What can Unity do to approach the monolithic awesomeness of your chosen game engine?
Discuss!
*: Anyone who answers “my game engine is bigger!” will be laughed right out of this thread. There are also combat cyborgs who will shoot said posters, but I will neither confirm nor deny assembling them.
What is my favorite game engine?
…The RPG Toolkit. And, Unity.
Why is it better than everyone else’s?
The TK lets you make JRPGs really really easily. Also, the RPG Toolkit was my first game engine. As far as Unity is concerned, because it’s generally useful and easy to understand, is extremely flexible, and generally makes game development easy for me.
What can Unity do to approach the monolithic awesomeness of your chosen game engine?
I would really like to see Unity Tech put out a basic JRPG kit/tutorial. RPGs are a well-loved genre in any event, but giving people a basic set of best-practice principles, and some code/assets that show how you’d go about implementing them, would be really nice. As far as Unity is concerned, nothing because Unity.
The first thing after the realtime GI, realtime reflections, procedural destruction would be the visual scripting that runs the engine as a whole from physics to gameplay mechanics to graphics.
I like how Unity5 is looking, but I am going to have to hold back judgement till it’s out and I can see just how ready for use it is.
Lighting is so incredibly important for making a good looking game and Unity5 has the best tech out of the box. On paper anyway. Can’t wait to actually try it out.
It’s also nice to see sound design being taken to another level in Unity5. That is is super exciting and is definately an edge in Unity’s favor over other commercially available in engines. It’s an edge that isn’t to be overlooked imo.
Lighting, artwork and post are essential as Aabel says for making a good looking game. There’s no if’s or buts about it…
As far as engines go, they all have strengths and weaknesses. But I think it’s getting to the point with Enlighten and UE4’s work in progress LPV / lightmass upgrades CE is still the king of outdoors it’s not worth the hassle / you’re not going to miss it.
Where UE4 leads the pack is PC and Console tools, just the shear amount of out the box features and how rapidly they develop gives a clear advantage in this sector. Where it falls over is general performance sucks compared to Unity and it’s way behind for mobile. (Also stability in some areas)…
Unity has the mobile segment wrapped up nicely, it’s quick / lightweight and finally reached the point of stability / maturity. It has a long way to go to be a dominant force for PC / Console but if they keep doing what they’re doing I have every faith they could be.
At the moment I see it as Unity vs. Unreal and both are damn good. Let’s all have fun with them…
On a side note, if I was doing a 180 right now and swap back here are the things I’d miss instantly. World composition with point of origin and layer streaming ( I mean it’s just fantastic), material editor ( I love UE’s Mat editor), cinematics (although I know Unity are working on this) and the out of the box TOD function also maybe just how damn impressive the VFX system is.
Oh, sweet jesus. There has been a new version out for almost a year and I didn’t even know it existed. Boy, those were the days… of not getting anything done.
Don’t ever see going back though, unless it was for a game jam or something. I would probably be more likely to rebuild toolkit editor features in unity and consider it the best of both worlds.
Yeah, I’m not going to lie - the TK is really biased towards making a clone of Final Fantasy IV. That’s about the zenith and nadir of its capabilities, really. I made a rhythm game with it back when I was in college, but it ran really freaking slowly (though, that was back in the 3.0.6 era - TK 3.1 hadn’t yet come out.) Grindalf made a side-scrolling shooter in it, which was interesting, but required a lot of code.
That all was some of the reasons I came to Unity. Anything outside of the JRPG cookie cutter tended to require a positively silly amount of work to get up and running; conversely, in Unity, it may take a silly amount of work to build the cookie cutter, but if you can, you can totally go to town!
I haven’t evaluated TK3.2 at all, yet. I might, though, just to see how it’s coming along.
EDIT: I should note, way back when when I started with the RPG Toolkit, we had the same problems with newbies who wanted to make an MMORPG with it. Not much has changed in the nearly 10 years I’ve been paying attention to game development.
Never used UE, briefly mucked around with CE to make some nice-looking outdoor environments, used to do some Flash stuff years ago and I am a big fan the multiple-users-in-a-scene in PlayCanvas.
It’s never been about what’s the “best engine” it’s too subjective. It’s about taking what features / tools can be handy out of Engine A and Engine B and making your mind up as to what suits your needs. Although I get that it was supposed to be a little more of a sarcastic point ;).
,but on the public site, i would say Unity5.
Or is it just “shiny graphics” engine? Got any links to share?