What is the best alternative to&#x20;Panda3D?

The methods are not defined. See More

2148 325

score 72 · Answer 2

jMonkey3

Top Con

Terrible API reference

Top Pro

Java is a great development platform

Java is a well-optimized just-in-time compiled language. It's faster than languages without an effective native-code compiler such as Python or Ruby, similar in speed to other just-in-time compiled languages such as C#, while slightly slower than compiled languages such as C or C++ (with some low-level and numeric benchmarks being similar to C++). Java also has a wide variety of high-class IDEs available. See More

Top Con

Not an engine for total beginners

While it's clear that you need to know Java first before using this engine, it is recommended that you have some programming experience as well. Most performance issues and memory leaks are more due to bad programming practices than the engine itself. See More

Top Pro

Multiplatform support

Code can be ported to mobile (iOS is in the works) and other Android supported devices with minor changes to the code (just change some implementations that vary on the platform such as inputs and user interface). It can even run on certain Raspberry Pi devices. See More

Top Con

Slow release cycle

jMonkey3 lacks manpower to have a fast and decent release cycle. See More

Top Pro

Free and open-source

jMonkey is completely free, meaning it's possible to develop and release a game with no fees or royalties. Because it is open-source, jMonkey has plenty of people fixing bugs and, adding to the engine as well as creating a variety of plugins that can be used in the engine. See More

Top Con

Relies on archaic tool chain

jMonkey Engine uses Apache Ant for build automation, which is archaic and backwards, even by Java standards. See More

Top Pro

Not limited to using its own IDE

Unlike some engines, jMonkey doesn't force its own IDE. You can use its Netbeans-based IDE, but you can also set up a project to work in another IDE such as Eclipse. You can still use the special tools from jMonkey's IDE in such projects. See More

Top Pro

Engine modifications can be made using Java

Because jMonkey is implemented in Java, the same language its apps are typically developed in, developers will have an easier time modifying the engine to their needs. See More

Top Pro

Has everything

jMonkey3 handles input from computers and mobile devices. It handles networking, physics, rendering, terrain, and cinematics. See More

Top Pro

Ease of extensibility

Engine is modifiable. See More

Top Pro

Freedom of choice for architecture

The user is not compelled to use any programming architecture nor standard in order to make a project working. JME allows the freedom to use what is best for a game. See More

Top Pro

Offers both low-level and high-level ways of editing shaders

Modifying shaders can be done either via a visual tool called Shader Nodes or via GLSL that allow you to make your own shaders without the engine getting in the way or having to hack around to do so. See More

Specs

Mobile targets:Android; iOS

Supported languages:Java

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

72 27

score 136 · Answer 3

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

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

136 24

score 170 · Answer 4

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

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

170 39

score 824 · Answer 5

Unreal Engine 4

Top Pro

A visual scripting system for non-coders enables quick prototyping

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

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

824 181

score 758 · Answer 6

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

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

758 64

score 394 · Answer 7

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

No complicated stuff, just super easy. Anybody who knows Python and nothing else could make a game using Ursina. See More

394 50

score 117 · Answer 8

ursina

Top Pro

Supports 3D

Top Pro

Super easy to learn

Top Pro

Great community

The Ursina Engine Discord server is very helpful. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

You can find anything you need in the docs. See More

Top Pro

Great future

New and Blooming Ursina, derived from Panda3D has some amazing potential. See More

Top Pro

Open Source and moddable

The full source code is on Github, you can modify it easily and make your own game engine. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac

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

117 3

score 345 · Answer 9

Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator

Top Pro

A proven engine for mobile development

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)

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

345 61

score 28 · Answer 10

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 173 · Answer 11

Unity

Top Pro

Great community support

Unity is bolstered by a huge, helpful community via its official forums, wiki, Unity Answers, and Unity Asset Store; plus the most-subscribed subreddit of any game engine. See More

Top Con

No native editor for Linux

Though it builds for Linux, the Unity Editor runs only on Windows and Mac. Some users have successfully run the Windows version on Linux via Wine. See More

Top Pro

OUYA support

Top Pro

Over 20 platforms

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

Very optimized

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

Flexibility is provided by a strong component programming model

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 Pro

Powerful standard shaders

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

Can create custom forms and tools

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 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. See More

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. This allows it to be more powerful than other, simpler drag-and-drop engines such as Game Maker Studio, although it can take a bit more experience to learn the workflow. See More

Top Pro

As of Unity 5 all engine features are free for everyone

As long as the company makes $100k or less, Unity's free version can be used to release games without purchasing the pro version. See More

Top Pro

Supports 2D and 3D

With Unity knowledge of just one engine is needed to be able to create both 2D and 3D games. See More

Top Pro

Great community

Great Community support through Forums and Unity Answers. See More

Top Pro

Provides access to a huge list of assets through Asset Store

There's an Asset Store, providing free and paid assets (including components). It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection. See More

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

173 38

score 142 · Answer 12

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

Lots of references, tutorials and open source code to learn from. See More

142 42

score 634 · Answer 13

libGDX

Top Pro

Lots of resources to learn from

Top Con

Not starter friendly

Even default applications fail to load in Android. It doesn't have any documentation on errors either. See More

Top Pro

Great performance across devices

While it may not always have the best performance for a particular device or system, it's one of the few engines which consistently performs very well across different platforms. See More

Top Con

Documentation could be better

Other than a brief installation / getting started overview, libGDX's documentation consists of an official wiki with several incomplete pages, and automated Javadocs. The community recognizes these shortcomings, and new users are encouraged to ask for help. See More

Top Pro

Fantastic UI toolkit (scene2d)

scene2d is a 2D scene graph, scene2d.ui is a UI toolkit on top of that. It enables very complex mobile and desktop UIs. See More

Top Con

The project slowed down in development

The number of active developers has decreased, many open issues and pull requests. See More

Top Pro

Can use any JVM language

Since it's built with Java and runs on the JVM, any language that compiles to Java bytecode can be used to develop games with libGDX. See More

Top Con

Build system is clunky

LibGDX uses Gradle, which is very demanding of memory and makes IDEs freeze on anything if your computer is not powerful enough. See More

Top Pro

Uses Box2D

A Java port of the Box2D physics engine is included in libGDX. See More

Top Con

Does not create compiled code

LibGDX runs entirely on Java and does not create executable binaries. See More

Top Pro

Allows you to migrate from 2D to 3D within same framework

LibGDX supports both 2D and 3D game development. Allowing developers to migrate from 2D to 3D with ease without having to switch the engine they are using or having to learn a new API. See More

Top Con

A bit difficult to use

This engine is not well put together. Is made from various free modules each with their own peculiarities. At times it feels you need to learn a couple of libraries rather than just one. Is not an engine for beginners as it requires coding. Lots of coding. You need to be intermediate to advanced in Java to develop in LibGDX. See More

Top Pro

Doesn't force a specific design

Unlike some engines, which only allow you to make your game in a few specific ways, libGDX allows you to design any type of game you wish as it is extremely customisable. See More

Top Pro

Active and helpful community

The libGDX community, in the official libGDX forum is extremely helpful and approachable for any kind of question regardless of the its quality or difficulty. The forums themselves are a very helpful resource for any issue or guide simply by searching past posts in there. In addition to the forums, there's also the official #libgdx IRC channel on Freenode. See More

Top Pro

Interfacing with platform specific code

Sometimes it is necessary to access platform specific APIs, e.g., adding advertisement services or leaderboard functionality provided by frameworks. See More

Top Pro

Free, open source & permissive license

libGDX uses the Apache License 2.0. Not only is libGDX free and open source but also it's license gives you a lot of power over the engine. As long as you provide a copy of the license, give credit, do not hold devs liable and do not use libGDX logo in any engine forks you can do pretty much anything you want. See More

Top Pro

Kotlin support

It is written in Java so you can easily make games using Kotlin and Ktx project will help you get all advantages of this language. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to customize

Top Pro

Constantly improved

LibGDX itself is pretty mature, and get updates not quite frequently, but various libraries for it are actively updated. See More

Top Pro

Across platform support

You can write once and run anywhere (Android, IOS, Desktop, Browser) also lately came with lib to deal with VR. See More

Top Pro

Support for 3rd party tools

libGDX has built in support for many 3rd party tools, including (but not limited to) Bullet Physics, Box2DLights and the well-praised Tiled Map Editor. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials to get you going

Even though the official documentation might be lacking, there are many tutorials on YouTube for libGDX. See More

Top Pro

Excellent font rendering support

Very good tools for rendering fonts. See More

Top Pro

Similar to the Microsoft XNA framework

Old XNA users may like libGDX since it's API is actually very similar to XNA's. See More

Top Pro

Focusing on object pool patterns, to control memory without pointers

Unlike Unity or other engine, it allows to optimize a language that uses garbage collector when using patterns of objects you can control the use of memory without needing a language like C / C ++, getting the same speed in a more productive language. See More

Specs

License:Apache

Languages:Java

Desktop targets:Windows; OSX; Linux; HTML5

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

634 171

score 17 · Answer 14

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

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

17 9

score 34 · Answer 15

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

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

34 21

score 14 · Answer 16

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++

Good for newbie game creators. Can be used for prototyping: on several occasions was used to make a demo/experimental version before creating a final commercial product on different engine. See More

14 11

score 118 · Answer 17

Adventure Game Studio

Top Pro

Easy to learn tool

Top Con

Natively supports only 2D

2D only native support, 3D could be supported with plugins though. See More

Top Pro

Completely free and open source

AGS is licensed under Artistic License 2.0 and is completely free for use for creating both freeware and commercial games. See More

Top Con

Uses dated tech

Engine is based on the old technologies, which impose number of limitations and may cause problems on latest systems (level of annoyance varies depending on your priorities). See More

Top Pro

Relatively well documented

Besides the manual there are multiple text and video tutorials and code samples written by community. See More

Top Con

Graphics renderer is a bit dated

Graphics renderer is not well optimized for high-resolution games and complex effects. See More

Top Pro

Used for a number of high-profile commercial releases

Adventure Game Studio has been used to develop games such as "Resonance", "Blackwell" series, "Gemini Rue", "Primordia". See More

Top Con

No visual editor for scripts

You have to actually write all scripts yourself. See More

Top Pro

Lots of assets available

An extensive library of game templates and script modules accumulated over years. You can construct a simple game in hours (if you know what you are doing). See More

Top Con

Development is slow

Further development of the engine is currently slow, done by only few people in their free time. See More

Top Pro

Friendly community

An old, big and active community which would support newcomers not only in learning basics of the engine, but can help with every aspect of game making (including art, voice acting, moral support, etc). See More

Top Con

AGS Script isn't as full-featured as other scripting languages

Its own scripting language has lower syntax capabilities compared to modern script languages. See More

Top Con

Assets cover almost exclusively adventure/quest genre

The features, script functions and game templates are very biased towards adventure/quest genre. The non-adventure games were made in AGS (2D shooters, platformers, turn-based strategies), but their development usually requires to write everything from scratch. See More

Top Con

Workflow is closely coupled with the editor

Workflow is very tied to the editor and custom file formats, which can cause problems for bigger, more professional projects (interfering with source control, parallel development, automated builds, etc) See More

Specs

License:Artistic License 2.0

Languages:AGS Script

Dev platforms:Windows

Desktop targets:Windows; Linux

Pygame uses Python as its scripting language. Python is widely considered one of the easiest languages to grasp even for beginners. See More

118 9

score 320 · Answer 18

pygame

Top Pro

Easy Python syntax

Top Con

Deathly slow

Top Pro

Very easy to understand

The API is very straightforward. See More

Top Con

Nonexistent community

No good forums, wiki, or other ways to reach other Pygame developers. See More

Top Pro

Good canvas system

Pygame has a drawing system that allows the user to create and draw on an unlimited number of canvases. See More

Top Con

Very basic

Pretty much just a wrapper for SDL. See More

Top Con

Pygame is a multimedia framework, not a game engine

Physics, AI and networking are not supported. See More

Top Con

Messy documentation

The docs are messy, and some basic functions are infuriating to work out. There's even some places in the documentation where it's clearly wrong about how a method is called/what the arguments really do. See More

Top Con

Outdated

Pygame uses a really old version of SDL and is missing some of the features developed for SDL2. See More

Top Con

Hasn't been updated in years

Hasn't been updated in years. See More

Specs

License:LGPL

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. See More

320 35

score 72 · Answer 19

PlayCanvas

Top Pro

Real-time collaborative online editor tool

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Con

No collision offset

Top Pro

Rendering engine runs on the browser

Has an advanced WebGL renderer that runs in the browser. See More

Top Con

Not many tutorials

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Open source

PlayCanvas is fully open source and is under active development. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to use

Top Pro

Loads extremely fast

Top 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. See More

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