When comparing O3DE (previously Lumberyard) vs Clickteam Fusion 2.5, the Slant community recommends O3DE (previously Lumberyard) for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D game engines?” O3DE (previously Lumberyard) is ranked 14th while Clickteam Fusion 2.5 is ranked 36th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro No royalty charges and completely free
Pro Amazon has announced 3 in house games using it developed from Amazon Game Studios
As a proof of how much Amazon is committed to the project.
Pro Advanced VR support and VR Samples to bootstrap your project
Advenced stereoscopic reprojection to save rendering time.
Pro Landscape editor
Sculpting and painting tools for terrain and instanced details.
Procedural generation of terrain.
Pro Roads and Rivers tool
Built-in support for roads and rivers to ease the design of rich game environments.
Pro Free development license, including source code
Full source code for Engine Editor and every tool.
Pro Easy to create full realistic natural environments
Thanks to built-in terrain, time of day, ocean and volumetric fog systems. There is also a gfx pack with various environmental meshes, cloud, particles, materials and skyboxes.
Pro Very lightweight and scalable entity component system
Multiple entity contexts, reflection, serialization, replication, script binding, event bus (EBus) messaging, fully cascading prefabs (slices).
Every reflected property can be fully exposed in the editor with a customizable gui control and can be animated in the built in animation tools.
Pro Cloud gems
Online oriented plugins composed by both client, server and administration components to easily add various online capabilities without further work (es leaderboards, login, message of the day, downloadable contents).
Since version 1.7 they has been released at a steady rate.
Pro In-editor 3D modeling tool for fast level prototyping
Very advanced 3D prototyping tool with many modeling features and UV mapping support available. If you want you can build any kind of fully textured static mesh without relying on external tools.
Pro Total Illumination v2 Realtime GIobal Illumination
Realistic looking lighting bounces.
It doesn't require long offline precomputation times like other static and dynamic GI solutions based on lightmaps or other similar techniques.
Pro Uses AWS cloud
Other than common aws functionality it supports game specific Game Lift for autoscaling game servers.
Pro Slices a very powerful nested prefab system with hierarchical property inheritance
Modular workflow and flexible cascaded propagation of changes.
Pro Modular system
To easy add and remove modular functionalities to a project and easy share them.
Modules are called Gems and can contain code and/or assets.
Pro Very Flexible Base Shader with many built in techniques
Tessellation and Displacement.
Various Parallax Mapping techniques(POM siluette).
Translucency and Sub surface scattering.
Detail Mapping.
Material Blending.
Emission.
Advanced uv transformation and animation.
Pro Rendering of volumetric fx with full light and shadows support
Global environmental volumetric fog and/or hand placed custom shaped volumes with featuring full lighting and shadows.
Pro High quality free assets packs
Amazon made available a selection of triple A quality scenes filled with high quality assets.
Pro Specular reflection antialiasing
Implements the most recent technique available (published in 2017) from Anton Kaplanyan.
Pro Flexible uber shaders with cache and hot reloading
You can modify shaders while testing the game.
Shader files are modular and annotated to setup the material editing gui and filter out mutually exclusive options. All shader permutation are compiled almost instantly from the asset processor and cached for later use.
Pro Built-in Twitch support even by visual scripting
You can create games that react to keywords entered in a designated Twitch channel and let streamers to invite targeted viewers into their game sessions on demand with ease.
Pro WWise LTX Audio
It is still possible to use the non LTX version with few changes.
Pro Lua scripting with the built-in IDE
Built-in Lua editor with remote debugger to debug Lua scripts running in any device.
Pro Virtual file system with live reload on any device
Optimized versions of assets can be streamed live to any device connected over the network.
This makes possible to implement asset types that hot reloads reducing drastically the time to test new content and little changes on device.
Pro Every aspect of the engine is made with scalability in mind
Multiple grain of control over any kind of engine setting and various kind of Lod systems. Settings can be grouped and applied in batch.
Pro Is the first engine to feature SpeedTree 8
Pro Perforce versioning system pre-integrated with the tools
Perforce also comes with a free version for a limited number of team members.
Pro Cutting edge character shaders
Has skin shaders with subsurface scattering and weighted wrinkle maps, eye shaders with refraction parallax, hair with anysotropic specular reflections, etc.
Pro Order independent transparencies
A must for problematic things like hair , vegetation and scenes with complex solid transparent objects(es glass of water with ice cubes).
Pro Implements the state of the art for Temporal Antialiasing from NVIDIA Research
Special iteration of Temporal AA to battle the ghosting issue omnipresent in engines using other Temporal AA techniques.
Pro New Fbx Importer adds support for every software exporting in fbx
It now works for both static models and animations and support advanced setups(es lods and physics).
Pro Full HDR renderer path with output support for HDR tv standards
Updated renderer pipeline to leverage the full spectrum of precision, luminosity and image processing features of the latest HDR tv.
Pro Cinematic multitrack tool with full featured animation editing
Animation Spline editor supporting huge range of keyframing and tangent editing tools.
Pro Advanced in-game UI with 2D and 3D placing
The UI uses the entity component system so it's fully modular and easily expandable. The UI is easily skinnable and supports border scaling images (scale 9). Powerful layouting system supporting multiple screen resolutions. Being based on the entity system every property can be fully animated.
It is elegantly managed in a separate entity context so it doesn't get messed up with other kind of entities and their components like in other engines, but it's fully decoupled communicating with entities in other context on specific event buses.
Pro Full source code repository with updated development branch now on GitHub
See here.
Pro Permissive runtime license agreement
With the Developer edition of the product, there are absolutely no limits or requirements when selling your creations. You are free to make as much money as you want (this applies to the Standard edition too), and you don't have to include any logos or credits in your creations.
Pro Upgrade discounts
If you buy Fusion 2.5, and later decide you want to upgrade to the Developer version, or in the case of moving from MMF2 to F2.5, the company offers upgrade discounts.
Pro Export native runtime for all platforms
Be it Windows EXE, Android APK, iOS, HTML5 and Flash SWF, Fusion 2.5 is able to export your game to fast, truly native runtime for specified platform with a click.
Pro Intuitive drag & drop interface & visual event editor
CF2.5 uses a straightforward drag & drop editor that allows for easy level, animation and event creation without having to write a single line of code.
Pro Developers work so closely with the user base
Dedicated Bug tracking system linked to user forum for ease of access.
Pro Free version
A free version is available for download here.
Pro Can also create Windows applications
CF allows creating Windows applications. Additionally, due to hundreds of available extensions, the process is quick.
Pro Box2D physics engine included on all platforms
Clickteam Fusion 2.5 brings to you the box2D physics engine.
Pro Community-driven extensive object repository
Click Fusion has a great selection of extensions submitted by the community.
The extensions cover a variety of game-building tasks including parsing of strings using up to two alternating delimiters using the "Tokenizer Object", generating random numbers without reusing them from multiple lists which can be refilled and distinctively replenished with the "Random Multipool Object" among others.
Pro Not only is it the best, it is the original
This software has been around since 1994 (then called Klik & Play) and is still going very strong. Also, one of the founders of Clickteam was the developer of STOS BASIC and AMOS BASIC for the Atari ST and Amiga computers.
Pro A great unofficial community for Spanish-speaking users
A great community in Spanish where you will receive all the help you need to solve your doubts and problems. You'll also find all kinds of resources and materials in Spanish.
Una gran comunidad en español en donde recibirás toda la ayuda que necesites para solucionar tus dudas y problemas. También encontrarás todo tipo de recursos, tutoriales y ejemplos en español.
Pro Balanced feature set
An excellent compromise between ease of use, power, flexibility and ability to export to different platforms. Easy to learn for beginners with the ability to make complex things, of course, at the expense of a larger effort. Good rapid application development tool for making 2D games.
Pro Supportive, passionate community
Any time you have a question or a problem, the community and the software developers are there to help you out either on forums or steam. The devs repond quickly to private messages or instantly on ClickConverse (chat). Additionally, many users have support sites with open source examples and tutorials.
Pro Well-optimized
Runs well under high object numbers, particularly on PC and iOS thanks to hardware acceleration.
Pro Great IRL user events
Clickteam holds user conventions for customers to come along, meet the staff and hang out with people who they've met online. This furthers the community spirit which is so prevalent around Clickteam's products and it's a fantastic weekend.
Pro It is very powerful for making 2D games, yet requires no traditional programming experience and very little to no higher math
There is no 'easy button' program that will make a good game for you with no hard work, and this software is no exception to that, but it does make the process easier. With the option of coding in either a spreadsheet style editor or a list style editor, the event based programming language reads more like English than traditional programming languages. This has made it ideal for me as I have a very hard time understanding traditional programming. I would say this is the perfect solution for people that want to make 2D games but who don't have a very mathematically oriented mind, and think more visually. Just like anything it can take some getting used to, but after following some tutorials and tinkering with it, you'll be able to create practically any kind of 2D game with it so long as you have the determination.
Pro Exports native mobile code, making great performance games
Pro Great for non-game apps
Such as tools, utilities, multimedia projects, etc.
Pro Great online store to get free and paid assets
Pro Can create custom extensions
Pro Visual (HLSL) effects
Pro Great formula editor, which allows you to create complex maths and events with ease
Pro Box2D physics engine
Pro Stable
Have used fusion 2.5 through all of its iterations, even when it was owned by imsi as CNC ( click n create ) it has been very stable and projects have been known to run on almost any Windows based computer. The projects you create even run on future versions of Windows with never many issues.
Pro 3D powerful solution
Cons
Con Some Legacy systems are still incompatible or not fit well with the new entity component system
At first it is common to try a feature and then understand that it is meant to work with the legacy system and not with the newest one.
Legacy systems get replaced or updated to work well with the new entity component system in every new version, but there is still some work to do.
One example for all Flow Graph visual scripting is meant for the legacy entity and Script Canvas is the visual scripting conterpart for the new entity system, but it is still not available at the moment.
Con No source code repository with updated development branch (requests for Github support currently pending)
You need to wait up to 30 or 60 days for fixes as they are shipped with the next official release.
There is no comfortable way to submit fixes and changes to the engine as the forum is the only tool for sharing code.
Con CryEngine with AWS plugins
Con Some features are really outdated and major updates are few and rare
There are some features that could make the software a lot more powerful but Clickteam does not have the staff resources to handle updating the software to be competitive with similar software.
Con Its Event Editor can be cumbersome if you are working on complex projects
While Fusion's visual programming event system is great to simplify things, it can be much more cumbersome to work with it than reading lines of code when you are working on a complex project. Especially if your events involve many nested conditions and lots of objects on the frame.
You are able to group events and objects, but it doesn't help at all if there's lots of conditions on an event and it becomes pretty hard to read.
Con Many extensions not available on non-Windows platforms
A lot of community-made extensions are only written for Windows, making it hard to port your game to other platforms.
Con It is very expensive
100$ to $400.
Con Many event 'gotchas', especially with object selection
Many events have very unpredictable selection behavior, e.g. the 'Create' action (where the selection depends on whether a selection list already exists).
There is also a lot of subtle selection behavior, e.g. implicit object pairs for actions when an object is used in an expression.
Con No native animator with curves, etc
Con Poor native movements
The native non-physical movements are practically unusable if you don't want to use Box2D physics in your game.
Con Need to write C++ extensions when existing extensions don't cut it
If you need e.g. a Steamworks extension or 3D display extension, you need to move out from the event system and create extensions in C++ with a cumbersome API. Fusion does not have FFI calls like other programming languages.
Con No animation/object hierarchy
You need to position/rotate objects manually.
Con Cannot script editor
You cannot script the IDE or editor with e.g. macros or custom functionality, like you can in other popular game engines.
Con Slow event system
Since the event system is interpreted, complex frames will start to slow down. This is also caused by poor code reuse, as usually, you need to copy+paste events with new conditions, making it impossible to cache intermediate results.
Con Lack of native network multiplayer system, built-in database support, social media support
Con Exporters are separate purchases, and they are not cheap
Con No console/Linux exporters
Up to now, Clickteam has a console convert service.
Con Simpler than Scratch
Fusion 2.5 is more Simpler than MIT'S Scratch!