When comparing Gideros vs Urho3D, the Slant community recommends Gideros for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Gideros is ranked 26th while Urho3D is ranked 61st. The most important reason people chose Gideros is:
Gideros provides on device players for iOS and Android that can be used to instantly try out your code directly from the Gideros IDE.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Instant on device testing
Gideros provides on device players for iOS and Android that can be used to instantly try out your code directly from the Gideros IDE.
Pro Auto scaling and image resolutions
Gideros provides an easy way to target various screen sizes by providing automatic scaling options and choosing the best image resolution based on device screen automatically
Pro Local builds
You can build apps without an online dependency.
Pro Friendly & helpful community
Gideros has an active forum where you can find friendly and helpful advice.
Pro New features and improvements are released regularly
Gideros is being constantly updated and improved by the main developers.
Pro All in one studio, no complicated setup
Gideros Studio is incredibly easy to set up. Once installed it is very easy to create a new project or open one of the many example projects. Trying out an example on the desktop is two clicks away.
Pro Easy plugin architecture
Gideros Studio has a very powerful feature which enables developers to use a C/C++/Java/ObjC library next to Lua. This way it's possible to call the library functions under Lua, get the results and interpret them directly under Gideros Studio.
Pro Supports many platforms
Gideros supports iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, WindowsRT, Windows Phone and HTML5 platforms.
Pro Amazing 2D performance
2D performance is amazing.
Pro Very easy to learn
Gideros uses the Lua programming language which is very easy to learn (and very powerful). There are some excellent video tutorials too, to help you get started. The Gideros forum community are also very friendly and helpful if you any any problems.
Pro Free and fully open source
The entire engine is open source and makes use of other open source libraries. Source code is licensed under MIT and available on GitHub.
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.
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.
Pro Fat-free codebase
Only use what you need.
Pro Small turnaround times while developing
Builds are quite fast, aids in rapid development.
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.
Pro Good 3D level editor
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).
Pro Does not require an editor to get going
Pro Flexible rendering pipeline
You can configure rendering pipeline.
Pro Multi-Lights
There are no lights limits per mesh.
Pro Unofficial Oculus Rift support
Information on enabling OR support can be found here.
Cons
Con Few resources, but growing
Gideros has a small community, and therefore do not have as many "How to make a game" tutorials. However, there are a couple of excellent books available that can take you through the fundamentals.
Con The Gideros IDE is not as fully featured as other IDEs
The Gideros IDE is not as fully featured as other IDEs, but you can easily use the very powerful and compatible ZeroBrane Studio IDE.
Con It has been stopped developing
The owner has moved to build new 3D engine, however, that is also experimental stage, not for production.
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.
Con The UI can be hard on the eyes
Urho3D's UI could cause eye strain.
Con There is no support for reflections
Neither SSR nor cubemap parallax correction are implemented in engine.
Con Bad Android support
You can not compile this engine using latest Android Studio.
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.