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Godot
All
45
Experiences
Pros
30
Cons
14
Specs
Top
Pro
Fully dedicated 2D engine, no hacks
Godot has a mature 2D engine with many features used by modern 2D games.
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Con
Primarily supports own language (GD Script)
Although C# is also supported by Godot, it is only supported by a separate version, and Mono must be downloaded separately. While GDScript is very accessible, and if you know Python you'll pick it up fast, having to learn a new language to fully make use of the platform can be a bit discouraging. And for those learning to code as well as learning Godot for the first time, many would rather learn a language they can 'take with them' when they explore other platforms in the future.
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Pro
Lightweight
The executable is portable and less than 40 MB in size.
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Con
C++ Engine API not very friendly
The base C++ code from Godot is not documented, it's hard to set it up, to compile and hard to extend, it could use better programming standards.
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Pro
Under constant development
This engine barely released one year ago has more than 1000 forks on github and about 100 developers. Not only that just a bit of browsing trough issues you will quickly find out the dev community loves new esp free technology and does not shy away from completely rewriting parts of the engine. The audio engine is being completely rewritten to use threads and so forth.
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Con
Annoying minor bugs
Minor bugs can go unaddressed for some time, due to it being a free program.
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Pro
User friendly UI for all your team
Non-programmers (musicians, artists, etc) can join the development easily.
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Con
GDScript is quite immature language
GDScript is copy of python and the real problem is, it is not python. Which means it cannot have all the power and new features that is available in Python or other programming language. It does have some good features but it is not good enough for what you need if you want to deep dive into game development. You can just feel that by the godot team is solving that matter by supporting mono version. Because C# is popular in other game engine and it contains all the new features that is available from new programming language. If i give you very simple example for why GDScript is immature, GDScript does not support asynchronous programming. Which is very efficient for performance of your game. You may mention about multi-threading because asynchronous programming is one way of multi-threading. However If you try that in Godot, you cannot multi-threading where you want to implement asynchronous system. For example, Autoload (Fake singleton) where you want to manage data in real time. Autoload is not real singleton. It is not a separated thread that manage data. Therefore everything is synchronous in autoload. Even though you create new thread from Autoload script, your game will just stop and wait for your thread to finish its task...
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Pro
Free and open source
Godot is licensed under MIT license. Anyone can grab the source from here, and compile the engine themselves.
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Con
Godot 3/4 split
The recent release of Godot 4 brings new features, but isn't yet fully documented, and performance may not be as optimized.
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Pro
Editor and runtime are fully cross-platform
You can run Godot on all 3 major operating systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) and build your game to all available platforms from each without any platform-specific work needed. All platforms including Linux are supported first class.
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Con
No console targets
Given that you can target both desktops and consoles with the same code base in other engines, the lack of support for consoles in Godot is pretty hard to get past if targeting desktops for a game. But asking for an open-source engine to target consoles is probably too much to ask. But it would be interesting to see some legacy consoles targeted even if current ones cannot be.
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Pro
Drag & drop interface
Many parts of the editor allow you to drag & drop, which makes working with assets and scene trees a joy.
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Con
It's hard to learn
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Pro
The list of supported languages is growing
Officially, Godot supported languages for now will be GDScript, C#(Mono), VisualScript and C++.
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Con
Difficult to optimize
Godot has an OOP architecture. Everything is an object internally and data is spread among many classes, thus it's difficult to optimize (i.e. not cache friendly, difficuly to vectorize or paralellize, etc). Read about "Data Oriented Design" for more info about the problems and solutions.
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Pro
Can be deployed to multiple platforms
Deploy games to desktops (Windows/OS X/Linux), smartphones (iOS/Android/BlackBerry), and the web (HTML5 via Emscripten).
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Con
Strange terminology at its base
Scenes can be made up of other scenes. That makes some sense. But even the smallest object (or prefab or asset) in a scene -- such as that spoon on the table or the marble on the floor -- is still called a scene... except when it's called a node. This is a bit odd for those coming from other engines. With all the great decisions behind the basic design of this engine, the choice of this term from all the potential other terms out there seems really out of place and only serves as a constant reminder that not everything about Godot is great.
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Pro
Integrated animation editor
Every property can be animated.
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Con
No built-in way to import atlases
Godot does not have an easy and automatic way to import atlases created by other tools. However, there are plugins that can be used to import atlases from other engines.
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Pro
Built-in physics
Add physics to 2D and 3D scenes, through rigid and static bodies, characters, raycasts, vehicles and more.
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Top
Con
2DPhysics is weak compared to Box2d
Box2d has much more features.
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Pro
Unified game editor interface
All the game development work is done inside one program: the engine editor. The scripting is done in the same program. No need for Eclipse or other front-end editors.
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Con
NoAdmob or other AdNetwork support
Godot has no native support for implementing advertisements into your game.
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Pro
Instancing and node concept makes sense
The node and the instancing concept work very well and helps developers to structure content efficiently.
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Con
Many buggy and half-finished features
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Pro
Fun to use
An important aspect that can't be grasped without using the engine for a few days. The Interface is evolving nicely and making games is just fun.
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Con
Hard for a Unity user
Coming from a Unity background, Godot engine is hard.
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Pro
Internationalization of the editor
You can change the language shown in menus. Godot translations can be found here.
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Pro
Easy to learn scripting language
Godot has their own scripting language called GDScript. The scripting language is easy to learn with Python-like syntax, but it is not Python. It's very powerful, easy to learn, and it's free of unnecessary things because it was custom built for optimized integration with the Godot Engine. It can be used to add custom behaviors to any object by extending it with scripting, using the built-in editor with syntax highlighting and code completion. A built-in debugger with breakpoints and stepping can be used and graphs for possible bottlenecks can be checked.
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Pro
Really good community
The community is great and really cares about the engine. It is easy to get help and to be part of Godot's future.
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Pro
Creating editor tools is a breeze
Godot Engine is itself a Godot game. By adding the "tool" keyword to the top of a script, you can design extensions for the editor itself INSIDE the editor. Integrating these editor scripts into a bundled plugin for sharing is extremely easy to do.
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Pro
Friendly towards Version Control Systems
The engine is build not only to support version control but to really use it. Scene files for example which usually get compiled into some sort of unreadable data stay in a text format - that way you can actually see your changes in a version control system like Git.
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Pro
Doesn't need to be installed into the system
Godot is very portable, you can download the file from a website then put it on a USB and run it on your other computer without any troublesome errors.
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Pro
Easily expanded scripting system
With 3.0's addition of NativeScript and PluginScript via GDNative, developers can easily define bindings for new scripting languages. In addition to the primarily supported C++, GDScript, VisualScript, and C# languages, the community has contributed D, Nim, and Python as well with more on the way.
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Pro
Incredible documentation after 3.2.2 beta
The documentation used to be weak, but now we have nathen with his help the documentation is the strongest advantage.
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Pro
Scene Based editing
Godot gives you the ability to create scenes to make your life easier, with reusable objects and things you want to incorporate in your games. This makes the game making processvery streamlined and organized.
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Pro
Built-in documentation linked to the internal ScriptEditor
The editor has a fully searchable index of class API documentation for everything the engine offers (NOT just a web interface). You can easily open the documentation for any class by Ctrl-clicking the class's name in the in-engine text editor for scripts.
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Pro
Simple and readable codebase
The engine's source code is easy to read and understand with a self-documenting approach to code design. You don't have to wait months or years for other people to fix an engine bug that is important to your game. Often times, you can spend an hour or two of your own time to fix whatever problems you encounter yourself.
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Pro
Easy to get involved
No need to learn anything with node, you can build a game without typing a line of code + has visual scripting.
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Pro
Engine is yours
There is no royalty and the game you made + engine itself is yours.
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Pro
Can be installed on Steam
You can easily install Godot via the Steam store.
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Pro
Comprehensive tooling
In addition to the scene editor and the script editor (with debugger), the engine also provides a tile map editor, an animation editor (not just for rigs), a performance monitor, a network profiler, and an audio bus console.
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Pro
It has a visual scripting tool (Godot 3)
It has a great visual scripting tool. It's a great choice if you don't like to code. This was however removed in Godot 4, so you will need to use the (still supported) Godot 3 branch for visual scripting.
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Specs
Platforms:
Windows, Linux, Mac, Android
Popular Language Bindings:
GDScript, C#, C++
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Experiences
Free
2148
325
Esenthel
All
24
Experiences
Pros
17
Cons
6
Specs
Top
Con
One-man developer
Although the complete engine is maintained by a single, highly-skilled individual, he can be limited to what he is able to see or perceive, and sometimes he doesn't recognize broken or incomplete features until he sees it firsthand and sometimes doesn't recognize valid reports from his users. But when he does recognize the gap in the engine's feature-set, he is quick to make adjustments and updates.
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Top
Pro
Quicker development by using the integrated code editor
Esenthel has a built-in code editor which drastically simplifies the programming process. Programming with Esenthel is based on C++, however, when using the code editor there's no need to make separate .cpp or .h files. Code can be written once and the editor will be separating definitions and declarations automatically in the background allowing for quicker development.
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Top
Con
Lack of in-depth tutorials
There are plenty of beginner coding tutorials which serve as a basic introduction for a new user to get up to speed, but once having passed that stage there is a real lack of free more advanced tutorials/examples/code snippets demonstrating the finer details of the vast and varied API functions.
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Top
Pro
Can be easily extended
Built in pure C++ so it is easy to use and extend however needed.
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Top
Con
Slow roadmap implementation
Bugs are fixed promptly, but the developer maintains a growing 'roadmap' of features with no indication to users of time frame and priority of feature implementation.
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Top
Pro
Available on Steam
Esenthel is available on Steam.
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Top
Con
Lack of editing tools
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Top
Pro
Can be used for collaborative development
Esenthel comes with tools allowing for multiple developers to work on one project at the same time in collaborative mode. Every change made is instantly visible by other team members.
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Top
Con
Web support practically non-existing
Web support exists only on paper. The way it works is that Emscripten is used to convert an entire project to unreadable Javascript. That practically only works for very simple demos, no real-world projects.
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Pro
Engine issues are resolved quickly
The author is very device minded and able to handle any problem quickly and effectively and he has a good track record of listening to requests.
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Top
Con
Expensive
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Top
Pro
Access to full source code
Having easy access to the full source makes it possible for any skilled developer to add features that a project requires.
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Top
Pro
Attractive licensing
Free to try, with license as cheap as 9.50$/month (with yearly subscription), 11.40$/month (monthly subscription) or full source code license 228$/year.
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Top
Pro
Incredibly stable
The engine is rock solid and stable which, considering its extensive feature set, is a huge plus for game developers
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Top
Pro
Helpful and responsive forum
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Top
Pro
Good support for Android and iOS
Android and iOS support is pretty stable and easy to develop on. It's possible to, for example, develop the entire game on Windows or Mac and then easily compile for Android and iOS.
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Top
Pro
Can import a wide variety of formats
3D - FBX, DAE, OBJ, 3DS, B3D, MS3D, BVH, ASE, PSK/PSA 2D - BMP, PNG, JPG, TGA, DDS, TIF, WEBP, PSD, ICO Videos - VP9, Theora Sounds - OGG, WAV, MP3 (once decoding patents expire)
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Top
Pro
Constant development and progress
New features or update to features are provided monthly.
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Top
Pro
Supports in-app purchases
IAP support for both mobile and desktop devices.
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Top
Pro
Supports multiple compression libraries
LZMA, LZHAM, LZ4, ZLIB, Snappy, RLE
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Pro
Oculus Rift native support
Oculus Rift API integrated into the engine platform.
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Pro
Supports modern graphics and sound APIs
Graphics - DirectX 9/10/11, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, WebGL Sound - DirectSound, OpenAL, OpenSL
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Pro
Rock solid
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Specs
Dev platforms:
Windows; OSX; Linux
Desktop targets:
Windows; OSX; Linux
Mobile targets:
iOS; Android
Supported languages:
C++
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Experiences
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54
17
Unreal Engine 4
All
44
Experiences
Pros
17
Cons
26
Specs
Top
Pro
A visual scripting system for non-coders enables quick prototyping
Blueprints are authoring tools designed for non programmers so designers and other team members can help tweak and prototype. UE4's Blueprint scripts resemble flowcharts where each box represents a function or value, with connections between them representing program flow. This provides a better at-a-glance indication of game logic than a simple list of events, and makes complex behaviors easier to accomplish and games a lot faster to prototype.
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Top
Con
Very high build size
A blank project will build in to a minimum of 200 MB.
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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.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Powerful material/shader system
Allows a texture/material artist or VFX artist to create amazing effects from the ground up.
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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.
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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.
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Top
Con
Hard engine for beginners
This engine not easy for beginners
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Top
Pro
Realistic graphics
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Top
Con
Steep learning curve
Especially when compared to its primary competitor, Unity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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Pro
Spectacular lighting visuals
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Con
Royalty based
5% of profits will go to Unreal after $3000 earned in a quarter.
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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).
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Con
They spend more time adding features than fixing existing ones
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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.
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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.
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Pro
AAA Ready
This is ready to make the next AAA game.
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Con
Poor source control support
Merge tool is not working.
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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.
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Con
Poor quality assurance on their releases
After each release they almost immediately release a hotfix. And another one. And another one.
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Pro
Quick release-cycle
New feature releases can be commonly expected about once a month.
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Con
Unreal Engine crashes a lot if you don't have the required system requirements
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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.
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Con
Sparse Resources for C++
C++ happens to be the main suite for Unreal, yet the documentation is very, very sparse.
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Pro
Proven track record
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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
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Pro
No coding experience needed
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Con
Difficult for Mac users
If you're installing it on Mac, you simply download Epic games launcher and watch it download nothing endlessly.
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Con
Tutorials do not go in-depth enough
The blueprint tutorial just teaches how to turn on a light when you press f.
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Con
Proprietary
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Con
Not available on Linux
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Con
No Terrain Editor included
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Con
Bad support
The epic games team only assists with billing and account issues, not bugs.
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Con
Terrible physics
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Con
Frequent crashes
Often the editor crashes interrupting your work.
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Con
Poor error messages
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Con
Rarely works
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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
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Experiences
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824
181
libGDX
All
26
Experiences
Pros
19
Cons
6
Specs
Top
Pro
Lots of resources to learn from
Lots of references, tutorials and open source code to learn from.
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Con
Not starter friendly
Even default applications fail to load in Android. It doesn't have any documentation on errors either.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Con
The project slowed down in development
The number of active developers has decreased, many open issues and pull requests.
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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.
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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.
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Pro
Uses Box2D
A Java port of the Box2D physics engine is included in libGDX.
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Con
Does not create compiled code
LibGDX runs entirely on Java and does not create executable binaries.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Pro
Very easy to customize
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Pro
Constantly improved
LibGDX itself is pretty mature, and get updates not quite frequently, but various libraries for it are actively updated.
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Pro
Across platform support
You can write once and run anywhere (Android, IOS, Desktop, Browser) also lately came with lib to deal with VR.
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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.
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Pro
Lots of tutorials to get you going
Even though the official documentation might be lacking, there are many tutorials on YouTube for libGDX.
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Pro
Excellent font rendering support
Very good tools for rendering fonts.
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Pro
Similar to the Microsoft XNA framework
Old XNA users may like libGDX since it's API is actually very similar to XNA's.
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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.
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Specs
License:
Apache
Languages:
Java
Dev platforms:
Windows; OSX; Linux
Desktop targets:
Windows; OSX; Linux; HTML5
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Experiences
Free
634
171
Unity 3D
All
45
Experiences
Pros
22
Cons
22
Specs
Top
Pro
Lots of resources to learn from
Unity3D provides an exhaustive documentation where everything is given a full description supplied by a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions to understand the ins and outs of the engine. In addition there's an ever-growing community that can offer advice to help resolve any situations that may arise. Along with the official Unity resources, there are many high quality (and often free) third party tutorials available.
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Con
Very bad terrain
Native terrain creates a lot of draw calls which is bad for performance.
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Pro
Easy learning curve
The way the editor is structured, by setting scripts on objects, and the use of a high-level language, C#, makes it easy to learn.
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Con
Adds too many features without fixing earlier issues, rapidly increasing number of bugs that will never get fixed
Unity continues to add many new features without fixing earlier issues. Unity is either understaffed, overambitious, or both, resulting in a continual increase of problems and degraded experience across a number of platforms. Many bugs are reported daily and never get addressed, and there are many bugs from previous versions that are never looked at or fixed.
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Pro
Lots of assets can be found in the Asset Store
For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
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Con
Bad UI tools
Way of creating UI is uncomfortable and inconvenient.
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Pro
Very popular
Unity is a proven game engine. It is used by a wide range of developers - from small indies to triple-A companies such as Microsoft, Paradox, Square Enix and Sega.
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Con
Hard to maintain projects due to vendor lock
Unity3D is proprietary, closed source game engine. Unity asks money for features like basic version control support, etc. It is impossible to migrate a game from Unity3D in case performance does not satisfy growing requirements of a project.
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Pro
Allows for rapid prototyping
Unity's modular system and usability allows for quickly developing a prototype of an idea. It has features like drag & drop editing, shaders, animation and other systems already in place to allow diving right into developing a game.
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Con
Asset store is required to replace engine functionality
You will need to, for example, buy an input manager asset off their asset store in order to replace their own terrible inaccessible input manager.
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Pro
Great community
Great Community support through the Forums and Unity Answers.
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Con
Moderators on forums are sometimes arrogant
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Pro
Great editor
The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time as well as progress gameplay frame by frame. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
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Con
Weak memory management
.Net libraries are slowing it down, memory safety is compromised, classes have to be implemented to manage objects in memory, like object pooling.
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Pro
Can be used for free
As long as the development company makes $100k or less, it can use the free version of Unity to release games.
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Con
Garbage collection can't be turned off
Given the use of C#, the memory control is out of the developers control, this can be good, but not controlling memory means that the garbage collector can trigger at any time and ruin performance.
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Pro
Works with 3rd party IDEs
You can use any C# IDE for it, but the ones tested which have Unity integration are: Microsoft Visual Studio MonoDevelop Visual Studio Code (much faster than VS, but a bit harder to set up for Unity development) JetBrains Rider (very fast, has lots of functionality and best Unity integration, but it is not free)
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Con
Bad batching support
Draw Call Batching is done automatically and does not include Skinned Renderers (eg. characters). Also for dynamic batching, meshes need to have less than 900 vertices.
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Pro
Has a great animation system
Unity provides a great state machine animation system called Mechanim allowing to separate animation from the model and assign the same animoations to different models.
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Con
Very self-centered engine
Unity3D uses very unique approach for doing things. Most of the knowledge acquired while using it, would be completely non transferable to other engines. Advanced Unity3D programming is really dealing with Unity3D bugs, and finding loopholes around engine issues - nothing to do with graphics, etc. Skills which would be valuable with other engines.
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Pro
Over 20 platforms
Unity offers over 20 platforms for publishing including mobile, console, web, VR, and more.
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Con
Dark UI theme not available in the free version
Dark theme, which is a must for prolonged work without eye strain, is only available with one of the paid monthly plans.
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Pro
Versatile
Not tailored for specific types of games (like Unreal...), so it won't get in your way if you want to make something unique.
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Con
Encourages bad coding practices
A lot of Unity code feels like a hacked blur of arguable coding practices. C# and .Net usage in Unity is questionable. A lot of the API is done in "C Style" (public static methods, available at all times), encouraging the use of public fields for everything, a lot of questionable implicit casting. The list goes on.
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Pro
Powerful standard shaders
The built in standard shader in Unity 5 is incredibly optimized and supports PBS/PBR.
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Con
Increasing number of bugs
With each new version things may stop working ,for example with Android, some bugs are never getting fixed, like the freeze bug with adb.
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Pro
Very optimized
Unity runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards.
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Con
Mobile builds (Android, iOS) take about 18MB at least
Even a Blank Project, Needs 18MB for the APK file (on Android).
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Pro
Well structured
Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually do not read the docs, like the one that describe orders of execution, or specific functions hooks and such. Some like to say it lacks raw power where people who are used to standard optimizations have no problem. For example It is not uncommon to encounter users who complain about low FPS but forgot to activate occlusion, flag static elements, activate animations culling, and so on. As for complaints about C#, people who are transitioning from C++ were already bad at C++ before being bad at C#. They often come from the PC world where the sheer power of today's machines is very forgiving compared to the platforms we had to develop for in the 80s~90s. One of their errors is for example to never read this doc.
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Con
Asset bundles can be cumbersome
Asset bundles are a way to load external resources that are not packed with the game or application and offered as a separate, optional package. However, they may not be compatible between versions or even platforms (you have to create them separately). Asset bundles need to be loaded and unloaded, avoid concurrent loads from web or cache or a naming collision can happen. You can find workarounds with static objects (load obj files and textures by code), but for animated game objects you are pretty much stuck with this.
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Pro
Can create custom forms and tools
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Con
Price is very high
Cost is based on Revenue: less than $100K = Free between $100K and 200K = $35 a month per seat greater thank 200K = $125 a month per seat
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Pro
OUYA support
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Con
New il2cpp script backend is show stopper to some iOS projects
Il2cpp script backend is required to build arm64 app, but it's still very buggy and not production ready.
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Pro
Flexibility is provided by a strong component programming model
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Con
Waisted resources
Slow, buggy, expensive and 1000 other problems.
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Pro
.NET functions can be used
ReactiveX,async/await, etc. .NET functions can be used in Unity.
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Con
Comparatively high learning curve is putting it nicely. Expect to spend days upon days researching basic functionality.
Although C#, JS, and Boo have documentation available online, it can still be difficult to understand the library and Unity's component based system.
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Pro
Great extensions are updated daily on GitHub
GitHub has a lot of extensions.
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Con
Bad model importing
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Pro
Has awesome plugins
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Con
Bad input
Their input manager cannot be accessed via code. If you want to update controls at runtime (which any PC game should be able to do), you'll have to roll your own. Except joysticks are also not available via code.
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Pro
Free for mobile development
Unity allows free mobile development. There are some limitations.
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Con
Bad raycasts
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Specs
Dev platforms:
Windows; OSX; Linux
API:
DirectX 10, DirectX 11, DirectX 12
Desktop targets:
Windows; OSX; Linux;
Mobile targets:
Windows Phone; iOS; Android; BlackBerry 10; Tizen
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Experiences
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Defold
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12
Experiences
Pros
11
Specs
Top
Pro
Easy to learn
Defold uses Lua, which is regarded as an easy to learn language by most.
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Pro
Completely free of charge
Software and online dashboard are free of charge.
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Pro
Good combination of visual editing + code (Lua)
You can do a lot with drag and drop, but you're not limited -- the code (Lua, which is easy to learn) allows you more power than just visual editing usually gives you.
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Pro
Fast results
Going from idea to result is very important for the creative process.
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Pro
Visual editor
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Pro
Very performant
Being crossplatform it is important to work on low end devices.
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Pro
Easy and fast export for various platforms
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Pro
Great community
A very active and friendly community in forums.
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Pro
Source code available
You can download and modify the source code of the Editor and the engine for free.
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Pro
Collaborative
You can invite friends from the dashboard and create games together.
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Pro
Hot reload
It allows you to change scripts in a game while it is running live. Common use-cases is to tweak gameplay parameters or to perform debugging on a running game.
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Specs
Languages:
Lua
Dev platforms:
Windows; Linux; OSX
Desktop targets:
Windows; Linux; HTML5; OSX
Mobile targets:
iOS; Android; FB Instant Games
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Experiences
Free
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