What are the pros and cons of Unity game engine?

News & General Discussion
1

For my final year project I am researching different game engines in order to justify the best one for my game implementation. So I would like information regarding the advantages and disadvantages of Unity game engine.

I couldnt really find much information on this matter online, especially disadvantages and would really appreciate help

2

what kind of game it is?

my favourites:

  • unity indie is free (publishing for mobiles too)
  • easy asset workflow
  • easy scripting (js, c#)
  • easy to use
    etc.
3

Thanks

For any game I guess, just in general

What is Unity bad for that cry or UDK is good for?

4

In my view, for hobbyist projects it’s usually not the game engine that is the limiting factor, it’s the developer.

Therefore, I believe you can choose any engine that supports your preferred platform programming language.
You might want to check the activity/helpfulness of the community and possibly the availability of assets (asset store) as well.

5

Pro’s:

  • Easy to use.
  • Easy to programme on.
  • Available for almost any current generation platform (with an exception to the Nintendo 3DS).
  • Collision detection without mathematics.
  • Endless possibilities.
  • Games always come optimised for console manufacturers (= less work for you required to follow their guidelines).

Cons:

  • Heavy (engine takes a lot of space on your HDD).
  • Mouse heavy (it’s the only Windows app so far which I can’t properly control by touch screen nor stylus).
  • No editor for Linux.
  • Expensive if you need all features.
  • Using the engine requires you to agree with their policies (like if you unexceptionally make too much money, you must purchase the Pro version or they may sue you).
6

Those are pretty dumb cons.

Some Real cons to get you started:
Only 32-bit program still in existence
Features locked behind pro version
Missing features that other engine have(it also has some things others don’t)

7

Dumb cons don’t exist when giving an honest opinion.
It’s more of an arrogant insult than an honest critic you made actually.

You really make it sound like:
Person 1: “I’m sure the European Union has screwed up all of its member states”.
Person 2: “You’re dumb, smart people know they saved only one member state”.

As for your examples:
32-bit only: not a real problem to me, I hardly notice any differences between 32-bit and 64-bit apps anyway (unless they suck up all your RAM at once).
Features locked: exactly the same thing as the 4th con I mentioned, just formulated differently.
Missing features: there aren’t any features I really miss out as anything Unity lacks can still be worked around (unless you’re talking about stuff like 3D model support exported by a specific application or the ability to script in C++).

8

But really, if you’re making 100,000, it’s not that big of a deal to pay for pro is it?

3 Likes
9

thanks guys for some suggestions, I also found this point online

Performance problems can be hard to locate, address, and fix since you are dealing with a black box (no source code). Examine your shaders closely and watch how you manage the scene.

what is a source code because I keep hearing this is a disadvantage of Unity?

Why would fixing performance related problems without source code be hard

10

The code for the actual game engine your using. Unreal provides the source for their engine. With Unity you can get the source at a huge cost, which is out of range for most small developers.

It can be hard to fix performance issues on big games without source because you can’t step through the code and see where memory or CPU is getting eaten up. The only things you can work on is the code you have created/applied to work within the engine. Having source gives more power…if you have the knowledge to use that power.

11

Opinions are like a$$holes, everyone’s got them. I agree your cons are on the weak side…

Harddrive size? In the age of everyone having Terabyte’s… really?
No editor for Linux… sure I guess that affects a small percentage of the market.
Expensive… perhaps a little, but compared (previously) to some of the bigger engines, it was cheap. Most games dont need the features in pro anyway.
32/64bit… not a big deal really, unless you’re trying to make a AAA game.
And if you manage to make the $100,000 from Unity, you should be grateful and pay the measly fee they ask, rather than being cheap.

Real cons:
Crud GUI, finally about to be replaced though.
Out of date Mono
GC is a massive pain in the a$$
Working on big games takes ALOT of optimisations.
Standard networking isnt the greatest.
No Multi-threading (another problem that will go away with an upcoming release)
No profiler in free

Unity 5 is looking to be the best release to date and will solve a handful of the major cons Unity has.

12

I actually have an SSD of 128 GB (of which Windows drinks half of it away), so it’s still a legit con to me.

Back when I started to use this forum, the gossip forum was filled with “Y U NO MAKE LINUX EDITOR?!” topics.
Linux users is indeed a small percentage, but if you look at the actual numbers it’s still a big amount of people.

Even if you make over $100000 there are much more costs to cover than just an engine.
And keep in mind you have to may another batch of money for every upgrade.
And yet another batch of money for additional (Pro) platforms.

So no, I won’t change my mind.
And as I already said before, there is not such a thing as “real con” or “fake con”, there aren’t even “true opinions” and “false opinions”.

13

Dude… You can get a 2 TB hard-drive for 80 bucks… and if you make 100k using free software the least you can do is buy the pro version.

I’ll rephrase my statement : “Your cons are pointless to most people besides yourself.” Which is totally fine. James has some real good cons; I was having a real crappy time thinking of some.

14

What? I think I’ll make a cup of tea since this thread isn’t making much sense. Things always make more sense with tea.

15

Pros:

  1. Easy to learn
  2. Has a free version
  3. Allows for rapid prototyping
  4. Comes with a fair amount of versatile (though ugly) default shaders
  5. Asset store

Cons:

  1. Documentation is severely out of date or, in some cases, completely non-existent for some features
  2. Technology that has been common for the better part of a decade, such as render textures and stencil buffer support, are behind a $1500 paywall
  3. Profiler is behind a paywall
  4. Terrain engine is a complete joke
  5. If you want to have feature parity on mobile after buying Unity Pro, you’ll have to spend another $1500-3000 on Mobile Pro licenses
  6. New features added to the engine tend to be implemented half-way or severely delayed without any explanation as to why
  7. STILL 32 bit and will be until Unity 5.0, meaning sometimes the editor will silently crash if you run out of memory
  8. Ancient version of Mono means you’ll be fighting the GC once your project reaches a certain size
  9. No plans to update OpenGL support to 4.x means you won’t have things like Compute Shader or Geometry Shader support on OSX or Linux
  10. Movie Textures are absolutely terrible in every way. Implementing pre-rendered cutscenes is a nightmare and, for some reason, Pro only
  11. Rapid prototyping capabilities are dramatically outclassed by competing engines like GameMaker, UDK, and UE4
16

Unity
Pros:
-Easy to Use.
-Lots of Assets
-Tutorials/Scripts for just about anything.
-Great community to ask if you can’t find answers.
Cons:
-Not as advanced as UE4 and CE.

UE4
Pros:
-Open source, endless possibilities. Could become easier than Unity and more powerful than CE.
Cons:
-New, needs time to buildup to Unity’s Pros.

CryEngine
Pros:
-Most advanced/powerful engine.
Cons:
-Hard to Use.

17

Unity

18

Pros:

  1. Free until you make $100K
  2. Learn
  3. More than enough to make impressive games if you don’t waste a lot of time worrying about have the coolest shadows and reflection effects: those things are the tip of the iceberg to go after you’ve learned enough about the rest of it.

Cons:

  1. If you have any motivation and ideas you like you will spend at least $250 and probably more in the Asset Store
  2. 32 bit editor causes problems
  3. Poor versioning and namespace management of assets in the assets store
  4. Terrain system isn’t too good at all, you’re better off in Blender creating and texturing a terrain although others will argue you’ll loose a lot of features, those features can only be handled by top of the top line desktop HW anyway.
  5. Increasing and no doubt extremely strong competition from UE4 now. What will Unity 6 and UE5 look like in 2 years or so?
19

Like I said, there will always be a percentage of people that prefer a linux editor, but its not a mainstream requirement. Funny though, I’ve been around these forums for a few years now, and don’t really recall all these ‘wheres my linux’ threads, compared to the which is better UDK or Unity threads… oh and the slender clones.

Unity will use approximately 0.012% of your 128 Gb drive. How many games do you have installed, because I now have 3 x 240Gb SDDs, and over 70% of those are filled up with games… I mean Titanfall clocked in around 50Gb I think… so by comparison of other software, Unitys footprint is marginal. I cant understand why you have a grope with 1.5Gb. Its a drop in the hat, even on a 128GB drive.

To complain about $1500 when the engine you used cost WELL over 10 million dollars (probably more in the 100’s of million of dollars now), youre just having a laugh. If you cant afford $1500 when you made over $100,000, there’s something wrong with you (ie. you’re one of those cheap and expect everything to be free types)

tbh, it sounds like you’ve been using Unity for 5 minutes, and don’t really have a grip on what’s really wrong with the engine.

20

I would like to chime in here. I’ve been a programmer for 10 years and have been dabbling around in game development since 2007. In that time, I’ve learned to make Java games, Dark Basic/Dark GDK, XNA, and now Unity. Here is my ultimate list of PROS/CONS of Unity:

PROS

  1. Unity is extremely efficient and easy to use. Things that would have been tedious, annoying, and difficult work is extremely easy in Unity. Specifically when it comes to importing objects and working with 3D models. In terms of XNA, it was the most frustrating and tedious program to do 3D modeling in. Often my models would let lost on screen, not texture correctly, and most file formats weren’t even supported.
  2. The interface is very simple and easy to customize. Everything is right where I want it.
  3. I absolutely LOVE the asset store. There are tons of things I can work with that save me days/weeks of time creating myself.
  4. The audio engine is amazing. Being a music producer on the side, I love how simple it is for me to do 3D sound with 3D/surround panning and the works. If you people have seen how difficult that used to be in the past, man it is so simple in Unity.
  5. Built in engine for compressing graphics, models, and other assets
  6. Doesn’t restrict you to one programming language and also works in a browser window
  7. The built in debugger is fantastic, no more adding line breaks and stopping my game to see things!

CONS

  1. Unity will always been Unity. No matter how hard you try or unique your game is, you can tell when a game is made in Unity. This makes games lose their unique edge IMO.
  2. Working between objects via coding is a pain in the ***. In other languages, I could easy program my game to work between objects/code and easily access everything from a central location. Unity is more complicated. It uses tags, parent objects, children, game components, and etc. Honestly I’m just not crazy about how coding between objects in the game relate to one another. Instead of finding game objects with the “findwithtag” and etc. I think objects should automatically be able to find other game objects if there is a script attached to them with a class for that object.
  3. Very easy to get unorganized in Unity. Too many assets, folders, and etc. in the hierarchy even when you nest items.
  4. Iffy for different screen sizes. I like the Unity units for 3D, but for 2D gui textures, it’s a huge drag to re-size graphics.
  5. It’s cheating. Yes, Unity is not legitimate game-development from scratch. A true developer makes a game from the ground up without all these fancy gizmos/gadgets to help make a game. WIth that being said, the easy of Unity has allowed many more people to make great games instead of half the garbage that was made in XNA for example (seriously, some of the XNA titles out there were utter trash compared to the average Unity game).

All in all, I can honestly say Unity is my favorite and preferred game development tool today. I’ve done progarmming over and over and it gets too time consuming/tedious. Unity takes out alot of the BS so I can just straight to the good stuff.