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Add to SafariWhen comparing Duality vs Modd.io, the Slant community recommends Duality for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Duality is ranked 30th while Modd.io is ranked 94th. The most important reason people chose Duality is:
The full source code is available on GitHub, where the framework is actively developed. All of the editor, core and plugin code is written in C#.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
The full source code is available on GitHub, where the framework is actively developed. All of the editor, core and plugin code is written in C#.
Pro Great editor
Duality includes a powerful visual editing system that can be used for previewing, integrating, editing and testing game content.
Pro Live reload of code and assets
Pro Very extensible
Because both Core and Editor are completely plugin-based, Duality not only incorporates a clean and modular design, but is also very extensible - even if it wasn't Open Source. In fact, most of the standard editing capabilities comes in form of Editor plugins.
Pro Built-in physics and lighting
Pro Friendly to version control systems
It can be configured to serialize all data in a text-based format, which has been structurally optimized for version control systems.
Pro Used in commercial projects
It has been used in a production environment without burning the place to the ground. Supposedly artist-proof editor workflow with an API for tailoring the system to fit your team.
Pro Its Fun, its easy to script
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Pro Runs well on low-end devices
The game client doesn't use much CPU nor bandwidth.
Pro Free
By far, this engine is completely free to use.
Pro No installation required - super easy to get started
Modd.io runs in browser, it provides IDE, map editor, and asset manager all in one platform, so you don't need to download or setup anything.
Pro Easy to use free Asset Library
You can easily change your game assets (images, sound, etc) with a single click using modd.io Asset Library
Pro Has multiplayer support baked in
This engine supports up to 64 concurrent players, and hosts servers for you as well
Pro Perfect for Impatient game developers
It literally takes 5 minutes from signup to publishing my game
Pro Easy to use
Modd.io is designed for new/intermediate developers who wants to get into game development. You should be comfortable using the engine after spending about 15 minutes in watching tutorial videos
Cons
Con Visual Studio required
To have possibility for scripting you have to download entire Visual Studio and spend 10 GB of free space
Con Requires windows for development
Con The engine is evolving in a bad way
Over the last updates, many useful features have been removed, making it harder to create more complex games.
Con Not very secure
Modd.io comes with its own security issues. Many of them have been used to destroy eachother's games, which completely busts your progress on your game unless you have backed it up by exporting it's JSON.
Con Not Possible for stuff
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Con Annoying asset size limit
Each asset is limited to 800kb (except for audio being 3mb) which is okay for simple assets but unacceptable for creating spritesheets for animations or tilesheets for the map.
Con Very flat map
No matter how well game maps are made, all of them look just not beautiful.
Con No/limited camera manipulation
You cannot create a shake effect which is also urgently needed in complex game creation.
Con Certain variable datatypes are urgently needed but do not exist.
Such datatypes as arrays composed of numbers, strings, etc are needed to create complex games but just do not exist in this game engine.
Con Joke-y community
Most of the staff team in the community are constantly behaving like jokers. It just always feels like 80% of the staff team is not the right pick for such a community.
Con The homepage is not good
The homepage allows players to join your game, but the way it works is just not good. The "unpopular 0 player" games get less exposure than the popular games. The tier system also puts a star on your game card which also lures players to your game making them think this game has a special event or something, giving a disadvantage to the less popular games which are still so called "Tier 1".
Con Not very powerful
This engine is ready to use right away, but already starts dropping framerate at over 1000 units which are not very active.
Con Tier-based servers with certain lockdowns
Modd.io "tiers" all the games you create. The very basic tier, commonly called "Tier 1" is very limited and removes motivation to develop a game.
Con You'll have to learn a new programming language
This engine has it's own IDE with a drag and drop style programming language. It does take a good 2 hours to get familiar with the API..
Con No lower level API access
You cannot access lower-level APIs through this engine, such as the renderer.
Con No single player support
All games in modd.io must support multi-player game mode.
Con Limited customizability
Modd.io is designed to be good at making "specific" kind of multiplayer games. Its strength unleashes if you don't care too much about the specifics in UI. For example, if you wanted to make a casual death match game, it is extremely easy to make it using modd.io. However, if you want to create a puzzle game with a unique UI, it becomes very time consuming.
Con No 3D support
This engine is limited to 2D only.
