When comparing jMonkey3 vs Unreal Engine 4, the Slant community recommends Unreal Engine 4 for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Unreal Engine 4 is ranked 2nd while jMonkey3 is ranked 12th. 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 Java is a great development platform
Java is a well-optimized just-in-time compiled language. It's faster than languages without an effective native-code compiler such as Python or Ruby, similar in speed to other just-in-time compiled languages such as C#, while slightly slower than compiled languages such as C or C++ (with some low-level and numeric benchmarks being similar to C++).
Java also has a wide variety of high-class IDEs available.
Pro Multiplatform support
Code can be ported to mobile (iOS is in the works) and other Android supported devices with minor changes to the code (just change some implementations that vary on the platform such as inputs and user interface). It can even run on certain Raspberry Pi devices.
Pro Free and open-source
jMonkey is completely free, meaning it's possible to develop and release a game with no fees or royalties. Because it is open-source, jMonkey has plenty of people fixing bugs and, adding to the engine as well as creating a variety of plugins that can be used in the engine.
Pro Not limited to using its own IDE
Unlike some engines, jMonkey doesn't force its own IDE. You can use its Netbeans-based IDE, but you can also set up a project to work in another IDE such as Eclipse. You can still use the special tools from jMonkey's IDE in such projects.
Pro Engine modifications can be made using Java
Because jMonkey is implemented in Java, the same language its apps are typically developed in, developers will have an easier time modifying the engine to their needs.
Pro Has everything
jMonkey3 handles input from computers and mobile devices. It handles networking, physics, rendering, terrain, and cinematics.
Pro Ease of extensibility
Engine is modifiable.
Pro Freedom of choice for architecture
The user is not compelled to use any programming architecture nor standard in order to make a project working. JME allows the freedom to use what is best for a game.
Pro Offers both low-level and high-level ways of editing shaders
Modifying shaders can be done either via a visual tool called Shader Nodes or via GLSL that allow you to make your own shaders without the engine getting in the way or having to hack around to do so.
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 Terrible API reference
The methods are not defined.
Con Not an engine for total beginners
While it's clear that you need to know Java first before using this engine, it is recommended that you have some programming experience as well. Most performance issues and memory leaks are more due to bad programming practices than the engine itself.
Con Slow release cycle
jMonkey3 lacks manpower to have a fast and decent release cycle.
Con Relies on archaic tool chain
jMonkey Engine uses Apache Ant for build automation, which is archaic and backwards, even by Java standards.
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.