So, me and my team are on the brink of a big decision. Which engine will we use for our next project?
So a little bit about the project; It’s an open world game in which people will be free to build their own base/casa if you will. The map size that is aimed for will be around 200 km2 and a single session will support between a 100 and 200 players simultaneously. The map will be a modern day landscape, with villages and one or multiple smaller cities. Another important aspect is that we want to give it a “realistic” look. I know that’s kind of a vague term, but what I mean to say is that we want the game to be looking as close to real life that we are capable of producing.
About the team; at the moment, we are just three programmers. We don’t plan on keeping it that way, for obvious reasons, but that’s how it is at the moment. All three of us have experience with Unity and generally know our way to finding a proper solution to a problem. The same goes for C#, as it is a very familiar language to us.
Our plan is to create a prototype to test and to hopefully get funded to create the whole project. We have limited time on our hands, mainly due to financial reasons.
So the reason I’m doubting we should use Unity is for a couple of reasons.
- Collider limit
- More work to make it look good
- More hacker-sensitive (Might be wrong)
Reasons to pick Unity.
- Knowledge of Unity & C#
- Fantastic asset store which will save time
When it comes to Unreal, I think we’ll having an easier time to make it look the way we want our game to look. On the other hand, I’m afraid it might cost us a lot more time to develop the game and learning the engine.
So preferably we will stick to Unity, so I would love to get more insight on the points that worry me.
I’ve read multiple times that Unity has a collider limit, the numbers I read vary between a 100-200k. In a map of such magnitude, including player driven content, I think you are bound to reach these numbers. Is this collider limit correct? Is there a proper work around?
So Unreal looks better from the start, but is it actually that much work to make Unity look closer to how Unreal looks straight away? I have little knowledge on this subject, so I do wonder.
The last issue is one that doesn’t really worry me, since hackers will be able to crack your game no matter what. But I just wonder, is Unity more hacker-sensitive than for example Unreal?
With a map of that magnitude you’ll want to be making extensive use of LODs and even swap some things for static, non physics things if you’re zoomed out to view the entire map at once… and if not, then you’ll want to make use of occlusion culling and probably not even load the entire map at once. This will be true regardless of which engine you choose.