runtime for specified platform with a click. See More

Top Con

Many extensions not available on non-Windows platforms

A lot of community-made extensions are only written for Windows, making it hard to port your game to other platforms. See More

Top Pro

Intuitive drag & drop interface & visual event editor

CF2.5 uses a straightforward drag & drop editor that allows for easy level, animation and event creation without having to write a single line of code. See More

Top Con

It is very expensive

100$ to $400. See More

Top Pro

Developers work so closely with the user base

Dedicated Bug tracking system linked to user forum for ease of access. See More

Top Con

Many event 'gotchas', especially with object selection

Many events have very unpredictable selection behavior, e.g. the 'Create' action (where the selection depends on whether a selection list already exists). There is also a lot of subtle selection behavior, e.g. implicit object pairs for actions when an object is used in an expression. See More

Top Pro

Free version

A free version is available for download here. See More

Top Con

No native animator with curves, etc

Top Pro

Can also create Windows applications

CF allows creating Windows applications. Additionally, due to hundreds of available extensions, the process is quick. See More

Top Con

Poor native movements

The native non-physical movements are practically unusable if you don't want to use Box2D physics in your game. See More

Top Pro

Box2D physics engine included on all platforms

Clickteam Fusion 2.5 brings to you the box2D physics engine. See More

Top Con

Need to write C++ extensions when existing extensions don't cut it

If you need e.g. a Steamworks extension or 3D display extension, you need to move out from the event system and create extensions in C++ with a cumbersome API. Fusion does not have FFI calls like other programming languages. See More

Top Pro

Community-driven extensive object repository

Click Fusion has a great selection of extensions submitted by the community. The extensions cover a variety of game-building tasks including parsing of strings using up to two alternating delimiters using the "Tokenizer Object", generating random numbers without reusing them from multiple lists which can be refilled and distinctively replenished with the "Random Multipool Object" among others. See More

Top Con

No animation/object hierarchy

You need to position/rotate objects manually. See More

Top Pro

Not only is it the best, it is the original

This software has been around since 1994 (then called Klik & Play) and is still going very strong. Also, one of the founders of Clickteam was the developer of STOS BASIC and AMOS BASIC for the Atari ST and Amiga computers. See More

Top Con

Cannot script editor

You cannot script the IDE or editor with e.g. macros or custom functionality, like you can in other popular game engines. See More

Top Pro

A great unofficial community for Spanish-speaking users

A great community in Spanish where you will receive all the help you need to solve your doubts and problems. You'll also find all kinds of resources and materials in Spanish. Una gran comunidad en español en donde recibirás toda la ayuda que necesites para solucionar tus dudas y problemas. También encontrarás todo tipo de recursos, tutoriales y ejemplos en español. See More

Top Con

Slow event system

Since the event system is interpreted, complex frames will start to slow down. This is also caused by poor code reuse, as usually, you need to copy+paste events with new conditions, making it impossible to cache intermediate results. See More

Top Pro

Balanced feature set

An excellent compromise between ease of use, power, flexibility and ability to export to different platforms. Easy to learn for beginners with the ability to make complex things, of course, at the expense of a larger effort. Good rapid application development tool for making 2D games. See More

Top Con

Lack of native network multiplayer system, built-in database support, social media support

Top Pro

Supportive, passionate community

Any time you have a question or a problem, the community and the software developers are there to help you out either on forums or steam. The devs repond quickly to private messages or instantly on ClickConverse (chat). Additionally, many users have support sites with open source examples and tutorials. See More

Top Con

Exporters are separate purchases, and they are not cheap

Top Pro

Well-optimized

Runs well under high object numbers, particularly on PC and iOS thanks to hardware acceleration. See More

Top Con

No console/Linux exporters

Up to now, Clickteam has a console convert service. See More

Top Pro

Great IRL user events

Clickteam holds user conventions for customers to come along, meet the staff and hang out with people who they've met online. This furthers the community spirit which is so prevalent around Clickteam's products and it's a fantastic weekend. See More

Top Con

Simpler than Scratch

Fusion 2.5 is more Simpler than MIT'S Scratch! See More

Top Pro

It is very powerful for making 2D games, yet requires no traditional programming experience and very little to no higher math

There is no 'easy button' program that will make a good game for you with no hard work, and this software is no exception to that, but it does make the process easier. With the option of coding in either a spreadsheet style editor or a list style editor, the event based programming language reads more like English than traditional programming languages. This has made it ideal for me as I have a very hard time understanding traditional programming. I would say this is the perfect solution for people that want to make 2D games but who don't have a very mathematically oriented mind, and think more visually. Just like anything it can take some getting used to, but after following some tutorials and tinkering with it, you'll be able to create practically any kind of 2D game with it so long as you have the determination. See More

Top Con

The free edition is severely limited

Top Pro

Exports native mobile code, making great performance games

Top Pro

Great for non-game apps

Such as tools, utilities, multimedia projects, etc. See More

Top Pro

Great online store to get free and paid assets

Top Pro

Can create custom extensions

Top Pro

Visual (HLSL) effects

Top Pro

Great formula editor, which allows you to create complex maths and events with ease

Top Pro

Box2D physics engine

Top Pro

Stable

Have used fusion 2.5 through all of its iterations, even when it was owned by imsi as CNC ( click n create ) it has been very stable and projects have been known to run on almost any Windows based computer. The projects you create even run on future versions of Windows with never many issues. See More

Top Pro

3D powerful solution

Specs

License:Proprietary

Languages:c

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac

Desktop targets:Windows, Mac

Except for basic FPS games getting anything done will require solid knowledge of C++, Flash, ActionScript and Lua. See More

366 91

score 142 · Answer 16

CryEngine

Top Con

Steep learning curve

Top Pro

C# integration

CryEngine has some C#template and also C# based system to write your function/ideas in to your game. See More

Top Con

No GNU/Linux support

Top Pro

DX12, Vulkan support

CryEngine 5.4 now supports DX12 and Vulkan See More

Top Con

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Top Pro

Features allowing for realistic weather effects

Cry Engine has volumetric fog rendering which allows for realistic cloud shadows that actually render shadows onto the fog itself. Combined with their time of day system, it's possible to create incredibly realistic weather effects. On top of this, color grading allows user to post process pallets allowing them to change the color tone for different type weather, such as using a deep dark blue for rain. See More

Top Con

Hard to develop games other than FPS

Cryengine is a great engine to be used for developing an FPS (and it's relatively easy to do so). But if you want to develop another type of game, it requires at least advanced knowledge of C++ and Visual Studio. See More

Top Pro

There is already a built-in AI

It can shoot, walk on patrol points, can see the player and so on. See More

Top Con

No Mac OS X support

Top Pro

VR support

Cryengine (starting on Cryengine V) has Virtual Reality support. Developers can create games with VR support for multiple platforms: PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. See More

Top Con

Restrictive license

Cryengine is not restrictive anymore just more personalized. The model is Pay what you want and if you want more you get a membership with them. Or private support, help and lessons directly from the CryEngine team. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic water rendering

Cry Engine has realistic water effects that even simulate ocean physics. Features such as waves that respond to global wind, and dynamic water volume tessellation allow for some of the most realistic water effects available to a game developer. The engine also takes into account LOD (level of detail) on water geometry to allow it to stay performant for water at a distance. See More

Top Pro

Realistic rendering of vegetation and landscapes

Where Cry Engine really shines is with rendering scenes of nature. The Crysis games feature incredibly detailed vegetation and weather effects and it's the Cry Engine that enables that. The engine has many features to create a cohesive realistic looking world. Dynamic water effects allow users to have beautiful oceans, fog and cloud effects allow for realistic weather, and a plethora of lighting effects optimized for natural looking scenes make Cry Engine one of the best engines for creating vast beautiful landscapes. By having all these features built together from the ground up, Cry Engine is capable of doing more complex effects more efficiently, than other engines that didn't have these effects planned from their inception. See More

Top Pro

All platforms, including next-gen consoles, are supported

Supports miltiple platforms including: Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4, Wii U, PC, iOS, and Android. See More

Top Pro

Versatile flow diagram script model

Flow graphs resemble flowcharts where each box represents a function or value, with connections between them representing program flow. This provides a better at-a-glance indication of game logic than a simple list of events, and makes complex behaviors easier to accomplish. See More

Top Pro

Dedicated channel for Q&A

Crytek has launched a dedicated Q&A forum for everything Cryengine related. It's called Cryengine Answers and it's a community dedicated to sharing and answering any question related to Cryengine. See More

Top Pro

Online marketplace available

The Cryengine marketplace is an online marketplace which enables developers to access and use individual assets from thousands of materials, sounds and 3D objects created by the community. Even Crytek's own library assets are available there. See More

Top Pro

Advanced volumetric cloud system

Cryengine has an optimized volumetric cloud system for Virtual Reality to give clouds full 3D spatial rendering. This ensures a high rendering quality with a minimal performance hit. See More

Top Pro

Terrain tools are great

Top Pro

Disallows bad practices in asset creation

Simply by looking at the RC log when exporting can greatly improve your work. Cryengine doesn't handhold you constantly and helps greatly with avoiding bad practices in asset creation. See More

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows

Desktop targets:Windows, Linux

Mobile targets:iOS, Android

Supported languages:C++, C#, Lua

The AppGameKit Basic can now export to HTML5. See More

142 42

score 239 · Answer 17

AppGameKit 2.0

Top Pro

HTML5 support

Top Con

Restrictive virtual buttons

"AppGameKit" does not grant editing the very basic parameters of virtual buttons such as font and text size. The only method some people suggest is to use an image for every single "button". See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Supports developing games for Android, iOS, PC, Mac, Linux and now HTML5. See More

Top Con

Terrible scripting language

MS Basic from the 70's has more features. Procedural, no OO, inheritance, basic user defined types with overloading. Nothing. It even has GOSUB. See More

Top Pro

You only need to to pay for the license only

There is no charge for upgrades, or for extra platforms (the HTML5 version just appeared in the latest version), there are no subscription fees or other usage charges. If you publish onto either Apple or Google's stores you will have to pay their costs, of course, but the makers of AGK do not take a cut of this themselves. See More

Top Con

BASIC language

Even though it supports C++, it's mostly C++ mapped to BASIC without OOP. See More

Top Pro

Plugin support for Windows

Plug-ins can now be added to the Windows platform. Create your own Tier BASIC commands and call them using the AppGameKit Basic script language style. See More

Top Con

Can almost only do trivial games

The editor is rather limited, not fully polished, and 3D is missing some key functionalities (3D is work in progress). See More

Top Pro

Instant testing on multiple devices at once

AppGameKit supports instant testing on all connected devices. With the push of a button you can run your game on any device connected to the development machine. See More

Top Con

No builtin game mechanics, events, inventory.

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

Every function is fully documented with examples and exercises. The Tutorial PDF is a full Introduction to 3D game programming with integrated references to every functionality and its most important usecases. The documentation is regulary updated. See More

Top Con

$80 even if your game doesn't fly

Top Pro

Easy basic programming

Program in tier 1 BASIC programming for every 3D game need. See More

Top Con

Editor code completion is pretty bad

Top Pro

Raspberry Pi free version available

A Raspberry Pi version is available and free. Users just need to register with the developer and then they can download. See More

Top Con

Pros on Slant are written by AGK marketing guys

Top Pro

Very fast compilation

It is a compilation based language, but the compilation is very fast. A project of about 1800 lines of code, for example, can compile almost instantly. (That's because it does not compile, it's an interpreter) See More

Top Pro

Support

Informed, timely and intelligent feedback from the AGK forum. See More

Top Pro

Fast development

There are plenty of functions which facilitate development and deployment. For example, the AGK player immediately plays the updated bytecode on Android devices then the online site helps with building an APK file for Google Play Store in minutes. See More

Top Pro

Uses a powerful scripting language built for game development

Software produced with the App Game Kit is written in a language called AGK Script. This language has powerful inbuild commands including commands for 2D graphics, physics and networking. The commands make use of the platforms' native functions to improve performance. They are also designed to enhance code readability. The AGK Script commands have extensive online documentation. See More

Top Pro

C++ and Basic, you have the choice.

It runs fast with BASIC but if you want more you can use C++, it's also easy to use. See More

Top Pro

Can be used for advanced games programming in C++

Libraries which provide the same functionality are available for the five platforms, so you can code in C++ See More

Top Pro

Comes with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

AGK comes with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on the Code::Blocks IDE for writing AGK scripts. A key feature of the IDE is its ability to broadcast compiled programs to other devices for testing. See More

Top Pro

Performance

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows, Mac, Linux

Desktop targets:Windows, Mac, Linux, HTML5

Mobile targets:iOS, Android

3D:Yes

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. See More

239 74

score 423 · Answer 18

Unity 3D

Top Pro

Lots of resources to learn from

Top Con

Very bad terrain

Native terrain creates a lot of draw calls which is bad for performance. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Con

Bad UI tools

Way of creating UI is uncomfortable and inconvenient. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Great community

Great Community support through the Forums and Unity Answers. See More

Top Con

Moderators on forums are sometimes arrogant

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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) See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Over 20 platforms

Unity offers over 20 platforms for publishing including mobile, console, web, VR, and more. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Powerful standard shaders

The built in standard shader in Unity 5 is incredibly optimized and supports PBS/PBR. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Very optimized

Unity runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards. See More

Top Con

Mobile builds (Android, iOS) take about 18MB at least

Even a Blank Project, Needs 18MB for the APK file (on Android). See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Can create custom forms and tools

Top 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 See More

Top Pro

OUYA support

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Flexibility is provided by a strong component programming model

Top Con

Waisted resources

Slow, buggy, expensive and 1000 other problems. See More

Top Pro

.NET functions can be used

ReactiveX,async/await, etc. .NET functions can be used in Unity. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Great extensions are updated daily on GitHub

GitHub has a lot of extensions. See More

Top Con

Bad model importing

Top Pro

Has awesome plugins

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Free for mobile development

Unity allows free mobile development. There are some limitations. See More

Top Con

Bad raycasts

Specs

API:DirectX 10, DirectX 11, DirectX 12

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux;

Mobile targets:Windows Phone; iOS; Android; BlackBerry 10; Tizen

After 4 years of development and promises ShiVa 2.0 has JUST gotten into beta access. See More

423 138

score 33 · Answer 19

ShiVa

Top Con

ShiVa 2.0 has been worked on for nearly 4 years!

Top Pro

Straightforward pricing with capable free option

The free ShiVa Web version is limited to web publication, but otherwise has the same capabilities as the $200 ShiVa Basic. Upgrading to the $1000 ShiVa Advanced brings tools geared toward team development and professional releases, such as integrated SVN support and profiling tools. All versions are royalty-free. See More

Top Con

Outdated

The current version 1.9.2 of ShiVa was released in December 2013. While there is active development on version 2.0, its beta is available only to paid licensees of the current version. See More

Top Pro

Lua can be used for fast coding and C++ for optimization

All game logic can be scripted in Lua. ShiVa also provides a cross-compiler from Lua to C++, allowing Lua scripts to be further optimized and compiled to native code for performance. See More

Top Con

High Cost

Costs $200 for the basic version alone, which allows you to publish to any format other than web. The Team/Pro version costs $1000 See More

Top Pro

Great support

In addition to the help forum, Basic and Advanced licensees have chat and direct email access to the developers. See More

Top Pro

Native c++ export

Top Pro

C++ plugin development options

Top Pro

Great performance on mobile

Smaller platform specific executables, native code export, good FPS even for complex scenes. ShiVa has great advanced optimization features, including PVS and LOD, decreasing number of drawcalls even in complex level. Platform specific profiles allow developers to customize size and compression level for textures and test those settings directly in editor. Other engine features, like lightning baking, mesh combining and GPU skinning will boost performance too. See More

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows

Mobile targets:Windows Phone; iOS; Android; BlackBerry 10; BlackBerry Tablet OS; Marmalade; WebOS

Supported languages:Lua-based

Torque3D is a free game engine licensed under MIT with source code available on GitHub. See More

33 19

score 34 · Answer 20

Torque3D

Top Pro

Free and open source

Top Con

Aging

If you are planing on using some of the latest graphical options, pick another engine. See More

Top Pro

Incredible Performance on low-end PCs

Even on low-end-PCs the Engine and its games run perfect. See More

Top Con

Weak AI

Movement AI is limited to moving in a straight line. See More

Top Pro

Many stock features for a FPS but flexible enough for other Genres

Top Con

Limited platforms

Torque3D only publishes to desktop and mobile. See More

Top Pro

Continually updated by a dedicated and skilled community

Top Pro

Easy to implement 32 to 64 multi-player networking

Torque's approach to networking makes this one of the best performing and easiest to implement multiplayer game engines available. See More

Top Pro

Redistributable tools

Specs

Supported languages:C++;TorqueScript