Unity vs Gamestudio and others...

News & General Discussion
1

I’m a Windows developer looking for a professional 3D engine. I’m planning to use it for a FPS, similar to Battlefield 2. Not that I’m trying to steer people away from Unity, but I’m wondering how other engines stack up against it, such as Gamestudio A7. If anyone has any unbiased experience using these two or other engines please share some incite. I want to make sure I’m making a solid decision if I’m going to drop 2,000+ on a Mac and another $1500 on Pro. I could download the demos of various engines and borrow a Mac, but maybe this user base could save me some time…

Thanks!

2

I’m not making an FPS, so I can’t help with any specifics in that area, but I did dabble with Torque, DX Studio, Gamestudio, Anark, Blender’s Game Engine and Deep Creator before moving to Unity. My target audience is 99% PC based, and all my experience is with Windows development, so I was pretty much in the same boat as you. For me, the biggest hot buttons were application stability and developer support, which is where Unity and OTEE get top marks. The feature set is top notch (and soon to be even better with 2.0) and there’s a very complete FPS tutorial that should get you on your way in no time. (You can play the resulting mini-game here: http://unity3d.com/webplayers/FPS_Tutorial/index.html

I think your estimate of $2000 for the Mac is a bit higher than need be. My main development platform is a 17" Intel Core Duo that sells new for less than $1500 and you can probably find last year’s model (what I have) for under $1000. More than good enough to tap into everything Unity can do.

Hope this is helpful.

3

hey adam. i’ve researched other engines but not actually tried to do anything in them but many others here will be able to give your opinions with that. i’m all about FPS’s - i do have a shooter project going IMO unity is perfectly suited for the task. you can see a small test level i did quite a while ago in the links below. performance is a bit slow with that but it was my first try with all the fun eye candy - i’m a bit less ‘nooby’ now ; )

player (sorry mac only):
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=4163

screenshots:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=4035

but that said, i wouldn’t take our word for it. take the time with the unity demo a borrowed mac to check unity out for yourself. i really think unity sells itself - just try it out then you’ll be sure ; )

4

Hi Adam,

I too started out on the PC side researching various engines, and like many other people here ended up with Unity on a Mac. I’m not yet set on what genre I’m going to concentrate on, so my requirements were a little less specific than yours. (For example, it was one reason I decided to not use Torque, since it seemed a little too FPS-biased unless you wanted to do a ton of work.)

In any case, I tried Gamestudio A6 amongst others, and for me some of the biggest advantages of Unity were:

Quick code->test->code cycle. In Unity it’s all in one IDE, and you do some work, hit the play button in the corner to check it out, do some more changes, hit play again, etc. In A6 it was code, build, wait for build to finish, try it out and see the issues (in a separate window), then go back to coding, then build again, etc… Things just flowed much better in Unity.

Same for the asset workflow, I just found things much quicker in Unity in terms of dropping something in a project directory, having it pop up in the IDE, and dragging it into my project to work on.

I also really appreciated the easily available tutorials and documentation that Unity provides. A6 also had a large library of documentation, it just felt a little more scattered and version-dependent, IMHO. (Especially with their recent switch to lite-c)

Those were some of my reaons, but in the end I agree with the prior posters in that trying Unity out is the best and quickest way to see if it’s a “fit” for you. I really enjoy working with Unity, unlike some of the other tools, which just felt a little to much like work for me.

In any case, good luck with your research!

-Eddie

5

In my experience, Torque and GameStudio kind of force their idea of what a game is down your throat.

Unity isn’t designed around building FPSes, and yet you can put together a very solid FPS using sample code in nothing flat, and when you decide to do something that the engine developers didn’t anticipate you won’t have to wrestle with their assumptions.

Obviously, you’re talking to a convert here (my previous engines were Blitz3D and before that Torque).

6

What initially sold me and still sells me on Unity is the fantastic integration with third party tools, everything from Blender to Maya. You don’t have to jump through the conversion hoops as with Torque, A7, Virtools, Shockwave, etc… etc… to get your assets in, and once they’re in, just click on them to edit, tweak, save, and boom, they’re updated in the ide, even while the engine is running. This magic under the hood, that allows you see your tweaks so quickly, makes a lot of difference to me, and I think to a lot of aspiring independent developers - it’s an order of magnitude less annoying and more fun to build stuff. Add to that the web and cross platform publishing capability, price and not least the community support, and I think it’s totally worth the price of a mac as a premium to get in. It was to me.

That said, If I wasn’t able to justify a mac, I’d probably still be using Torque, which paired with the XNA framework (which does a lot of the conversion and object linking stuff) may become the platform to beat on Windows. Or you can wait for the Windows port of Unity, which I predict we’ll see (early?) next year, and will put everything else to shame.

Advice to both you and me in the meantime: build your assets!

7

Unity’s workflow is insanely nice (and flexible).

8

That looks great! :o

9

I think Unity is very stable, the editor looks nice and it’s possible to build your game for Mac and Win PC and even as webplayer to display it in a browser.

I was in the same situation like you and I bought Unity Pro and an iMac just to use this great engine.
It was definitely worth it. I would recommend the new 20"/2.4GHz iMac and Unity Pro. That’s a great start and should suit to your needs.
So for like $3000 you get a brand new computer and Unity 1.x with a free update to Unity 2.x.
And… you join the very friendly Mac community. :slight_smile:

Isn’t that wonderful ? :smile:

10

I agree completely with everything in the above post… except the iMac model. Go for the 24" one. Apparently, the 20" iMac has an odd 18-bit color screen. So, that’s ~$300 more, but you get some major screen real estate which is good for developing anyway. :slight_smile:

11

Thanks everyone for your incite! From my research I’m noticing that the Unity has the best user base/forum around. Documents/tutorials are straight forward and easy to follow, at least from what I read. After a coulpe of months of research here’s my overview:

The A7 looks good on paper, but I have yet to see a solid demo using some of the latest shaders.

Virtools has been used in quite a few releases, but their licensing is expensive.

Torque looked promising but their TGEA has quite a few issues with stability and lack of documentation.

Visual3D is in its infancy with no documentation until the release.

Unigine v0.4 looks fantastic, a bit pricey with a royalty charge.

C4 AND Ogre require too much programming for my taste.

Those of you who are developing with Unity3D Pro, do you have any performance issues with pushing out polygons and next gen shaders/shadows?

12

Or buy the 20" one and for $200 buy yourself a nice 22" widescreen LCD and attach that as a second monitor.

Then you REALLY have some screen real estate to work with.

13

Very good point. :slight_smile: I’m not sure how “nice” we are talking for $200… but getting a second monitor is a good idea. It also illustrates the need for the imaginary xMac!

Let’s get on topic though!

No option is going to avoid programming for long. Hopefully you, or someone on your team has a bit of programming experience, or is at least willing to dive in. That said, Ogre does seem to have the problem of having to learn things at a low level to get it going.

In general, people have been satisfied with the polygon pushing power and the shader performance, but some others here might be able to give a precise response. With Unity 2.0 OTEE seems pretty excited about the terrain engine and how much detail they can push out there. (They’ve just come off developing a game with pretty high poly counts, so that’s saying something.)

This community IS top notch.

14

i don’t think you’ll hit a poly count problem (unless you go really nuts). my bottlenecks are things like too many pixel lights or having physics called too often. stuff like that. i just got pro but haven’t had time to play yet. so i can’t comment on bloom etc…
i tried to buy gamestudio a bunch of times back at v5. their shop never would accept my card! i don’t know what it’s like now but it was pretty easy to use then. once you go unity though, there’s no looking back! i’ve said it before… i got more done with my unity trial than i did in years of fooling around with other engines - think at the time it was a 15 day trial too!