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

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

2148 325

score 824 · Answer 2

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

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 3

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

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

17 9

score 136 · Answer 4

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

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

136 24

score 205 · Answer 5

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:-

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

205 37

score 634 · Answer 6

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

The methods are not defined. See More

634 171

score 72 · Answer 7

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

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

72 27

score 423 · Answer 8

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

Normally, you can only use the Source Engine to develop "source-mods" (as Steam calls them), however the developer wiki is correct in saying Valve have a proven track-record for finding source-mods and turning them into fully-fledged games, Black Mesa Source is a good example of this, as it began life as a source-mod available for free, however Valve turned it into a fully-fledged and paid game. See More

423 138

score 27 · Answer 9

Source

Top Con

Only for mods

Top Pro

Great documentation

Valve's official documentation website is great for newbies. It demonstrates the pros and cons of the engine (and since the website isn't maintained by Valve, but instead the community, the pros and cons are largely unbiased). There are also a number of pages dedicated to entities used within official Valve games and also community-made mods that were turned into full-fledged games by Valve. These pages explain the ins and outs of how most source programming works. There are also guides for Valve's tools which are both included in Source SDK and in any Valve-developed game. See More

Top Con

SDK is outdated and difficult to use

Source SDK has not been updated in ages, and has instead been "re-released" under different names, e.g "Source SDK 2013 Singleplayer". It's honestly easier to use the version of SDK included with any Source game, namely Portal 2 or DOTA 2, since both have a variant of Source SDK that is more updated than anything you can find in the tools section of Steam. See More

Top Pro

Runs on every potato pc

Since it has precalculated lighting, this engine is great for low end PCs too. See More

Top Pro

Many basic entities

You don't need to code your own door or ladder etc. You can pretty much use every entity used in Half-Life 2 yourself easily. See More

Top Pro

Visual logic, no programming

Of course you can program stuff into source but for level design only, source has a really easy input/output system for your level logic (e.g. doors, trigger when player walks into room...). See More

Top Pro

Has a built-in video capture and editing application

Source includes Source Filmmaker, a video capture and editing application. See More

Top Pro

Easy way to export or load source models to unity and maps

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows

Console targets:Xbox; Xbox 360; PlayStation 3

Mobile targets:Android

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

27 13

score 34 · Answer 10

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

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

34 21

score 25 · Answer 11

ShiVa3D

Top Pro

Streamlined API

Top Con

Outdated

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

Top Con

ShiVa 2.0 has been worked on for nearly 4 years!

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

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

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

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 Pro

C++ plugin development options

Top Pro

Native C++ export

Top Pro

Robust

Top Pro

Competent GUI system

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

Thanks to the increasing popularity of Babylon, it has a growing community of helpful developers. It's easy to find help on their forum. See More

25 4

score 229 · Answer 12

Babylon.js

Top Pro

Small (but helpful) community

Top Con

Young project

Babylon is quite young compared to many of it's competitors (released in 2013). The community is still somewhat small, however growing quickly. See More

Top Pro

A good amount of easy to understand resources to learn from

Babylon provides a playground where you can explore examples and play with the code. The official documentation offers a wide variety of well-written tutorials on topics from beginner to advanced. Additionally, there are many tutorials written by the community available that you can find by doing a google search. See More

Top Con

Still evolving

Top Pro

Great base shader material

Top Pro

Actively developed

Babylon has great project health, with activity on Github daily for bug fixes and new features. See More

Specs

Rendering:Physically based rendering

Special FX:particles, postprocesses, lens, glow, etc..

Tech:WebGL1/2 + JavaScript or TypeScript

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

229 26

score 758 · Answer 13

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

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

758 64

score 72 · Answer 14

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

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

72 12

score 47 · Answer 15

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;

Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great. See More

47 9

score 52 · Answer 16

Amethyst

Top Pro

It's free and open-source

Top Con

Can be buggy at times

Top Pro

There are more user friendly window managers available

There are certainly more user friendly window managers available for MacOS, such as Divvy or Moom. Amethyst, however, is more powerful and customizable than the more user friendly options available and therefore may be a better choice for a user looking for more advanced capabilities and customization. See More

Top Pro

Works with keyboard shortcuts, no mouse needed

As it's designed to work closely to how xmonad, Amethyst uses keyboard shortcuts to control the windows being used, meaning no mouse input is necessary. This can make for a faster way to control windows. See More

Top Pro

Multi-monitor suppport

Top Pro

Has many common layouts to choose from (fullscreen, floating, row, column, wide, etc)

Top Pro

Can switch between tiling and floating mode

Top Pro

Under active development

Top Pro

Configured via UI

No CONFIG file provides security and will avoid making amethyst crash. Instead configured via simple UI See More

Top Pro

True tiling means never losing track of windows under a huge pile of others

Specs

Control NPC spawning position, frequency, maximum enemy active at once, and maximum enemies created by the generator. See More

52 10

score 1 · Answer 17

Shoot 'Em Up Kit

Top Pro

NPC Generators

Top Con

Lacking some details

No information on file formats or codecs in the manual. See More

Top Pro

Support for user-created HLSL shaders

Both model and post-process shaders. See More

Top Con

Tutorials are too short and too old

The only real tutorial videos are 1 or 2 minutes long, and date from 2013. See More

Top Pro

Great for shoot 'em ups

The name fits the functionality. See More

Specs

Steam Rating:Mixed

1 0

score 135 · Answer 18

MonoGame

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Support for iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows (both OpenGL and DirectX), Windows 8 Store, Windows Phone 8, PlayStation Mobile, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and the OUYA console with even more platforms on the way. See More

Top Con

Slow rate of updates

Versions 3.9 is overdue by a year, and version 4.0 is set to release in 2040. See More

Top Pro

Open source

All the code is available to you ensuring you'll have the ability to make changes when you need to or even port to whole new platforms. See More

Top Con

Non-Windows tools are a bit funky

Monogame support for Xamarin Studio or Monodevelop is a bit shaky especially for library references. Only good non-Windows IDE compatible with MonoGame is Rider and that costs money & isn't open-source. See More

Top Pro

Well-known and documented API

The framework implements the XNA 4 API, so games made in XNA can be ported to other platforms using this. This was the same API used by the Xbox Live Indie Games platform so there's lots of documentation online for it. See More

Top Pro

Managed code

By leveraging C# and other .NET languages on Microsoft and Mono platforms you can write modern, fast, and reliable game code. See More

Top Pro

Good community

The community MonoGame has to offer is helpful and mature. See More

Top Pro

Performance on desktop

The performance on desktop platforms matches that of C++, but you still get all the pleasant features that C# has to offer. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

Languages:C#

Mobile targets:Android, IOS, Windows phone

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

135 27

score 345 · Answer 19

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)

Includes easy to use 3D editor for quickly clicking together 3D games. See More

345 61

score 55 · Answer 20

CopperCube

Top Pro

Allows creating 3D apps and games without programming

Top Pro

Good 3D editor

Top Pro

Native WebGL support

Can create 3D games as real WebGL apps, running inside websites. Doesn't use a cross compiler, so WebGL apps are small and download quickly. See More

Top Pro

Good terrain editor

CopperCube includes a terrain editor. Terrain can be drawn with height painting tools directly in the editor, textures can be painted quickly with automatic texture blending into the terrain. There are also tools for placing grass and bushes, and for distributing meshes automatically over the terrain. See More

Top Pro

Available on Steam

CopperCube is available on Steam It was Greenlit. See More

Top Pro

Exports to irrlicht

It was also written by the founder of irrlicht, although it is not open source. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn and to use

Top Pro

Fast prototyping

You can quickly develop an experimental working model of the product (prototype), because the engine gives you access to a lot of prefabs, plugins and settings. And, you can use the visual programming to speed up the process, even if later you have to write code in order to improve the final product. See More

Top Pro

Oculus Rift support

Supports both DK2 and DK1. See More

Specs

Dev platforms:Windows; Macintosh

Desktop targets:Windows; Macintosh

Mobile targets:Android

Supported languages:Javascript; ActionScript 3