I have been searching for an easy to use, visually pleasing and affordable game engine. With so many out there, it’s becoming more and more of a challenge to figure out what game engine is suitible for certain projects.
I have come across, so far, 2 solutions to the small Commercial release of Stunt Force Futurity (Stunt Vehicle game closely related to Rush 2’s Stunt Course), Torque Engine - and now I have come across Unity.
Now, I request your honest opinions
What game engine is most easy to use?
Torque or Unity?
What game engine can accomplish more?
Torque or Unity?
What game engine would be best suited for a vehicular stunt game? Torque or Unity?
What game engine can pump out the best looking - smooth frame rate?
Torque or Unity?
Basically, I’m looking for insider information and suggestions on which direction to go about things.
Well… You DID post on the Unity forum, so while honest, our oppinions are still a bit biased
Unity by a long shot. We have an editor that was there since day 1. You edit everything there. We have a very robust and fast scripting system (mono / .Net), so you’re not limited either
Depends. For large worlds, online play that looks 3-4 years old, Torque shines.
For smaller, high-quality games, Unity is the way.
Unity. We have the PhysX physics engine - the same one powering Unreal3 and a lot of other games. AFAIK, In torque, there is no built-in physics other than a car that “behaves just like Halo”…
Unity. We have bumpmaps, reflective stuff, dynamic lighting etc. At the same time we make use of all OpenGL tricks available on the Mac to maximize performance. The latest official word from GarageGames is that they will not support stuff that is Mac-only.
I own a license of Torque
To answer your questions.
Unity
Unity
Unity
Unity
Torque is a good engine, but sometimes compiling it in mac is a pain. OpenAL issue and sometimes graphics stuttters for me. I think Torque compiles smoothly using a windows machine).
I like reading Torque’s source code (Helps me understand C++).
If you need to learn Torque, You need to buy the book which is a good book. Unity has good tutorials included.
Torque updated their version to 1.4, downloaded it hoping it will fix my issue, but did not.
Prototyping on unity is alot easier for me compared to Torque.
Torque is worth $100.00 but not more
I’m not bashing Torque, it’s a good engine but Unity Rocks.
Both engine can be downloaded and demoed. Try both and compare.
Also the Unity DEVs are putting out new releases quite fast considering their perfectionism (they make sure everything is easy to use but still powerful before they release it), and all 1.X updates are free for license owners.
Judging by what they have added for 1.2 alone, Unity is moving ahead very fast and we have many cool things to look forward to.
While I know it’s a priority for most, I’m a little anxious that a Windows release will change the friendly Unity community and take away that “Mac is best!” sentiment that it’s fun to tout every once in a while. That said, I expect it’s on its way. More power, and financial security, to the Unity team.
Probably the biggest problem with this is that it’s a lot of work (anyone who tried GUI coding in C++ would agree with me :)) - a huge manpower (and money) investment. And it does not add features, per se, just makes editor run on Windows (right now you can publish to Windows, you only need a Mac for development).
All of these comparisons are moot once you ask “So which is better on the Mac?”
The Mac Torque forums are plagued with “I can’t get Torque to compile”, “Mac Torque hasn’t been updated in months… when are we going to get the same version as Windows users?”… I think they have one guy (no joke) working on the Mac version.
I might have turned into a fanboy about all this, but I think Unity is simply revolutionary as the first WYSIWYG game development tool that works as advertised. I am continually amazed by its versatility and depth. OTEE has created an extremely open ended tool with which you can make anything from the simple puzzle game to some full fledged game rivaling anything current gen on the available hardware.
After using Unity for the last couple of months I can’t imagine a better environment for creating this type of content.
I bought Torque and within 10 minutes in the forums there I came across a discussion about Unity. I bought Unity 2 weeks later and have never looked back.
…damn guest setting. That last post was mine. Maybe you guys should stop letting us “guests” post. Make people register before they can post to the forums.
If you can, I’d wait until the intel pro macs come out, then buy the last available PPC architecture G5 for a serious reduction in price. Or of course if money isn’t a major issue, wait for the intel based mac and buy that… but a Unity port to the new architecture might take awhile and will probably be too slow to run in the “Rosetta” emulation mode.
Damn, I really hate that Apple is making every software company port their code yet again… like the OS9 transition wasn’t painful enough!
This transition won’t be anything nearly as painful. Just have to sort out Endians, and perhaps processor specific stuff (unlikely). And then we’ll get the normal .1 upgrade stuff. A lot of people won’t have any of these problems, and can compile straight out of the box.
I was none too impressed with the mac version of Torque. Using it feels kludgy, the editor feels very tacked-on. I bought it, toyed with it, threw up, then forgot about it for a year. Then I toyed with it again after the 1.4 release, and said to myself “yep, still sucks.”
The torque development community is definitely windows-centric, also. Many of the third party development tools that Torque likes are windows-only (the QUARK DIF editor comes to mind…)
Just bought Unity. It’s downloading right now, don’t know what I think of it yet, but what convinced me to buy was the fact that it’s Cocoa based - made for MAC OS X from the ground up.
That’s how Apple tells the story. But if your project depends on external frameworks (FBX SDK, Mono, PhysiX, etc.) you first have to wait until all vendors made a universal binary of their library available.
Until now I haven’t heard to much of available universal binary frameworks like the FBX SDK etc. Or did I miss something.
