When comparing Unreal Engine 4 vs ct.js, the Slant community recommends Unreal Engine 4 for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?” Unreal Engine 4 is ranked 17th while ct.js is ranked 55th. 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 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
Pro Beginner-friendly
ct.js is bundled with examples, docs, and easy to follow tutorials. Documentation and tutorials are available in a side panel on every screen.
Pro Skeletal animations with DragonBones support
You can import skeletal sprites and animations from DragonBones, which is also free. Skeletal animations are added to objects through code; developers can listen to marked events in animation, and ct.js automatically associates sounds in a DragonBones project with the game's assets.
Pro Good code editor
The built-in code editor comes with error checking, type checks, code completions accompanied with docs, multiple cursors support, and other modern features.
Pro Open source (MIT)
This means that no one will ever put any features behind a paywall and that you can reliably use ct.js in any projects without worrying about licensing. And you can hack on ct.js!
The repo is at https://github.com/ct-js/ct-js
Pro Tileset support
ct.js supports tiles in rooms, including collision checks and some extra editor tools, like bulk migration to a new tile layer or shifting by an exact value.
Pro WebGL and WebGL2 support
Starting with v1.0.0-next-1, you can now write WebGL games. WebGL support is based on Pixi.js.
Pro Modular approach
ct.js has a "Core" library that provides basic drawing functions, room and asset management, and mouse interactions. Any other functions are added to projects as "catmods", or simply modules. These modules can be enabled or disabled in one click, and can inject their code in different game loop stages, e.g. after drawing all the objects, leaving a room, or when a new object is created.
Pro Applicable to most genres
ct.js aims to be a general game engine and provides tools in making games of any genre.
Pro Dialogue and visual novel system with support for Yarn
A module ct.yarn allows developers to import a YarnSpinner project to create branching, data-driven dialogues and visual novels. An example is also bundled with ct.js.
The dialogue tree is made in a separate app, though.
Pro Real-time particle system editor
v1.3 brings a particle system editor, which displays a preview sprite for proper attachment of emitter to visual elements, and allows combining more than one emitter with different particles into one effect. With these, even the creation of complex, multi-step effects becomes easy. The editor comes with dozens ready-made textures for faster prototyping.
Cons
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.
Con Poor error messages
Con Rarely works
Con Tile editing is a chore
No live brushes with automatic corner drawing, no fills or rectangular/linear placement. All tiles should be placed by hand, with a "Shift" key to place multiple tiles at once. This will make you ragequit if you want to make sophisticated RPG scenes :D
Con Slower than native games
JavaScript and WebGL are fast, but they will always lose in performance if compared to native games, so it may be a bad choice for graphics-heavy games.