Hello everyone. I’m currently weighing my options between Unity or UDK for game development and I would love some input from the Unity community on the issue.
Here’s my list of pros and cons, please correct me if any of this is inaccurate.
Unity:
PROS:
-Friendlier community
-Runs on any PC
-Very lite footprint and very stable
-Simpler interface
-Can do marching cubes
-Royalties are 5% cheaper (20% vs 25%)?
-Union? Not sure if that is a pro, yet…
CONS:
-Less capable than UDK
-Less serious community
-Has yet to have a commercial release on a console, other than Wii
-Pricing has a large buy in for different platforms
UDK
PROS:
-Speed tree
-Can release on any platform or console
-Established brand name that may help distribution
-Only $99 to start selling and no royalties until I make $50,000 off of a title
CONS:
-Crashes often
-Waxy textures and fish eye cameras synonymous with Unreal
-Need a whole new PC just to run
-Impossible to do any meaningful destruction to terrain (in a way that would affect gameplay)
Am I leaving out any considerations?
Is there a specific reason why you chose Unity over UDK?
Unity has no royalties of any kind. (Unless you’re talking about Union, but that’s a separate thing, and isn’t necessary unless you’re targeting platforms that don’t have publicly-available Unity licenses.)
Also, I think there’s a bunch of comparison threads to read through already. Have a look around/search and you should be able to find the info you’re after.
Word says you have to restart the UDK editor if you want to compile, maybe not true, or there has got to be some sort of workaround… it just can’t be true, still I could never get to the bottom of the matter; in unity I simply Ctrl+S Alt+Tab, wait 0.2 seconds and new code is compiled and ready to go.
I would imagine that UDK probably has more power under the hood. But most average game maker probably doesnt need all that additional power and instead struggles with its worse usability.
so all in all I would say that unity is the better choice simply due to the fact that it makes it easier for you to manage to complete the project. and thats where projects fail i think. not due to technical limitations. (im talking about hobby people here)
Most of the reasons have already been stated. That you pay to Unity, but if you use Union there will be. Union is mainly for getting your game on markets you wouldn’t normally be able to reach, so unless you were planning something like that there would be no royalties paid (unless of course your game is released on Steam, the Mac app store, or the iOS app store, which all collect 30% of your profits).
I actually worked for a bit with UDK. Now I wasnt very experienced with it at all but yes it is 100% true. You need to restart UDK every time you edit a script, and then you need to open up another program and click compile. wait for that, close it, and open up UDK again.
That is wrong. With UDK you can only build for PC or iOS. If you want to make a game for Consoles you need to buy UE3 which costs several hundred thousands dollars.
In my humble opinion UDK has only one advantage over Unity. You get awesome graphics out of the box. For Unity, you need more effort to make it look “next gen”. But that may change with 3.5. And UDK isn’t that flexible if you plan to make a game other than a shooter.
Unity is free to try. Spend the $99 on UDK (a small investment) and put a few days of time into working with each game engine. No doubt you will choose Unity in the end
This is a rare troll post by me. You’re welcome to bookmark it in glee, because one day I will rise back on my soap box and rant about how I never troll, I’m just insightful or helpful or whatever. Then you can troll the troll with this troll.
Most large scale UE3 games use the Unreal Script for prototyping then port most if not all of it to C++ for performance reasons. Since you do not have access to C++ with UDK you can only get halfway there. When I was working with Unreal iteration was extremely slow, I don’t know if they have done anything to improve that.
Neither engine is perfect for everyone, Unity is targetted at smaller projects and so it is better suited for that. UE3 is designed for AAA first/third person shooters, so if that is what you’re doing then it would be a better fit. With sufficient time and effort either engine can operate outside these bounds.
I would suggest you try out both and decide for yourself.
Udk has steeper learning curve but is more powerful in terms of graphics wise. Tries a little unreal scripting but still thinks unity’s scripting is easier though. And i have heard animation in udk is a mess.
For rapid prototyping i would say use Unity. Faster assets pipeline and rapid scripting compared to udk. And better documentation imo. If you really want something good (graphics or whatsoever) should try out cryengine. Seen people said it’s better than udk and/or unity. But i will say if you are learning. Unity is good.
That always craks me up. I’ve lurked both quite extensively and if anything, it’s the other way around.
Rochard is out and about and there’s bound to be more.
That’s relative. Even from a second-world perspective 500 usd is not that much to start working on ios (another 500 for android) and etc. Free entry for PC, Mac and probably Linux in the near future.
Either way, beeing bound to one particular piece of middleware is the worst thing you can do. The main question to ask yourself is: “Are my specific goals easier to acomplish on this or that ?” and repeat for your next game and so on. And even if it’s easier to do on Unity, still check out UDK, the Cryengine, Shiva, etc and at least try to get a basic grey-on-grey prototype done on a couple of them before choosing.
Thats incorrect. Its $50’000 lifetime with UDK, future titles don’t have a 50k free aspect anymore.
Also, the ‘can release to any platform’ ended on the wrong engine. Unity has this benefit, UDK does not have it, its win - osx - iOS and at some point flash and android only, while unity supports every platform udk and even ue3 offers + more
