When comparing Leadwerks vs Skyline, the Slant community recommends Leadwerks for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” Leadwerks is ranked 31st while Skyline is ranked 39th. The most important reason people chose Leadwerks is:
Good API tutoials, workshop elements which can be loaded from steam.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very good entity system, did have GUI functions, easy to use terrain editor with vegetation system.
Good API tutoials, workshop elements which can be loaded from steam.
Pro Both Windows and Linux supported
Pro Built-in level editor
Has an acceptable 3D map editor that is easy to use.
Pro Versatile flow diagram script model
Leadwerks's flowgraphs 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.
Pro Community forum offers plenty of support
It makes game developing much easier if you have someone backing you up when you run into a bug or other issues, and get replies within hours .
Pro Decently sized library of tutorials for both Lua and C++
Pro Very clean and easy C++ API
Pro Lua scripting support
Pro Reasonably priced
Standard edition of Leadwerks costs 92,99€. Additionally, it often goes on sale on Steam.
Pro C++ scripting support
Pro Terrain editor
The terrain editor allows sculpting, paint, vegetation placement and importing of external maps. Especially the painting is done very well and can lead quickly to very professional looking results.
Pro Easy to use API and scripting language
Pro Great tech support and friendly community
A growing community that is always helpful with dev response times averaging less then 24 hours. Often less than 12.
Pro Comprehensive WYSIWYG editor
Skyline provides a straightforward drag and drop development environment that can be customized to suit individual preferences. Playing the game and animating the scene can be done from within the editor at any time.
Future versions will allow extending editor's functionality with plugins and offer an official way of trading custom plugins.
Pro Highly affordable licensing
Skyline's commercial edition costs just £40, has no royalties or earning limitations and includes 2 activations per license purchase and a year of free updates.
Pro Runs well on lower end machines
Skyline can be run on a machine with 2GHz Dual Core CPU, 2GB of RAM and Nvidia's 9800 GT (or equivalent) GPU. While, obviously, higher specs are recommended, it's reasonable to expect around 60fps on small scenes with these specs.
Pro Excellent terrain editor
The Terrain editor is easy to use and will include features such as hole cutting.
There is a differed lighting render for internal scenes, which makes creating multi light and beautiful/atmospheric scenes so much easier.
All the tools for the terrain are in one place such as placing road/paths, vegetation, billboards, and the settings are easy to locate and change.
Planned features include:
Hole cutting in terrain and
Terrain paging.
Pro Low learning curve
Making a game in the current top engines is hard work, making something small and basic in Skyline is not. Easy to learn drag an drop model placement and editing supplemented with easy to follow video's on forum make the process straightforward.
Pro Full global illumination
Including image based lighting.
Pro Has a free version
A free version that's limited to non-commercial usage and lacks a few features is available.
Pro Impressive water render
Rendering of a water plane looks fantastic and is easily edited for different effects.
Pro Artist-friendly
The schematic editor is designed to make it easier for non-programmers to create games.
Pro Asset store
Not much in it at the moment but is starting to grow and will continue to grow with an increase of users.
Pro Constant development and regular updates
There are many additions to the engine that are on the road map such as multi threading and tree physics.
The feature list is constantly evolving with each user request and idea put forth.
Pro Support for custom editors
Skyline has a custom editor that gives the user of making their own tools for use directly in the editor to develop their games. All the editors are made using the Qt Designer and programmed in lua inside the engine itself.
Pro OSVR support announced
Open-Source Virtual Reality support is in development.
Pro More editor's
Shadow editor.
Weapon Class Editor.
Mesh Editor.
Advanced Mesh Editor.
GUI Editor.
Script Editor.
Environment Editor (volumetric clouds and day night cycle, lightening, ocean settings, height fog).
Particle Editor.
Path editor.
Schematic editor.
Navmesh editor.
Material editor.
Pro Lots of learning resources
The documentation is been rewritten and follows a structure like a course.
Introduction to > Level designer with examples > Artists
There is also video tutorials, video examples and video tutorial series been produced.
There are user created demo scenes, examples and more.
Pro Visual GUI/HUD Dditor
Making HUDs and GUIs has never been easier
Pro PBR Workflow
Full PBR workflow, your not stuck to Secular or Metallic it has both
Pro One on one private support with engine developers
Can contact the Skyline developers and they will always respond and help as fast as they can.
Cons
Con Little to no support
This product relies on community support, although some members are helpful and quite approachable they don't like to share their secrets with people that are new to programming.
The product is sold as a Full featured platform but it seems to more in the Alpha stage of development as a lot of the good aspects where taken out in previous versions.
Con Has a track record of broken promises
Con Forums are poorly run and censored
Con Highly misleading advertising
Con Only prefabs made with the Leadwerks IDE could be used.
The two main problems for me is that C++ is not as easy to use like LUA. The IDE should also support C++. The secons is that only prefabs can be used which are made with the IDE. So you can not easy made a game that can be modded by the user.
Con Weak out-of-the-box AI
The only AI movement function is going in a straight line.
Con Very buggy
Leadworks is a not complete, it's a work in progress. As such many parts of the engine are clunky, especially the level editor.
Con Currently limited to targeting PC
Mobile targets are planned.
Con Free Version currently not available/severely limited when available.
The free version has massive amounts of features functionality removed, including the ability to compile anything standalone.
The free version is currently (as of November 2017) not available until the next major release.
Note: some of what is below is open to change, this is the coming set of changes.
The price will be jumping from $40 to £99.99 ($132.32) for the lowest tier able to build a standalone. This tier will not be able to remove the engine splash screen.
The next tier will be £199.99 ($264.66).
Con No C++ SDK
Con Small community
There is a small but helpful community that are constantly creating video tutorials and one member is creating a FREE ebook to make the transition to the engine simpler.
Con Still in beta
Not all features are fully implemented yet.
Con Lacks occlusion culling and lightmapping
This is been added in a future update, however a date of this update hasn't been given yet.