By reading a lot of reviews about game engines on several internet sites and forums,I have come to notice that a lot of people are switching to Unity.
But why exactly ?
I don’t understand because there are also game engines out there that are even better than Unity.
Take for example the Unreal Development Kit from Epic Games.
Even though that technology is more superior than Unity,even then a lot of people are switching to Unity.
So what makes Unity so special in comparison with other game engines like Shiva3D, UDK, 3D Gamestudio , Esenthel , C4 engine , etc,etc,…
Please help me out here,because I am trying to decide which game engine to choose for my game project.
well… There are a huge amount of threads which compare unity and udk etc… But the main reasons are:
Unity is free- no payments at all must be made if you want to publish anything (with UDK for example you need to pay for each game)
Unity supports many platforms- PC, Mac, IOS, Android, XBox360, PS3 and last but defenetly not least Web (with unity’s web player)
Well I could count on, but if you want more just search the forums
Unity is not just free (which makes it a very good deal) but you can earn up to $100K USD and not pay a penny in royalties, which is the best deal in the industry.
Try it and see if you like it.
FWIW, I’ve found Unity strikes a chord with programmers because they find it’s more intuitive than most other engines, has an API that provides both high-level and low-level access to most graphics operations, has an extensible editor and does it all using a general purpose programming language that has a comprehensive API that many programmers know and already like.
Also scripting with Unity is extremely easy. You can just drag and drop scripts on items, create scripts in editor and modify them freely. With UDK for example you would have much more trouble. Also the some missing (or just not that great) features of Unity are made better by its users. For example iTween is extremely awesome.
Take it for a spin and see how it fits. It’s the only way to really know. You’re likely going to get a lot of biased viewpoints on these forums.
For me it’s the simplicity of use, fast prototyping, and web deployment. While the webplayer penetration is still tiny compared to Flash, it seems to be growing pretty fast, and it will only continue to gain momentum as more game portals follow the lead of Shockwave and Kongregate. Since I’m looking to do more web work, this is important to me.
For me it’s ease of use, as an artist I don’t need to rely on programmers. Pages of confusing set up code is pretty much obsolete in Unity since heirarchy and OO coding is drag and drop. Easy for an artist to test individual functions in isolation by dropping them on an object and running the game to see if it works without having to search through pages of code.
The other big plus is quick deployment to other platforms. Your not tied down to 2-3 platforms so your game can grow and migrate to just about anywhere you want at minimal extra cost. Sure there’s a price but in the long term it ends up being far cheaper than your Unreal example.
Plus in my opinion Unreal is targeted at large teams where developers tend to specialize so the editor tools are bloated and spread out depending on specialization rather than being all in one place like Unity. Unreal feels like your only expected to use specific areas that are your forte and if you want to be a jack of all trades your going to have to spend a LOT of time learning the engine.
I came from an Artist background, barely knowing what a function, variable, string etc was to finishing a simple game from scratch with animated character, menu’s and gameplay within 2 weeks and a fairly polished sell-able title in a month.
I think I found it easier to use than any of the other engines you mentioned.
I tried out 3DGS ages ago, and had trouble doing anything other than making a little stopwatch application xD
And dont get me started on UDK…
While many other products may have an edge in some specific thing, I think overall, all things considered, I much prefer Unity. It is Flexible, good engine, good editor, multiplatform, good enough documentation with tutorials helpful community. The future looks bright for Unity. It is good to use tools which are well supported, if you are not in a position to do them yourself.
One of my favorite features and one of the big reasons I use Unity would have to be the insane art pipeline, Unity is definitely the most flexible engine I’ve ever used when it comes to importing/using/reusing assets. It saves a ridiculous amount of time and makes things really comfortable for the artists because they can just make the assets however they want basically, in whatever format they want too. And then Unity Free has all the key features for making almost any game you’d like so despite the grumbling of some users, Unity Free can in fact be used to make a commercial-grade game. Which when you consider there are no royalties until you make 100k (and even then all you have to do is buy Pro licenses, still without royalties), is a pretty darn good deal.
Also the editor is extremely flexible so you get a lot of excellent user-made tools like the Strumpy Shader Editor (Unity equivalent of UDKs material editor) and Vizio (more powerful than Kismet).
One thing which i only partly understand is that all the games i enjoy aren’t done with Unity.
The way Unity is advertised and the featureset certainly aggravates many people who aren’t good in making games but i’m sure a certain percentage is, still, when looking at the tech behind the games, no sign of Unity. Maybe it takes some more time, maybe it is more a problem on another level but i find it kind of weird.
So we all suck as Indie Game Developers!?!? 
You have a point, a couple of Unity games have been fun but most have just made me cringe. It’s not even down to the technology or engine or how polished they are. It’s just mediocre game design and implementation.
However there are quite a few promising games in development that have potential. Time will tell.
I’m quite aware how this sounds like but it’s simply the truth and i often was asking myself why it is still this way.
When looking back at all the games i’ve enjoyed playing the last year(s) there wasn’t a single Unity game amongst them and i’m trying to play on computers, mobile and consoles. All of them were made with Flash, BlitzMax, some middleware combi (Ogre3D, CEGUI, …), Java, a adventure game middleware (Visionaire, AGS, …), custom in house built engines, natively coded for the platform or powered by the ones the big boys use. Btw you could say the same about Virtools and Shiva, they aren’t any better.
All the Unity games i tried so far either lacked in the game design, gameplay, polishment or were just not my cup of tea.
Some of the indie purchases from this and/or the last month?
Humble Bundle #2 (different technologies, no Unity also due to the fact that Unity can’t compile for Linux), Eschalon II (BlitzMax) Puppygames’s Ultrapackage (Java), Kaptain Brawe (in house engine), Broken Sword HD (no Unity again), The Dream Machine (Flash), … or looking forward to Torchlight II (Ogre3D + …), Voxeltron (homebrew), Bastion and so on. Also with free games on the web, most of the interesting game designs are still done in Flash.
@taumel - I rather enjoyed playing Tiger Woods Golf, but that may be because I suck at golf in the real world. 
The genre of games I most enjoy are sims, which there haven’t been many truly realistic sims built with Unity IMO. But we’re getting OT a fair bit here…
Back on topic: At present, Unity’s feature set is actually pretty bland and dated. It lacks many of the features that one now expects in a decent, current technology, 3D game engine. We all know that big improvements in physics and graphics are, at best, likely not to be seen in Unity for years in the future (and by “big improvements” I meant things like DirectX11 or a full implementation of PhysX). Were it not for the efforts of the huge Unity community and its zero cost, Unity would not have one tenth of the number of users it has today. If UDK and Shiva were to offer the same licensing and have the same openness to 3rd party development, then I think Unity would have some serious competition. But the combination of awesome 3rd party tools + zero cost is a mighty hard combination to beat.
I have noticed a big shift in the community here aswell. People are not as all across the board positive towards Unity anymore. A year ago if you offered any kind of critique people were there to defend Unity with sticks and stones. Nowadays there seem to me much harsher critique directed at Unity even from the old-timers.
What has changed? Is it because of a big disappointment in the Unity 3 release or what happened?
I wouldn’t call it a “big shift” and I can’t speak for anyone else, but I certainly was a bit miffed with what Unity 3.x didn’t include and how poorly what was included was delivered. Take a look at the Unity Feedback website and see how many of the top “wishes” were actually delivered with 3.x. So far I think there was one. Look at all the threads here about features that don’t work or crashes. I think that if the next version of Unity (3.2?) resolves the issues that 3.1 has and if UT continues to deliver those features promised for 3.x, the “unfavorable noise” will settle down. But next year when UT announces 4.x I’m going to wait and evaluate the competition before I pay for the update.
@bigkahuna
I had my computer golf days already on the C64 and Amiga. Contrary to tennis games, i don’t think golf games improved in terms of that it’s more fun to play them.
Actually when thinking about it the majority of the shockwave games was even worse. But here you can blame the direction these games often were coming from. Agencies had a client, they asked for a game, either someone in the agency did it or they outsourced it. Mostly you had a thight budget and so on. Completely different story than if an indie was tinkering around with his game for months and sometimes years.
Anyway already in shockwave times the 3d aspect ate a large part of the budget you otherwise could have spent on the gameplay. With Unity the visuals have clearly evolved but the gameplay and designs haven’t this much. And if you have a convincing gameplay, you ultimately don’t need great graphics again. Sometimes all comes together in a brilliant way but that just doesn’t happen on a daily basis.
And hey if you can clay or paint and depending on your type of game there is no need for 3d at all, then something like Flash or 2d support in Unity ;O) is already enough and it doesn’t involve all the hardware problems you might otherwise run into.
Two stills from The Dream Machine:
Purely out of curiosity, why do you say this? Not saying that it’s wrong or right, I’m just really interested in what gave you that impression.
I agree a bit with taumel here. I believe that a large problem is that there are very few (if any) games that the Unity community can point to where we can say, “Hey that game looks good, is fun, and is an all around a great game.” Unity is capable of much more than the highest quality games the Unity Community has to offer. I believe that people outside of the community see those highest quality games that the community has to offer and then tell themselves that Unity is only capable of putting out that quality of game at its best. Hopefully, this attitude will change over time as more higher quality games come out.
I have experience with Unreal, Source, Virtools and Unity and I personally don’t see any reason to say that Unity is less capable of any of those other Engines. Back when I was a Unity user (before I worked for Unity) I definitely felt that Unity was the easiest engine to use out of all the ones I’ve used in the past. This is a double-edged sword in my book. This is great for people that want a low barrier of entry to making games, but Unity also enables people to make poor quality games faster and easier.
Saying so i think Splume was the best Unity game i’ve played so far. Not because it looks or sounds great but because the mechanics were interesting, although the level design needs more polishment and ideas, it still feels like a V0.9 or so, but that was a game i thought, yep, we’re improving, that’s the right direction.
And a personal feeling from me. To build something great i also need to feel comfy and that’s why i am hoping so much for a better programming language in Unity. Unity has many features but i always feel like in a safe harbour when i can use BlitzMax again. It tickles me in a creative way, whilst those ; simply annoy me because we deserve something better in 2011. In this respect i can be like an artist, like a ignorant arrogant snob. :O)
I felt that way with all of our games at Flashbang. None of them reached the “completed” mark.