Hello! New member, just want to say you guys missed the HUGE opportunity to call this place The CommUnity. Slippin’…
Anyways, I’m a 2d/3d artist wanting to make some simple games for mobile.
Amongst all the Unity 5 vs. Unreal 4 chatter, people seem to say Unity is better for mobile.
I’m sure people here are biased, but I’d love some thoughts on why Unity is better for mobile. I would just like to understand what optimizations or workflows make it the better choice if only targeting phones and tablets.
Thanks for any input!
Unity has years more experience on the mobile fronts so theres a lot more stuff supported an available.
But there’s not much reason to give huge vs list here. Both of them are free so you can try both and try to make a simple platformer or ping pong game to see which has the workflow you like more and how does your game run on mobile outputted from them.
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I wouldn’t say it is “better” because it really depends on what your making… I would say it is arguably the current leader in that space though.
The one thing to mention is they came far in my opinion. When they switched to a more relaxed model with free licensing, it felt like they quickly sunk a lot of the lower-use frameworks like Marmalade that didn’t have free licenses at the time and are very cumbersome to work with.
Fast forward a bit, and Unity has a lot of power behind the hood and some good things like the UI changes. But now they are getting a run for their money with things like Unreal as well.
One challenge I’ve had is that Unity tends to use more resources on mobile that I’d like and doesn’t always optimize well on all devices - even if you build simple 2D games. In that regard, it may sometimes be better to still use something like Coco2dx or good old C++ and QT. There is always a trade-off to using an all-inclusive engine. But, I will say, that Unity has a perfect middle ground and a big enough user base they may stay as the leader in the game space. #justmy2cents
For example, with coco’s or C++, you could very easily build a nice little 2D game for a 256MB RAM device. If you tried to use Unity, even optimized like crazy, its going to be an extreme challenge to keep a usable FPS.
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Thanks for the replies! I do plan to try both engines.
It just seems like unreal is mainly for powerful devices, which makes me wonder if there’s any big sacrifices when deploying to mobile. Mainly with graphics effects.
I am an artist, so whichever has the best visual effects optimized for mobile is a big plus. Tough to tell through the noise. Some of the before/after shots of Unity 5 do look dramatically improved.
I would also choose to make a more graphical game for later devices over a less graphical game for older models. Mobile 3d graphics are key for what I have in mind.
Unity shoud have the upper hand in mobile but i think right now ue4 and u5 are equally useles as the shaders are not optimized for mobile(the pbr ones) Very poor performance on Android after upgrading to Unity 5 - Unity Engine - Unity Discussions
I read on the roadmap that a shader optimizations is planned/probably in development but when,i have no idea.Seeing the lack of speed it will probably take a year,probably just in time for unity 6.(im not sarcastic)
Yikes! Thanks for sharing, as I’m sure the new shaders have a lot to do with the improved graphics.
Any degradation on iOS? Also, wonder how performance is on latest Android devices. I’ll have a closer look at that thread later today
I have no problems on iOS and not really on Android either when doing stuff like before the new shiny features. PBR is not that mobile thing anyways yet. Theres tons of Unity stuff on both markets so you can also test em and see how they run.
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