libGDX vs Skyline

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Very good tools for rendering fonts.

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

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.

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.