When comparing Monkey X vs Unreal Engine 4, the Slant community recommends Unreal Engine 4 for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Unreal Engine 4 is ranked 17th while Monkey X is ranked 27th. The most important reason people chose Unreal Engine 4 is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Native code support
Developers can make native calls directly from Monkey code. This allows access to any native functionality and platform-specific features.
Pro Native module support
You are not restricted only to the modules you get from the official release. You can build your own stuff. Even build your own "app" module. It feels limitless. In comparison with other cross platform solutions, you actually get the translated source code and you can play with it if you want.
Pro Built-in modules for quickly building games
Monkey X has a selection of great built-in modules.
- Graphics
- Audio
- Input
- Data and Filesystems
- Networking
- Math
- Text and Strings
- Collections
- Online Services
Pro You can create custom targets
The language gives you the possibility to build your own targets. You are not limited to the targets officially supported.
Pro Low cost license fee
All target platforms for a fair one off license fee.
Pro Easy to learn
With it's Object orientation and clean syntax its a brilliant language to learn if you have never done any programming before and yet still has all the power it needs to make full games and apps.
Pro Uses a great, easy to learn language
Monkey X uses a custom programming language (called Monkey) for all its scripting needs. Monkey is rather easy to learn, it's object-oriented which will help most programmers with understanding it. It's also statically typed and uses a garbage collector, helping to avoid manual memory management.
Pro Partly open-source
The entirety of the base-language itself is open source. Commercial modules such as Mojo for non-free platforms cost a one-time fee. Though Mojo is not free for all targets, the targets for these platforms are, meaning it is possible to implement other frameworks for these targets.
The Desktop (GLFW and C++ based) and HTML5 implementations of Mojo are currently free and open source.
The language's development is completely public, and is managed via GitHub.
Pro Free HTML5 and Desktop (GLFW) target platform
The free version of Monkey X lets you compile to HTML5 or Desktop (GLFW). Other platforms such as iOS, Android (and OUYA), XNA, Flash and Windows 8 (Phone) require the paid version of Monkey X Pro.
Pro Cross-platform
Monkey X is a cross-platform game engine. It allows developers to run the same code on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Flash, Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
The development environment supports Windows, OS X, and Linux.
Pro Not running in its own VM
Unlike other multi-platform engines (Unity3D, Corona, etc), Monkey-X games do not run explicitly in their own virtual machines. Your code is translated into the native languages of each target platform, and then compiled as a native executable. However, just as native games, on platforms such as Android (Currently), and HTML5, games will be ran through the targeted platform's usual VM(s). That being said, you won't be dealing with a proprietary virtual machine, so you won't experience any real overhead when compared to a native game.
Pro Made by the Mark Sibly Factor
The Mark Sibly Factor denotes that a programming language will be easy to learn, fun to learn and allow any age group ( within Cognitive Reason ) to program games and great games. The Mark Sibly Factor denotes also that the games programming language you purchase will be backed by decades of compiler programming experience, game making tool programming and finally a Game Programming Language that kicks Ass.
Pro Free for commercial releases
With the free version of Monkey you are still able to create commercial HTML5 and Desktop games.
Pro Many community modules available
The community has created essential modules:
- Spine for animations
- Box2D and Chipmunk for physics
- Game frameworks such as Ignition, fantomEngine, and Flixel
- Diddy for lots of extra functionality
- FontMachine for custom bitmap fonts
- MiniB3D for 3D gaming
- And several others...
Pro Drawing Commands
Drawing commands are easier to read and edit than is manipulating scene graphs. You can immediately see in your code what's going to be drawn and in what order. Transformations are a no-brainer too.
Pro Lots of great examples
Monkey X includes over 50 examples ranging from complete sample games to demos of single features.
Pro Object oriented programming
MonkeyX is an object-oriented dialect of BASIC that's easy, clean and powerful.
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.
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.
Pro Powerful material/shader system
Allows a texture/material artist or VFX artist to create amazing effects from the ground up.
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.
Pro Realistic graphics
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.
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.
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
Pro Spectacular lighting visuals
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).
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.
Pro AAA Ready
This is ready to make the next AAA game.
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.
Pro Quick release-cycle
New feature releases can be commonly expected about once a month.
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.
Pro Proven track record
Pro No coding experience needed
Cons
Con You'll have to learn a new programming language
Even though Monkey is rather easy to learn and borrows a lot of concepts from more popular languages, having to learn a new language develop games is a lot of friction for people that already know how to program in other languages..
Con The documentation is not very thorough
The documentation contains a reasonably detailed language overview, and a somewhat-generated list of the included modules, classes, and methods. Module descriptions are rather lax, but usually present. Method descriptions tend to be short, and a majority of them contain no usage snippets; most parameters have very minimal descriptions. And there are no community collaboration features to help improve it, besides GitHub.
Con The included IDE is poor
Although better IDE'S are availabe for a price, the default one is bare bones and lacks functionality
Con No real asset store
Untangling how to keep assets in the ".data" requires attention and a filenaming convention.
Con limited OS export targets with free version
Free version only targets Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and HTML5, not mobile.
Con Very high build size
A blank project will build in to a minimum of 200 MB.
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.
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.
Con Hard engine for beginners
This engine not easy for beginners
Con Steep learning curve
Especially when compared to its primary competitor, Unity.
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.
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.
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.
Con Royalty based
5% of profits will go to Unreal after $3000 earned in a quarter.
Con They spend more time adding features than fixing existing ones
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.
Con Poor source control support
Merge tool is not working.
Con Poor quality assurance on their releases
After each release they almost immediately release a hotfix. And another one. And another one.
Con Unreal Engine crashes a lot if you don't have the required system requirements
Con Sparse Resources for C++
C++ happens to be the main suite for Unreal, yet the documentation is very, very sparse.
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
Con Difficult for Mac users
If you're installing it on Mac, you simply download Epic games launcher and watch it download nothing endlessly.
Con Tutorials do not go in-depth enough
The blueprint tutorial just teaches how to turn on a light when you press f.
Con Proprietary
Con Not available on Linux
Con No Terrain Editor included
Con Bad support
The epic games team only assists with billing and account issues, not bugs.
Con Terrible physics
Con Frequent crashes
Often the editor crashes interrupting your work.