Is it accurate to say that Unity is the alpha of game development engines at this point?

I saw this picture and wanted to share it:



Seems about right.

 

Except alpha has a different meaning in programming circles. I was slightly puzzled until I saw the picture.

I do agree. At least in the indie space Unity has been the dominant engine for years. Now there are a ton of other engines moving into that space.

For developers it's been pretty good. We saw significant price wars over the last year, finally ending with every engine being free. (At least I assume they are over, the only way to go from here is to pay us to use the engine).

 

Unity is definitely a contender for the alpha position if they do not already hold it. About the only other engine that stands a chance at the position is Unreal and only for situations where you do not care about supporting legacy hardware.

 

For dev teams of 3-5 people or less, I'd say yes. Any more than that, there may be trouble. It actually surprises me as to how far Amplitude has taken Unity development, because I couldn't imagine how it was possible.

 

I don't know how I feel about that picture after sinking 30 hours into Ark : Survival Evolved. I want to see something like "unreal paris tour". I know graphics aren't the only part of gaming, but damn, the UE4 showcases are shiny.

http://www.benoitdereau.com/images/unrealparis/unrealparis01.jpg
http://www.benoitdereau.com/images/unrealparis/unrealparis02.jpg

So pretty. So pointless gameplay wise, but so pretty.

 

And raptors eat humans.

Yet... Unity manages to be a little smarter, and maintains that little edge.

 

Unity's market share is being eroded. Regardless of what you think about the quality of engines, the choice means a lot of people are stepping into Unreal first. Schools are teaching both now.

 

Such is the struggle within the raptor pack.

 

The college I just graduated from is planning some Unreal courses. They have like 10 unity courses already. I look forward to the future. I hope unity steps it up when Weyl fermion technology is affordable. Unreal has the leg up right now for that day being one of the most hardware demanding engines.

They'll probably keep that edge because of the asset store & how easy it is to use UNET. Multiplayer was 100% unreal for me until UNET. It's still easier in unreal, but at least the gap is a little closer.

 

Personally I would like to see courses stick to using multiple engines even if one suddenly were to become a big leader over the others. We already teach people multiple programming languages with the idea of getting them comfortable with using more than one. We should be doing the same thing with engines. It isn't like they won't have to pick up others.

 

I'd love to see a universal language and engine. But since the industry can't even settle on a universal operating system we should just follow @Ryiah's advice and become engine agnostic. Especially in education, you never know which way the industry will move. And picking the path of an individual student would be even harder.

 

To me, Unity and Unreal, even GameMaker are a big step toward that universal language and engine idea. It used to be really bad if you were just one person trying to do it on your own. Like, really, really bad before Unity, XNA and all of these other great things came along. Like, writing your own code to pull bitmap image data from files, then pushing bitmap data into buffers and then swapping buffers to achieve a non-flickering 2D image on the screen.

Really the differences between learning one set of tools or another set of tools to do something, and they both make your life a whole lot easier than trying to not use those tools, it's not all that bad. Also, there will always be at least two competitors in any significant market. If that's Unity vs. Unreal for the foreseeable future that sounds great.

One language and one engine might actually be a bad thing, also. There's no checking, no competitiveness to keep things fresh.

 

Which is the engine with the G logo in the right?

 

I think that Unity's sense of democracy has kept things fresh.

Look at all the cool stuff out of the asset store.

 

Game Maker

 

The "G" is the surprisingly still relevant brainchild of Mark Overmars, which in January 26, 2007 underwent a massive change under YoYo Games, which introduced a live web player and went on to actually have real titles produced in it. Hotline Miami was made in GameMaker. The original game that Super Meat Boy was inspired by was called Jumper, it was made in GameMaker. There were lots of other cool games and new games are being made today. Possibly tomorrow's next big thing. It's a lot easier to use than Unity, but you can't get away with the same visual effects and it's really hard to make games that involve data, due to the extremely limited nature of GM Script, which is basically a sort-of-kind-of JavaScript... unless they've improved that as well. It still blows my mind how much that engine improved over the years, though.

People used to laugh at you if you said you used GameMaker.

 

This is 100% spot on.

I used to tool around with GM, but I also was a doubter that a game could make it big that was made with it.

Way to go HLM! That game is rad.

 

Unity used to be the leader. But Epic really stepped up their game when they release UE4 for free and reduced the royalty cut to 5%. I definitely think they had a part to play in forcing Unity to release the full engine for free.

Unity have already lost the AAA space to Unreal, if both engines carry on their current trajectory I don't see Unity lasting beyond another 5 years. Unreal is open source now and are releasing major updates almost every month and have a rapidly growing user base. If we could see a graph of Unity's user figures I imagine it would look like a slow erosion at the moment. Pro doesn't really offer any serious benefits to most users so my guess is they're relying on asset store revenue to keep the company afloat. Unfortunately, as user numbers dwindle, asset store sales will too.

I've used Unity since 2012 and released 2 commercial games with it. It has been a great engine, and still is, but as someone wanting to produce AAA quality games for PC/Mac/Linux, Unreal offers much better features. One of my friends who was a long time Unity user had to switch to Unreal about 3 months ago for a new job, and he has been singing its praises since.

A few times I've seen scenes which literally make me say "f*ck me that's gorgeous!" out loud - and each time it has been made with Unreal. Even The Blacksmith demo didn't have the same impact on me, despite it being showcasing the best of Unity and having a number of graphical improvements not included in the standard software.

After seeing Unity's disappointing roadmap, I'll be making the switch this summer.

 

And now it would look terrible for either of them to revoke it.

Hard to disagree with some of the names using unreal. Even Hearthstone doesn't show off much graphically.

It's fascinating to me that such a well known and capable brand would actually put effort in to stay on top. The team on diablo 3 should take a [expletive] note. And the greedy mo's who handle the servers. The poor game design drove me away before the server trouble and poor optimization in certain zones, and now there's rampant botting and hacking problems.

Is that because your friend loves C++ or because he finds blueprints actually useful? I heard that Ark is using a lot of blueprints and it seems to run well (after all of the optimization patches).

Have you seen the video from the 2 images I linked in a previous post? haha

Again I'll reference the unreal paris tour. In comparison, I have been yet to be impressed by anything else.

Haven't looked yet. My new job is interested in unity and I don't have many unreal skills so I may just keep my head in the sand for a while. They want to release low hardware requirement mobile games so... we'll probably stick to unity.

 

It will be interesting to see any way. I think unity is winning the indie space as much as unreal is winning AAA. Both engines might be able to differentiate themselves enough to exist.

But if they both go after the same exact market there will be casualties.

 

The thing is, they both ARE going after the same market right now. Epic's move with Unreal 4 was genius and made it a viable option for Unity's main target audience, indie developers. I get the feeling Unity is going to put all its chips on the mobile sector and in a few years it'll be known as the game engine you use if you want to make a mobile application.

Epic is going to steal a lot of Unity users who want to develop for desktop platforms. There's just no competition. Epic is a AAA games studio (with a huge financial backing from a Chinese corporation). They know what kind of features people need, and unlike Unity are not afraid to implement features which require a bit of beef to run. Unity's philosophy of 'if we're going to implement a feature it has to run on hardware from a TitanX to a smartwatch' is commendable but unfortunately holds the top end back.

 

I don't think so. Time for schools and teaching is sparse enough as it is. If you teach one engine in more detail it's ususally not as difficult to pick up other ones when you understand the principles behind it. Starting fresh with two engines parallel means learning less of the important basics but that twice. And I know a lot of students would get confused with wanting to apply one workflow to another engine.
When you learn programming you usually don't learn two languages at once either but rather one in detail and then go on from there yourself or by choice.

 

Well I for one certainly don't agree with that. I've used both and I still greatly prefer Unity. But subjective opinions aside, there's also the issue regarding pricing model. For a lot of people royalty is a huge deal breaker. So for that reason alone, Unity is very much a big competitor even in the areas where UE4 excels.

 

There's a flaw in this thinking and it leads you to a likely inaccurate conclusion. You assert that as time passes, people's desire for better-looking 3D graphics increases proportionally/exponentially, to the level of dooming Unity in only 5 years. Where is the sign of this mainstream/universal desire to only play games with the best available graphics?

I've seen too many successful games with too many graphical styles to buy into that thinking.

What people do universally enjoy is a new game, with lots of content. Consider also that the majority don't have gaming rigs... to them, gaming is a secondary activity, not a way of life. So the faster, more agile engine that facilitates the creation of games that meet the minimal demands of these casual consumers actually holds an edge, simply because it can be so light weight.

And considering that there are now other payment models out there, games with lower production and maintenance costs are virtually win/win/win. It's like, why do people eat McDonald's? The answer? It's good enough to satisfy, requires minimal investment, plus its relatively cheap and the quality is consistent. Oh yeah, and the staff is trained to be courteous and they're very customer oriented. Carl's Jr./Hardee's offers gargantuan, char-broiled burgers that are much tastier. Their marketing campaign is provocative and appealing to all of the senses, just look at some of the racy commercials they've produced. Yet McDonald's stores still have a line around the block breakfast, lunch and dinner, every day year round.

Just for perspective, to think about it a little differently.

 

Having students become confused when they try to learn alternative engines is exactly why you want to teach more than one. They wouldn't have to be taught at the same time any more than you would instruct them in more than one language at a time, but you don't want them to feel like a single engine is capable of covering every single situation. You want them to be used to picking up new technology.

It does vary between colleges as to whether or not your curriculum forces you to learn more than one language, but they definitely won't teach them side-by-side. At least not until you've learned your first language.

 

Anselmo, my focus here isn't on graphical fidelity. Here's the point I was making. Unreal currently does a lot of things better than Unity for those making desktop games, one of those being better graphics, along with a more powerful particle editor, terrain system, and visual scripting to name a few. A lot of developers have already switched from Unity to Unreal for these reasons - I'm sure if we had statistics available to compare the number of UDK users with the number of UE4 users, the difference would be remarkable. That's the picture today, just over one year since the engine was released. And it is quickly improving month by month, receiving major updates.

If we project another 5 years down the line, and the Unreal engine is still open source and progressing at the same rate, and Unity continues the way it is at the moment, I can't see how Unity will be attracting desktop-focused developers to use their engine rather than Unreal.

Again, these are just my thoughts, and predicting what will happen years in the future is just not possible as any number of unexpected things could happen - a brand new engine could even crop up in the meantime and dominate both of the current titans.

 

What about godot?

 

No idea - never heard of it (yet)!

 

I doubt GameMaker represent any danger for Unity, and GameMaker is far away to be on par with CE3 or UE4.

You can get a correct picture if you switch GameMaker with Unity

 

I think in AAA terms, UE4 steamrolls Unity I'm afraid so I would say UE4 is the Alpha. This could all change within a year

Of course not all of us have giant teams so we use Unity because it is more empowering, just not as far along in development for features yet. Once Unity nails that we could see a new alpha. I guess what should have been asked is:

Alpha of what? 2D games? Web games? Mobile? if it's mobile then Unity is the Alpha

 

That's pretty much what unity is, unless you mean universally adopted. In that case we've already mostly been there, tech advances and poor management killed that.

 

@hippocoder there are a lot of things UT could be working on, but I want to ask you what you think would be higher priority: visual scripting or "AAA"

Unity seems like the most accessible engine, but right now that's mostly in hardware requirements. As easy as unityscript and c# are to pick up, ue4 has blueprints. That whole empowerment thing you mentioned, in a hierarchy, would be...

Blueprints (unreal)
javascript (unity)
c# (unity)
c++ (unreal)

Unreal has both the easiest and most difficult but powerful options. And they can work together!

Personally I think unity should buyout PlayMaker or develop something to compete They have their component business which is already somewhere between coding and visual scripting.

 

A visual node-based material editor!

 

Unity should buy out shader forge It's the solution to everything. A lot of the problems we have are solved by additional $$$$. If unity spends a vast amount of $$$$ then we won't have to. Just need to compare the number of sales of certain assets with the number of new users making that asset built in would attract.

If this were a UE4 discussion, someone would probably make it and then it would get incorporated into the next build

 

oh yes sorry i forgot to mention Unity is the alpha for mobile

 

Part of me wonders if it couldn't be re-purposed as a visual scripting tool.

 

How often do you teach, how many students do you have in your groups usually and how far apart is their ability to understand and follow complex new topics?
How good do your groups usually do with completely new topics?
Do you put your focus on understanding of concepts or the software itself?
How much time do you have for these topics compared to everything else that has to be taught and learned in the semester?

These are the questions I would of the top of my head try to answer to see if it's viable or sensible to teach more than one engine.

 

As a tutor of groups varying in number from 1 to 8 for the past 4 years I think I can say that a large percentage of the next wave of coders are f*ed.

It'd be easier to rate a lot of them on a scale of bad to worse.

They wouldn't understand this question.

Tutoring => the semester wasn't enough

Pfff I've been talking about college students struggling with general purpose programming in PYTHON.

I'm one of those types that can pick up programming easy so I think it's easy for everyone. The internet suggests I might then devalue my own talent, but that's not the case. I know I'm practically a god, I just don't see why it's so hard for some people You're dictating logic in a manner that a machine can understand.

 

One last post on teaching:
I should back away from my original statement of not teaching two engines a little just to clarify.

I teach sculpting and realtime art with Cinema 4D and ZBrush. My students know about Cinema 4D from all the semesters before because it is used at the university as the standard 3D program. So when I teach sculpting I am in the comfortable position of being able to extend already established knowledge in Cinema 4D.
I do teach sculpting in Cinema 4D and in ZBrush. So in a way I am already doing the 2 program approach but here's why I don't think it's necessary to teach for example Unreal and Unity parallel.
When I teach sculpting I always try to teach thinkingin in concepts instead of a program tutorial. Because it is demanded by the university I do the same things (techniques) in Cinema first so that people who can live with the bare essentials of sculpting can stick to Cinema 4D without the need for an external program (and Cinema does that astoundinly well - the Cinema normals even sync to Unity pretty good).
Then I do teach ZBrush because dedicated sculpting apps can do a lot more than most integrated sculpting can do in any 3D program that I know of.
When it comes to ZBrush there's two things I always try to communicate:
1. It's the same concepts you already did in Cinema 4D just with a different interface. It's "just" that beyond the basics ZBrush can do more to aid you
2. It would not matter to me if I taught ZBrush, Mudbox or Coat3D as a 2nd program - all of these have their own advantages and disadvantages. What you need to know is is that the core thinking process is the same and that you can use the tools to produce compareable results in pretty much any advanced sculpting program. Some tools differ but the core is always the same.

Here's the important part: What the further differences are between the major programs and what everybody likes better individually is something to find out on your own. The thought process is important - what to make out of the given tools and what the project you are working on demands is up to the individual.
It's just not very useful to teach everybody several different things when the individual will only need one of them. I always value the thought process of creation much higher than the tool. Tools can be and will be learned one you know what to do with them. Learning tools without a purpose is meaningless and confusing.
Teaching more than one game engine for me is the same thing - when the concepts of "thinking in game terms" are understood then everybody can proceed on their own and apply that knowledge to the different engines with the learning ressources provided, individually. It's just important that it is one of the major plattforms that incorporates state of the art features in some way. I would not say it's enough to teach - say - RPG maker and then call it a day. It wouldn't cover the basics that are needed to understand today's professional workflow.
I do think it's absolutely fine to use either Unity or Unreal and let students who want to major in that field advance on their own to the different alternatives.

 

For now... for 10 years time I predict that a visual programming language like Scratch will have evolved so far it will take over all forms of programming and game making. Since every child would have learned it at school.

 

I would say big plus for unity is the Asset-Store, which helps a lot, to get to your goal. And this is the biggest strenght of Unity. For mostly every problem you can run into, you can find an answer in the AssetStore (Community helps also a lot).

As for buying up a dev. / company like ShaderForge and or PlayMaker to integrate it into Unity, i dissagree. Wouldn´t be a good idea. Because of the competition, update frequency, etc. UT can keep focus on elemental, core things, while plugin devs can make more progress on a specific tool, they can invent & implement new stuff. When big companies buy plugin-devs, it often happens that after some years the update progress gets very slow, stops.

 

Tripple A (AAA) games are more artist dependent instead of a tech. UE4 can also produce ugly looking games (if there is no artist or one with bad skills). As for "realtime rendering technology" UE4 is Alpha, as mentioned. Why? Because of its history. They were always aiming for best graphics. And now they are looking a bit more to the mobile sector. For Unity, i would say they haven´t have ever the aiming for "best graphics on desktop systems". They have had the goal to publish on every system, especially to the mobile ones. Now with U5 i think they aiming to desktop systems "best graphics" field. They want to catch up the market.

 

By empowering I mean Unity is easier to use in general, and that does not necessarily mean blueprint. It just means there's significantly less steps and Unity holds your hand. This is blessing and curse. The sheer number of bugs is a bit much but this isn't a bitch thread, I'm just saying I don't feel Unity is the alpha of desktop or console game development. Yet.

But what would Alpha be categorised at? most users? most features? best visuals? It's an impossible question to answer but I guess the thread is really just for fun and I should cheer up and piss off

 

On the other hand with 3rd party developers you are depending on the continued development and support for the plugins. Espeically small external developers are much faster to abort a project if it dies down too much so that continued support isn't guaranteed any more. On Unity's asset store there's also the policy that when an asset is pulled that it's also not downloadable any more. Then there's sometimes problems with compatibility. Not always are 3rd party plugins completely reliable (then again the bugfixing response time is usually also faster than the official Unity cycle).
The risk is lower on high profile plugins like ShaderForge or ProBuilder that they will vanish any time soon.

While I wish the creators of these plugins all the success they can (they really deserve atons of it for filling these rather large holes in Unity's interface) get I still do prefer native and integrated solutions wherever possible.

From the sort times I've been using Unreal4 so far this feels very true. Unreal seems to have much more but also seems to exposes a lot more complexity than Unity does. As you said: blessing and curse.

 

I dislike this but it's true. I am torn on the idea. On one hand, it's a great introduction to logic. On the other hand, people should understand the wonder and control of coding. I grew up on java and do think machines are good enough that for a lot of general purpose applications you don't need C/C++... but it was still fun to learn it and play around with pointers. And I can see it's usefulness in unreal for creating custom blueprint nodes. I like that the multiple options available there can work together. Is there any other system like that? Besides play maker ;P

Game that causes the most epeen in the gaming community

Is that why it's still here?

 

Most likely

 

LMAO, yeah.. Sure it does..

@sledgeman

Of course bad artwork = a bad looking game but that has been the case in any engine since forever.. Just the lighting / shadows and post will make it look like a super shiny turd. As opposed to just an ugly one.

I keep hearing this, but there are tons of examples of great looking indie games (some which look and play better than some AAA) made by one to three people in many cases.. It's nothing to do with AAA it's a PC / Console engine and that's what it's best at.

Why is it easier to use? Because in Unity you can get away with using the standard shader, use nothing but asset packs and really not need to understand any fundamentals of game development?

If anyone wants to make their own quality PC / Console game, not just a mishmash of random stuff with the standard "post" on top. UE4 can be much simpler from an artist / coder side, in which you really have to just use it to find out why.. There's so much in it plus I've never wanted for anything.

Want an AI Behaviour tree? (that works a bit like mecanim) It has one. You want to make shaders? It has a intricate and feature complete material editor?, You want cut-scenes? It can do that, you want destruction or a more scaleform like UI... No problem, you want to block out a scene export it? No problem.. It goes on and on..

People keep saying Unity is easier, anyone care to say why? If C++ is an issue (which UE takes care of GC etc. for you) then use BP's.

 

I really should check out the competition one of these days so I can contribute once these discussions start getting technical.

 

Unity rox, Unreal rox, who care which is boss, we get the best toys freeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

 

Best is relative to you and only you, 10 years ago we'd of just loved to have an engine. Any engine never mind two professional class engines, but of course with accessibility comes competition. So more is needed to beat the competition, it never ends...

I'd like Unity to catch up in 3D(PC / Console) and I'm sure many want Unreal to catch up in terms of mobile. Whether any of them do is another matter..