Unity / Unreal Engine / CRYENGINE showcases at GDC 2018

Here are the official videos for Unity, Unreal Engine and CryEngine that were created for GDC 2018 to show what games were made with each particular game engine.

PS: I wasn’t able to find a Godot showcase from 2018, sorry.

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Juan Linietsky’s Godot 3 GDC material

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Is Unity still the best engine today?

Only in the same sense that C# is the best programming language.

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ya, so agree with that, and CG is also acceptable comparing with GLSL.

Just wondering, Instead of showing models+effect from artists, should showcase demo reflects how user friendly to cook a prototype and easiness to debug games?

I just came across another video, where they showcase (new?) Unreal Engine 4 features…

I do not think that there is any comparison to UE4 anymore.

The best looking Unity game simply does not look as good as the best looking UE4 game for some reason.

@Peter77 here is Godot report of this GDC 2018.

This is very useful to know

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“The grass in the other engine is always greener.”

I didn’t want to make a new thread, so I looked for an engine comparison thread that I can necro and picked this one.

I have found a surprising number of “Oh god, why have you chosen UE4, it is such a crappy engine”-posts recently. And from a gamer perspective I can see where they are coming from, all the UE4 games that I care about either run like a** or have a very distinct “UE4 look” that I don’t like. What really surprised me was that one post mentioned Unity in the same breath as CryEngine as being one of the “good engines”. I don’t know if this was one of you guys trolling, but with over 1000 hours in COD MW3 that person looked like a legit steam gamer to me.

Is the public opinion about the quality of Unity changing? Have you guys picked up any interesting anecdotal datapoints that support this hypothesis? Do you think this is caused more by the achievements of the Unity community as a whole, or by how poorly the developers of a few popular UE4 games optimize their games, dragging the public perception of the whole engine down?

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I think public perception is pretty much the exact same for Unity, only UE4 is getting the same general treatment as more and more games get released by people who don’t know how to get the most out of the engine or simply think they don’t have to. I remember when all Unity games “looked the same” because the only real way around it was to write a bunch of postprocessing effects (Unity’s were trash garbage at the time), custom shaders (Unity’s were trash garbage at the time here too), or actually purchase some combination of the two. It’s just that now UE4 is in that same position where everything looks same-y because, well, that’s just how it is on this bitch of an earth.

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I’m not a gamer but games in Unreal are really nice. Must be a player’s perspective.

What is public opinion of Unity?

There is a very distinctive appearance to the default settings in UE4. One that immediately springs to mind is the early access game Citadel: Forged with Fire and I’m definitely with @Martin_H that it and other games like it have an odd appearance to them that stands out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/487120/Citadel_Forged_with_Fire/

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What about the other big engines like RedEngine4…

or Frostbite,

or RAGE,

how do they compare then?

Or are we reaching common ground where there is not much between the game engines now in terms of graphics DX11/12/Vulkan, Physics Physx and Sound as they use common API’s and target the same hardware platforms.

Will Nvidia’s RTX add another layer of commonality where all engines can have raytracing?

They are really good but also proprietary. We don’t really know about the editor and working in them.

Frostbite is probably the most advanced with such amount of destructible environment and graphics fidelity. Also now with RTX.

Frostbite probably has the least amount of features out of all the engines. If you don’t believe me, ask around :slight_smile:

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A few of my team were core engine developers at dice… they have less than stellar comments about its features and usability in development. :slight_smile:

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Ok, Unreal is the best engine then :smile:

That’s surprising to me, and to be honest seems a bit like trolling. Not because I think Unity is particularly inferior to Unreal (although I think it still trails graphically despite closing the gap), but because Unreal does not come across to me as having any clearly visible deficit going on of the sort that all those Unity projects missing good post effects (or post effects entirely) communicated to gamers.

In my opinion, the Unreal sizzle reel shows a huge range of different aesthetic styles. I definitely agree that the default post settings do have a bit of a specific style, but that’s to be expected. And what I would say is that the heavy-duty default post probably looks exceptionally bad on games that are otherwise not well presented, whereas Unity’s presentation for these sorts of games is usually a bit more ‘humble’, it doesn’t make a sub-par visuals look like they are trying to be glossed over.

For Unity, I think the best way to go is still a bit of a stylized look. Games that aim for too much blockbuster presentation (such as D.R.O.N.E or Seeking Dawn) fall a bit short of where I would like to see them, whereas games like In The Valley of the Gods or Vane look really great. It’s debatable how much of this is due to Unity but I can’t think of a real exception to this hypothesis.

In the same sense that C++ is the best programming language. :stuck_out_tongue:

Unity’s still the most popular for indies:

  • Steam Indie genre page. Check the Trending, Top Sellers and What’s Popular tabs. All of them prominently feature Unity games as the majority of games that use third-party engines, such as Rust, Slay the Spire, Hollow Knight, and the Forest.
  • GameJolt. Most games are Unity. I can’t remember the exact page, but they also released a pie chart recently showing the engine distribution, and Unity was on top.
  • Most people use Unity in Global Game Jam. 4000+ for Unity and 200+ for Unreal was the number I can recall.
  • Google Trends. Unity is more popular than Unreal, which is more popular than CryEngine, according to Google.

Unity’s also the most popular for 2D, mobile and XR.

Where does that leave Unreal? Unreal does do indie, mobile, 2D and XR just like Unity, but it’s less used due to Unity’s existing community, mobile support, 2D support (Paper2D is dead) and such. The only market Unreal is better than Unity is in console AAA games, where Unity has near 0 games. However, if you’re going to do AAA, from what I heard you should learn C++ instead, since most studios use custom engines, unless you’re planning to work for a studio that uses Unreal specifically like Bandai Namco or Capcom.

And speaking of good looking Unity 2018 games, GTFO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vSYJckIfi8

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