In-engine advanced animation editing
UDK - Yes
Unity - No (at least not advanced)
FaceFX
UDK - Yes
Unity - No
Visual Logical Editor
UDK - Yes
Unity - No
The list could go on. While I agree that you need some pretty skilled artists working on your game, it’s not all that. UDK is superior to Unity, at least visually. Why? Just take a look at Beast. It was excellent in games like Mirror’s Edge or God of War, but let’s be honest. Unity’s implementation of Beast is lamentable, at best. It’s highly buggy, it lacks a lot of original features and so on. I’m not saying UDK’s Lightmass is perfect, but it’s far better than Unity’s Beast.
Also, UDK handles materials better - not to mention texture maps. UDK has a built-in LOD system. Blah, blah, blah.
As I have clearly stated before, Unity is easy to develop with. No hassle, no worries, good documentation and an excellent community. UDK on the other hand has experience. Sure, not in the iOS department, but in the general gaming department it’s one of the kings.
Is not about art assets, your art assets will provably look the same on Unity and UDK, is about rendering power that hold me back from using Unity. The problem with UDK is obviously the initial setup, quite huge amount of .ini setup and game specific classes inheritances to handle/ and learn how they work. Once you pass that stage, you are fine. The very good thing about UDK, is not only their rendering power and editor toolset/middleware, but also how Unreal Engine is too game specific, reminds me a bit of Torque. You have buildin save state system for all your objets states, inventory system (yes too game specific), vehicles, networking (yes, your pawns are ready to be sync over the net). But again, the 25% royalty shares isn’t a problem for us. My problem with Unity is (and always was), rendering power/quality and of course the license upfront being too high. 3000$ upfront isn’t bad for one man solo team, but when your team start growing, you’ll see how costly is 3000$ per team member. We will try to switch our current project over UDK within a month and see how things are going.
@Peter D - Well -of course- UDK will win if the expected income will be less than $5000, but there aren’t too many places in this world where you could live on $5000/year, let alone share that income with a development team. I maintain if your projected income as a game developer is less than $5000, then you’re a hobbyist. Nothing wrong with being a hobbyist, but it’s not the same thing as someone who is trying to earn a reasonable living. Pick a -realistic- income that makes developing a game full time worthwhile, multiply that times the number of people in your team, and then deduct the UDK + Apple royalties and you’ll get a much more realistic comparison:
Team of 3 members (two artists, one coder), each wishing to earn $30,000 / year (about twice what they’d make flipping burgers at McDonalds and half what they’d make working for a larger dev company) = $90,000 total desired income.
Unity license costs = $3,000 (using your numbers)
UDK royalties = $21,250 (25% of $85,000)
(Apple license and royalty costs would be roughly the same irregardless of which you chose.) In my opinion there’s a pretty big difference between paying $3,000 and paying $21,250, but hey I was educated in a public school so maybe I’m missing something. Even if you bought 3 Unity licenses it still works out in Unity’s favor.
As I said earlier, I’d be real interested in learning if a small indy team (1 or 2 people) has successfully made a living using UDK. I’ll admit that it looks like an amazing tool, but from my perspective it would be very hard to justify a 25% royalty.
well i buy the infinity blade and notice very odd about the game he take a lot of the GPU(graphic processor unit) and consume a lot of the battery of the device i have and IPHONE 4 and don’t think that are good signs for a game development process because a see at least a lost between 2% and 4% of consume off battery on my device.
Thats exactly what i was about to point out.
Unreal Engine is fully loaded with tools that you don’t need to spend time on it. If your game uses heavy visual FXs, you got a visual editor to quickly do it. If your game make use of dynamic Pathfinding, you don’t need to spend time (and money) on it.
If your game needs a very good pre-computed lighting system, again you don’t need to spend time and money on it.
Is not just the upfront money and royalties for licenses, is about how productive and good Unity vs UDK tools are.
The 25% you pay for UDK are the huge amount of middlewares and engine/editor tools that comes with.
This is becoming a pointless debate as you keep changing the basis of the comparison. First, you’re adding in the cost of hardware for a Mac but neglecting PC hardware, thus assuming that everyone has a PC but no one has a Mac. Second, you’re adding costs for features built into UDK but not for features built into Unity. What you’re stating are not facts but rather your opinion which you are supporting with unfair comparisons. You’re certainly welcome to your opinion, but please don’t try to sell your opinion as fact. Let’s keep hardware and features out of this when we’re talking about license fees, shall we?
I will concede that from what little I have seen of UDK it does very attractive and could very well be superior to Unity in many ways. I will also add that I agree with most of your criticisms of Unity and in particular the new features in 3.x (I’ve been very vocal on that subject already in other threads). But if we’re going to compare apples to apples (excuse the pun) and when the subject is license fees, then I think my comparison is pretty accurate.
Graphically yeah, there is not much difference. Going from your 3D app of choice to something in engine is what makes the difference. Unreal has the benefit of not only being developed by Epic themselves, but developed by the end user who submit back to Epic. It’s a never ending living piece of software. Workflow can make a difference to an artist and designer. Unreal has the leg on since it’s been doing this for a long time. Unity can do this, just needs to get on it. Licensing aside, I just want my stuff to look good and play nice without fighting the software as I am not a grade A programmer/scripter. UDK allows that. I need crazy AI work done or puzzle game logic, I call a friend, other than that I can handle most anything.
I don’t want to have to do this in order to layer animations(or make materials, control a particle system, do a camera flyby, move an object, control a prefab or do a simple logic game). An artist sees this and they tune out no matter how “easy” it is. It’s a chore and we have other things to do. A programmer is not an artist and the disjointed workflow to determine if this block of code is rendering the artists animation correctly is a chore. The programmer will see that it’s moving and call it a day, the artist will get the result and bug the programmer:
But rather this to layer and mix animations. And see the results without programmer intervention. A lot of UDK is like this. Control to the artist:
Workflow and tools are important to an artist. That can’t be stressed enough. And the list of tools goes on. Even just importing assets can be a PITA in Unity. The difference between *.ma and FBX file handling is a nightmare. Tools can and do make a difference in how art comes out. I’ve been there many, many times.
I have my Unity Lic and I sure as hell gonna use it for certain things, no doubt about that. The type of games I make will determine if I use UDK or Unity.
Workflow is where Unity needs to catch up on as visually and technically, it’s fine. Not just for programmers, but for artist/designers as well.
bigkahuna, I’m very sorry if you thought I was going in the wrong direction, but comparing the licenses alone is unfair. You’re not just going to buy the license and look at it, right? You’re going to use it.
The comparison I’ve made are real comparisons, not just parts of it. I’ve taken the development process as a whole.
Also, a $900 PC could easily outmatch a $2,000 Mac, don’t you think?
No, cause already comparable screens to a $2k iMac cost 700bucks and the only one offering such a machine is HP which only sells it with trash hardware.
On MacBook Pro you would find such wining price comparisions or on MacPro but on iMacs you will fail misserably by definition as only apple and hp create these kind of “screen with integrated pc” and apple on a whole different power level than HP is even considering (HPs focus is touch screen not powerfull box with no massive space overhead)
Aside of that it does not change the fact that UDK iOS requires you to have a mac, cause no mac = no upload to appstore. Apple did their homework and cut the itunes connect upload for rather good reasons which include the “fuck you windows flashies”
But to be on the topic: UDK is great and if you have a project with enough time, money and resources allocated to make use of it it will definitely work out
Also it will end you cheaper for prototyping and investor searching cause its $0 in those stages compared to the several thousand to ten thousands Unity costs with its licenses for a team at a reasonable size to make a real UDK game
But you must never forget the drawbacks of UDK like only supporting perforce for versioning among other things and the factor or productivity and steep learning to master compared to unity are definitely a serious thing to keep in mind as is the lack of pre 3GS support on the UDK side
@Lamont - Very interesting perspective. To my eye, the script you posted is many times easier to understand than the visual graph you posted (heck, half of it is comments), but that’s likely because I’ve been using Unity for a pretty long while and I’m guessing you haven’t?
Hey guys, don’t get me wrong. I’d love to be able to jump to UDK. I’ve seen some awesome work done with it, the community looks to be just as active as here, and you’re right, it includes a ton of very useful tools. But 25% royalty? That kills it for me. I don’t think I could take a 25% pay cut in this economy.
While we’re on the topic of licensing and iOS, have any of you tried Shiva3D? That’s another engine I’ve been tempted to build something with. The price is very attractive (a “basic” license, roughly $250, will let you build on all platforms) but I’m not impressed with its physics engine.
@Rives - I don’t want to get into the apple vs. PC argument, but some of us here already have Macs (until not too long ago that was the only way you could use Unity) so buying a Mac for iOS development is irrelevant for us.
bigkahuna, trust me, that’s the last thing I’d want to do. The UDK vs. Unity debate was pretty pointless too, because it all boils down to preference in the end.
Besides, I’m not going to give up on Unity anytime soon.
No, it’s just the stuff I am tired of dealing with. Our internal tools back in 1999 were like this. Massive walls of text with calls to all the frame ranges and defining the names of those frames. Not artist friendly. It is a chore. A non visual way to deal with an extremely visual task. Programmers have other things to do than get bugged about “does it look right?”. And artist have better things to do than to bang out and edit walls of text.
Hmm not sure where this debate about engines came from. I was simply pointing out that the 25% thing seems to have been mis-represented as epic take 25% of your net and not your gross.
Gross is your total earnings before deductions so to get 30k per year after deduction, from your indie work, you are looking for a minimum earn of 45250 (without any tax). That would be if you used UDK
If you used unity you are looking at 39000 (without any tax). A difference of 6250 extra dollars you would need to earn from each UDK game.
Adding the upfront costs (only applied once) would take the unity required earning (for your first Unity game) up to 43028 and the UDK required earnings (again for your first game) up to 45507 a real world difference of just 2479 dollars.
Seriously people. I know a lot of you are passionate about your engine of choice but, I was simply trying to get some factual debate going here not start some silly my engine is better than your engine war!
As indies we have a duty to ourselves to choose the right tools for the job and trying to turn others off a viable alternative simply because we happen to prefer engine A over engine B says a lot about whether someones advice can be trusted to be impartial!
Luckily a few of you on here get that and realised the debate was going off track somewhat!.
You still need a mac to upload your iOS game to your iTunes connect account.
True but, if you have a team of few members, you dont need a mac for each one of them.
Even if you bought 3 Unity licenses it still works out in Unity’s favor.
