I know I will be killed for saying this, but I really want to make games, and I can’t decide between Torque (Cringe) and Unity. Why is Unity better?
Don’t get mad, I really want to know.
Keifer
Because Unity works. And lets you create your game. Instead of fighting the technology. Oh, and Unity does have the documentation.
Actually, try both (we do have a 30 day trial). If Torque does not have a trial, ask them why they don’t.
Would it be possible to expand, I mean what problems are people having with Torque…
torque vs unity 1.x
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=739&highlight=torque
http://forum.unity3d.com//viewtopic.php?t=2156#14267
unity (2) has shadows + network + terrain now
kiefer, I know this may seem really anecdotal but I’ve tried almost every game engine available to the average game developer (those of us with less than a quarter million cash) since I have used computers (and that goes a LONG ways back) and there is not a single engine I can think of that matches Unity.
The polished and simple workflow, asset management, IDE, sheer brilliant usability, ability to build for a variety of platforms or delivery media from one code base, excellent support and community, ability to code in standard sorts of languages (JavaScript, Boo or C#) regardless of platform, and sheer joy of use makes Unity an excellent buy.
I can not stress how zen-like it is to work in Unity … you’re in the editor, moving stuff in a scene, hit the play button, see it all going, stop it for a second, tweak a script or change an art asset (as PSD file for instance) … pop, the change is instantly in scene, and play again. It’s superb.
There is NO engine anywhere that offers what the Unity indie license offers to get you started and I am one of only hundreds of users who came into Unity hoping/knowing I could make a game and Unity was the only answer to easily make that happen.
If you want to PM me and ask me any other questions specific to what you want to achieve, feel free.
I’ll follow up on Davey’s post by saying that he was my first contact in the Unity community more than two years ago. His enthusiasm and experience report alone convinced me to try the demo immediately.
Flash forward two years, and I have worked on five game projects, completed three of them, and one additional non-interactive animation. Before I found Unity I had never made a game before.
So I wholeheartedly encourage you to talk to Davey, as he’s one of the best users out there. Don’t be afraid to try the 30 day trial either. There’s really nothing to lose, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to use it! Although in 99% of cases, those who try it will jump aboard relatively quickly 
Hi,
I had the old Torque engine in demo version, and at first thought it was pretty nifty. It has a cool terain thingy and you could load your own textures in the demo.
But frankly thats it. They dont even have a demo anymore (one that you can interact with)
Look mate, unity is 1000 times better, and I’m using factual figures here. It has its own terrain engine, and you can always grab bryce 5.5 for free from download.com.
Now if you DO buy torque, please take this off my hands:
I cant seem to get rid of it. The moment you hit the scripting coding chapters you’ll feel like your on holiday in some hostile land where no-one speaks english and everyone is trying to destroy your will with their brain liquefying weapons.
Go unity. Undoubtably.
AC
Well, if you would have asked that in the Torque forums, you surely would receive a Torque-biased answer and if you ask here, you usually should get a Unity-biased answer, which is somewhat clear. But I think as I’m now in-between both worlds and have a 6 years experience with Torque and some released Torque stuff (like the FGE), I can at least tell you a couple of things here about Torque and (as far as I know Unity now after a couple of weeks) the differences or uniqueness to Unity. Surely this question has been asked and answered a lot of times, but I would like to answer too and try to be un-biased as much as possible. So here’s my 0.2 euro cent:
Torque has been written in times where network bandwidth and 3d graphics were not so developed as they are today. Mostly times where the average 3D hardware was less capable than today’s Intel onboard chips. Therefore you see (on the second look) in Torque a lot of stuff that is not so super-generic as it is in Unity, but more “specialized” to the game “Tribes 2” that is the underlying technologie of Torque (“V12 engine” in the very beginning). This leads to contraints in the engine like the the usage of the DIF and DTS file formats and the usage of a fixed art pipeline (even for a simple cube you need the art pipeline). This makes is in today’s view a bit unflexible to use. This is just one example contraint, there are lots more. Torque (or better need to say: TGE) is very centric around it’s player class because of its roots in the FPS genre. Making “other” stuff than FPS games (in the wider meaning, incl. tank games and alike) is somewhat hard and usually needs lots of development work. Don’t get me wrong, don’t want to say nothing other than a FPS game is possible, but Torque simply has its roots in the FPS genre and you can see this still today.
Unity compared to that is an ultra-generic 3D engine with no “direction” built in, means, it could be used for anything: FPS, racing, physics-based games, puzzles etc etc.
Surely, having a super-generic 3D engine usually means, compared to a 3D engine specialized in something, that it is sometimes slightly slower because of its universal approach, but usually with today’s hardware and the games we do as indy developers this doesn’t matter anymore. Other features like exporting to the web are then way more important than having the last bit optimized to squeeze the last percentage out. Again, don’t get me wrong here too: Don’t want to say Unity is not optimized or so. But as it is a generic 3D engine it cannot be specialized by design to be the best in FPS games or be the best in racing games. But as said, to us as indy developers usually the generic approach is the better one.
Having the “generic” approach in Unity means at the same time there is not so much “pre-configured” or out-of-the box. In Torque, if you want to make a fps game, there is a complete example working with multiplayer already done and ready to be modified. This is not the case today with Unity, at least not in such a “complete” thing as the starter.fps game demo of Torque. BUT (!) this is only true for FPS games (although the Unity FPS tutorial is very good!). If you want any other game type like a platformer, Unity offers such as an ready-to-use example. And way more others. The Torque starter.racing kit is not very… good. But this is more because of the not so well done wheeledvehicle implementation in Torque. Also it has to be noted that the Unitiy examples are in general way better documentated and simply… better. I’m pretty sure we’ll soon see way more examples of the UT guys with examples of different game types. They already have today more and better examples out there than Torque.
Torque has a high learning curve means you need to invest a lot of time upfront to learn how it works, all the quirks, need to know about how to compile the engine usually as you want usually some custom changes/addons in there. The script language is good, but you need an IDE like Torsion to unlock it’s full power with breakpoints and stuff. Unity comes with JavaScript in the simplest case which is easy to learn, lots of common resources around. Learning curve is low, you could jump start with Unity and have your first simple game completed in a few weeks (provided that you have some basic how-do-i-make-a-game knowledge).
Unity is way more expensive than Torque. For Torque’s 150 US$ you get already full source access. Unity simply costs more to get the ability to use self-written plugins (assuming that you really need this).
Unity offers built-in physics. An absolut awesome feature. And so easy to use that even a kid can use it. Torque has nothing alike inside. The RigidBody class that is in cannot be compared with a full fleged physics engine like Ageia.
Both engines have lots of docs. But the quality of the Unity docs is playing in its own class, way better than any Torque doc.
Unitys workflow is so lightyears ahead of Torque that it’s hard to tell anyone. I’m currently trying to tell this a couple of game-dev friends and I feel sometimes like the preacherman telling about the praised land and no one believes me. I mean I even bought a 2500 Euro Macbook Pro ONLY (!) to work with Unity! (Now I’m a Mac fanboy anyway ;-))
It is really outstanding what the UT crew did here. I mean I worked some years ago myself in a game engine company (Lightcube with the gxReality engine) and know how hard it is to make a good product and esp. an easy-to-use product, but as said, what those guys did blasted me away. Never saw such a good designed product and workflow.
Well, I could continue here endlessly. But at the end of the day you need to make your own decision. What I could give you as “tool” is to ask yourself some questions:
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Examine what games/products have been made with the engine you’re inspecting. Is there any game alike yours made with one of the engines? Can you get information about this game how long it took to develop, what where the quirks and stuff?
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What’s your target market? Web-based games? Answer if so: use Unity as Torque doesn’t offer that.
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Try to work with both engine demos. Which one “feels” better to you?
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Try not the be blended by the demos. Try to “see” behind, how it works, but it clicks and stuff.
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Watch the forums. This is for me the most important thing I do before buying an engine. See what people complain about in the forums. Are there many people complaining or is it more they’re asking questions, get an answer and go on to solve the next puzzle on their way to a completed game. It was for me so astonishing watching the Unity forums seeing that people not really have problems here. They ask questions, yes, that’s normal, but they usually have no problems with the underlying technology.
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Check your budget and your game: Do you want a Windows version (regarding Unity pro)? How much money can you afford for your game to spend on. Does the engines fit into that?
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Check the art pipeline! Are you satisfied with the Torque art pipeline? Unity art export path is way simpler.
Maybe this helps a bit. For me there were several reasons after 6 years of Torque to switch to Unity and I’m still glad and excited after a couple of weeks using it.
Martin
Unity is, without question, the way to go. Unity is a tool in the best way… it helps you get the work done without hindering you. It doesn’t get in the way.
Obviously I’m a big fan. 
But I’m a successful 30-something programmer and I’ve learn to appreciate real quality… its a hard thing to find.
OK take a look at this page… Unity Careers
Those people are the actual designers developers (etc) of Unity. They really are a bunch of smart and passionate people. They are very dedicated to Unity and it shows in the quality of the product.
And look at how your question has been responded to…
The people who are actively using Unity love it. That is a testament to how good of a product it is.
And browse through the forum…
The Unity development team has done an excellent job at making this forum a very positive place to exchange ideas, solutions, and questions. This forum, alone, is enough of a reason to Unity.
I second everything said here.
Unity is a great product- but there is a subtley as to what makes it a great product for me.
The Unity development team has come up with a product that defines a process. The true test of a great game is , “what is like to play?” Testing that constantly is easy with the engine.
Unity makes it possible to rapid-prototype your concepts to see if they work. That means experimenting leads to quick feedback on success- you as a developer are rewarded for pushing limits.
Common elements of games you enjoy are easily found and manipulated through the toolsets and community resources.
In short, the attention to workflow in unmatched, Unity is a real pleasure to use =)
The first answer is really the best: try both and see.
I got Torque years ago and never really got anywhere with it beyond (eventually) compiling it and convincing myself it all worked.
Torque is huge and complex and strongly oriented towards building the kind of game they initially built with it (i.e. Tribes). If that’s the kind of game you want to build, you may get a lot more out of the box with Torque.
Unity is – conceptually – kind of like Director but in 3d. Where the analogy ends is that Unity is game oriented (rather than “multimedia” oriented), has better OS hooks (via Mono), better languages (C#, Boo, and Unity’s flavor of JavaScript are all superior to Lingo), better performance, and better attention to detail (Director had horrendous flaws that were either never fixed (e.g. the built in UI widgets) or took years to fix (e.g. antialiasing). Oh and a better price.
So they’re not strictly comparable products. Torque is, in essence, a default game written on top of a huge code library that has been generalized from its original state, but is still not exactly generic. Unity is an IDE with a game-development-focus.
I used to use torque… now I use Unity. Try both and see what you like. IMO Unity just makes more sense, oh and it has support for phsyX!
Actually i wouldn’t try out torque, not if your time is worth something to you.
The short one:
Unity is not a perfect tool and there are ups and downs with it but if you see it in a comparison with torque, unity is kilometers ahead. So if you’re after 3d and deciding between torque and unity, unity is the way to go.
I don’t agree with taumel. Try both of them, because when I was also testing engines I remembered that from the outside Torque looked great, and I only saw how much it sucked after trying to do something different from an FPS MOD.
To me, Torque is a really overhyped product, but I still advise you to try it out. Only then you will truly appreciate Unity :-P. But, I must advise you that, like taumel said, Unity is not yet perfect tool, and you will probably find something that “bugs you”.
Regards,
Afonso
Get this, I haven’t got a mac yet and hense I haven’t tested this engine, I have however tested many other engines with no satisfaction, they always have something missing, or require massive programming knowledge, all I have been doing with Unity is reading the forums, features and tutorials and I can already see this engine is the way forward! The problem with all the other engines are like the guys on here are saying, they are geared too much on fps, and not enough flexibility for other genres, you can do it but it’s very tricky, and I’m an intermediate programmer.
Just can’t wait for my MAC.
Oh, how about a PC version guys
It took me about 6 months after I found out about Unity to get my Mac, and another 3 or so until I finally downloaded the trial (those latter 3 had to do both with waiting for Unity 2.0 and… more important: the awareness of my own potential of getting completely lost in game-development once I have it started with a tool that is fun to use ).
And now I got Unity 2.0 Pro and am working on my first actual game after waiting for… hm… some 27 years or so altogether… so what should I say? It was all worth it… And I think it’s not only the engine itself, but also the community, the developers, simply the atmosphere around it … … btw … not another Windows-thread, pleeaauuuse (Windows runs just fine on my Mac… with some virtualization tool… I even get those Windows-windows on my Mac desktop… seamless … does this forum support surveys? I would really like to know how many “converts” we have here… should be quite a few, and as far as I can see, everyone’s just happy).
@nafonso
Provided that i’m no masochist then why should i listen to Britney Spears for just a single second when i could listen to the Chili Peppers instead?!
This engine on a mac is actually quite a problem in my eyes, every business I have worked for/with in games are PC only, I’ve never seen a games business with macs, and the current business here is PC’s also, so not only do I have to get myself a mac but all the others, or the agro of setting up emulators, it’s just hassle, and no support for macs around here, just PCworld, Novatech etc. My oppinion this is almost a thorn in Unity’s toe. I’d snap this up tomorrow if it was on PC. Anyway, I’ll stop moaning now.
Hi Slaine,
This has been discussed quite a bit. For an example, see: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=4121
As far as I can tell, one Mac should be fully enough (that’s been discussed in other threads too, I just want to answer it here because that’s what you’re concerned about): I’m not sure how much this has changed with the asset server, but as far as my understanding goes (and I had just read about it in some thread… look for “version control” and you’ll probably find it), many people working with Unity on the same project simultanuously is a non-trivial issue anyways. With the asset server, this is probably a different story, but then, you’re also on another scale concerning the software licensing costs (the asset server license requires the Unity Pro license).
Usually, if you have people working on the visual assets, others working on the audio assets, and still others doing coding, and finally someone managing and assembling everything inside of Unity, that would be the only Mac+Unity that’s absolutely needed. And if you want to develop for Mac OS (which comes for free using Unity), then you need a Mac for testing on that target machine anyways. Btw, UT is doing a LOT of testing with different PC setups (for the games produced with Unity for the PC), so this comes “for free” when you use Unity. If you don’t have that, you need a lot of PCs for testing different setups. Put that into the calculation, too (not to mention the time this kind of testing will eat).
For the people doing the coding, it would probably be very helpful to have Unity installed, but even that depends very much on how the development is organized. Honestly, when there’s complex “logic” involved, I’d rather use the specialized development power (including all the cool debugging, Intellisense etc. features of a mature coding platform) of Visual Studio (or any other software-development IDE, like Eclipse, for instance), with some Unit tests etc. than getting headaches with a game engine that is perfect for developing the actual game, but maybe not so perfect for developing complex code (even if that code is used in a game created with Unity in the end).
If someone’s now doing code development with Visual Studio (or Eclipse, or whatever), he may not really like Unity (for coding) anyways - and in fact, he might be much more productive staying with his tool of choice, so there’s no need to get him a Mac. If you’re used to developing ActionScript in Flash, Unitron (the code editor used by Unity) maybe just fine for you - but if you’re used to developing with C# in VS.NET 2005, you may actually run away screaming… That’s simply not a strength of Unity, and it’s a wise decision of UT not to try to compete with tools like Visual Studio (and the others) because it’s a whole different business (you also won’t start modelling with Unity, except for some simple experimental stuff, maybe). Nevertheless, tools like that can have their good place in developing games - also when Unity is used as game engine. This obviously also depends very much on what kind of game you want to develop, and what your preferred style in game development is. If you just need a little scripting (which is probably very often all that you need), Unitron is fine.
I think there’s many possibilities, and honestly, if the game engine has a quality that saves you one or two weeks of one person’s working hours (= quite a few dollars), an extra-investment of say $1000 or $2000 for a Mac is not such a big issue from the business perspective. In particular, as any Intel-Mac is just a perfect machine to run Windows, too. And: A week or two is nothing when you have to mess with an engine that’s buggy or that’s not designed for the kind of game you’re trying to create.
Plus: When people have more fun doing development (and as far as I can tell, Unity and a Mac is a significant fun-boost - this includes having this wonderful community of peers in this forum), they’re more motivated, the overall atmosphere improves, and in the end, what you get are better games which are more fun to play. With a little luck, that might result in more income with more fun and less effort during development
To be fair, I should say converting from Windows to Mac OS also cost me some time (and if you don’t like Macs, you should probably not even think about it - Mac OS has its pitfalls, especially when you’re used to Windows): If I add it all up, it probably also comes to a little less than a week (spread over a few months), which includes getting used to a somewhat different style of working with the keyboard, looking for and playing with tools, finding a Webcam that works smoothly and figuring out the best approach of using Mac OS / Windows simultanuously on one machine - and I’ve been experienced with virtual machines before (in fact, I could START working with my used VS.NET development environment in less than two hours after my Mac arrived - just copied the VMWare Image, installed VMWare fusion, and that was it… using virtualization is an incredible timesaver when you have a tendency to changing hardware)… and I might mention in this context that I’ve heard of people using similar amounts of time when going from XP to Vista, or from Tiger to Leopard (and in fact, if you jump from Windows XP to Leopard, you’ll have less pain than when you jump from Windows XP to Tiger as I did)
Again, the community around Unity is also quite helpful with moving from Windows to Mac OS. If you look through the forums, you’ll find quite a few threads with specific questions, and very helpful answers from people who went that route. You don’t have to get your nose bloody by having to find out everything for yourself, but there’s quite a few friendly people here willing to share their experiences and help…
Although it’s getting a little bit off topic, it’s worth noting you can use Visual Studio for Unity C# coding if you wish. You still don’t get debugging features, obviously, but you get everything else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjfqQCxtfa0 is an old demo I did of Synergy and Visual Studio for Unity development.