When comparing S2 engine HD vs Amethyst, the Slant community recommends Amethyst for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Amethyst is ranked 26th while S2 engine HD is ranked 45th. The most important reason people chose Amethyst is:
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Built-in weather system
It is possible to edit weather conditions (rain, thunders,wind, clouds, night and day cycle) by simply moving some sliders.
Pro UI is intuitively laid out
Important functions can easily be seen and accessed, making the engine quite user friendly, even for beginners or those who are new to the engine.
Pro Great rendering
S2ENGINE HD rendering power is comparable to more famous engines like Cryengine and UE4.
Pro Complete terrain editor
S2ENGINE HD is integrated with a complete terrain editor that lets you sculpt, paint, add vegetation, and add splines like roads, rivers, fences, etc.
Pro Easy to use
Essential functions are very easy to use and understand.
Pro It's free and open-source
Amethyst is published under the MIT license making it open-source and id offered completely free. This allows anyone to give the tiling window manger a try, which is great.
Pro Recently updated and rewritten in Swift.
The application was written in Objective-C, but was recently updated and completely rewritten in Apple's new native language Swift.
Pro Works with keyboard shortcuts, no mouse needed
As it's designed to work closely to how xmonad, Amethyst uses keyboard shortcuts to control the windows being used, meaning no mouse input is necessary. This can make for a faster way to control windows.
Pro Multi-monitor suppport
Pro Has many common layouts to choose from (fullscreen, floating, row, column, wide, etc)
Pro Can switch between tiling and floating mode
Pro Under active development
Pro Configured via UI
No CONFIG file provides security and will avoid making amethyst crash. Instead configured via simple UI
Pro True tiling means never losing track of windows under a huge pile of others
Cons
Con Still in early access
Might be quite buggy.
Con Can be buggy at times
Con There are more user friendly window managers available
There are certainly more user friendly window managers available for MacOS, such as Divvy or Moom. Amethyst, however, is more powerful and customizable than the more user friendly options available and therefore may be a better choice for a user looking for more advanced capabilities and customization.