When comparing Skyline 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 Skyline is ranked 39th. 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 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.
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 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.
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.