When comparing Buildbox vs Urho3D, the Slant community recommends Buildbox for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Buildbox is ranked 51st while Urho3D is ranked 61st. The most important reason people chose Buildbox is:
Drag - and - drop editor without writing any line of code.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Drag - and - drop editor
Drag - and - drop editor without writing any line of code.
Pro Easy to learn
Buildbox is a drag and drop engine, making it easy for beginners to pick up. There are many tutorials available to help get you started.
Pro Has many game templates
Buildbox has 20+ different game templates including templates for platformers, racing games and Flappy Bird clones.
Pro Built-in support for ads
You can add banner and interstitial ads from multiple ad networks, including AdMob, RevMob, Facebook. They can work with Amazon's, Microsoft's, Google's and Apple's app stores.
Pro Develop once publish everywhere
Exporting iOS/Android/macOS/Windows/Steam/Amazon
Pro Cross-platform
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 Incredibly Expensive
$99/mo for full functionality probably makes this the least accessible piece of game development software in regards to price, all with a very limiting feature set.
Con You are restricted by it's limitations
For example, you can only make certain kind of games.
Con Not very powerful
You will be limited to using templates to build games.
Con Subscription Model
The two more reasonable price points limit the functionality of a software already far less powerful than many more cost effective alternatives.
Con Very expensive
Buildbox has a 15-day trial version, after that a $2675 license to use it must be bought.
Con Stability Issues
The software has stability issues on Windows, with the preview window causing program crashes when simple functionality is added.
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.