Unity 3D vs Skyline

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great Community support through the Forums and Unity Answers.

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.

As long as the development company makes $100k or less, it can use the free version of Unity to release games.

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)

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.

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

Not tailored for specific types of games (like Unreal...), so it won't get in your way if you want to make something unique.

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

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

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.

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

GitHub has a lot of extensions.

Unity allows free mobile development. There are some limitations.

A growing community that is always helpful with dev response times averaging less then 24 hours. Often less than 12.

Skyline provides a straightforward drag and drop development environment that can be customized to suit individual preferences. Playing the game and animating the scene can be done from within the editor at any time.

Future versions will allow extending editor's functionality with plugins and offer an official way of trading custom plugins.

Skyline's commercial edition costs just £40, has no royalties or earning limitations and includes 2 activations per license purchase and a year of free updates.

Skyline can be run on a machine with 2GHz Dual Core CPU, 2GB of RAM and Nvidia's 9800 GT (or equivalent) GPU. While, obviously, higher specs are recommended, it's reasonable to expect around 60fps on small scenes with these specs.

The Terrain editor is easy to use and will include features such as hole cutting.
There is a differed lighting render for internal scenes, which makes creating multi light and beautiful/atmospheric scenes so much easier.

All the tools for the terrain are in one place such as placing road/paths, vegetation, billboards, and the settings are easy to locate and change.

Planned features include:
Hole cutting in terrain and
Terrain paging.

Making a game in the current top engines is hard work, making something small and basic in Skyline is not. Easy to learn drag an drop model placement and editing supplemented with easy to follow video's on forum make the process straightforward.

Including image based lighting.

A free version that's limited to non-commercial usage and lacks a few features is available.

Rendering of a water plane looks fantastic and is easily edited for different effects.

The schematic editor is designed to make it easier for non-programmers to create games.

Not much in it at the moment but is starting to grow and will continue to grow with an increase of users.

There are many additions to the engine that are on the road map such as multi threading and tree physics.
The feature list is constantly evolving with each user request and idea put forth.

Skyline has a custom editor that gives the user of making their own tools for use directly in the editor to develop their games. All the editors are made using the Qt Designer and programmed in lua inside the engine itself.

Open-Source Virtual Reality support is in development.

Shadow editor.
Weapon Class Editor.
Mesh Editor.
Advanced Mesh Editor.
GUI Editor.
Script Editor.
Environment Editor (volumetric clouds and day night cycle, lightening, ocean settings, height fog).
Particle Editor.
Path editor.
Schematic editor.
Navmesh editor.
Material editor.

The documentation is been rewritten and follows a structure like a course.
Introduction to > Level designer with examples > Artists

There is also video tutorials, video examples and video tutorial series been produced.

There are user created demo scenes, examples and more.

Making HUDs and GUIs has never been easier

Full PBR workflow, your not stuck to Secular or Metallic it has both

Can contact the Skyline developers and they will always respond and help as fast as they can.