Unity 3D vs AppGameKit 2.0

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.

The AppGameKit Basic can now export to HTML5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Informed, timely and intelligent feedback from the AGK forum.

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

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

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

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

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