When comparing Impact vs Stride, the Slant community recommends Stride for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Stride is ranked 5th while Impact is ranked 43rd. The most important reason people chose Stride is:
Looking nearly as good as Unreal Engine 4, but rendering significantly faster.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Excellent collision detection system
Impact provides 2 types of collision detection; static and dynamic collisions. Both of which are easily integrated into game development.
Pro Extendable
Many plugins are available, including one called Impact++ which adds features like pathfinding and dynamic lighting.
Pro Level editor
Built-in map editor with support for tiling, collision layers, and actors.
Pro Extensive documentation available to support development
ImpactJS has an active user community that busily produces tremendous resources including videos, books, tutorials, walkthroughs and more. There are also comprehensive class documentation available.
Pro Truly cross-platform allowing developers to build for anything
Extending the reach of a game developed with ImpactJS is easy due to the cross-platform nature the framework. There are Considerations around performance, resolution and audio, however all can be appropriately addressed when in development. Works in the browser via Canvas, even on mobile. Easily translatable into a packaged app.
Pro Good looking and fast
Looking nearly as good as Unreal Engine 4, but rendering significantly faster.
Pro No royalties or licensing fees
Pro Projects are normal Visual Studio solutions
No proprietary project format, so it works with all the official .NET tooling.
Pro Supports Visual Studio
Pro Very modern render engine
Pro Powerful 3D Rendering Engine
Supports Vulkan. You can achieve good quality as in Unity3d and Unreal Engine
Pro Straightforward editor
Stride provides a simple and clean working environment for designing games.
Pro Community seems friendly and is growing
Pro Engine AND Scripting are both C#
Since the engine is written in the same language as the scripting, there is no weird mix of technologies as other engines have.
Pro Supports Vulkan
Currently the only well known open-source game engine that supports Vulkan, and probably one of the only.
Pro Easy to learn and use C#
Pro Multiple Starter Templates
The engine comes packed with multiole example projects to help you get started.
Cons
Con Not being maintained
Impact is not being maintained anymore. Last release is from 2014.
Con No terrain editor
Unless you like working on planes, there is no terrain support.
Con Editor is Windows only
Since version 1.7, Linux can be targeted for runtime. The editor for the engine is available only to Windows though.
Con Small user community
Unity and UE have a vast amount of user community.
Con Does not currently support Playstation or Switch games
Con Iteration may be slower than with other engines due to longer "build" times when certain changes are made
Con Shader system require's overhaul
Shader's are not easy to get to grips with and Stride's shader system. Needs overhauling for easier use.