Unity 3 Vs. UDK

Yeah, I had to.

I know not everything about Unity3 has been revealed yet.

But I am personally excited at the prospect of creating Pro-Quality games with Unity 3's new features.

I know this can be done NOW, but any additions of course make the deal even sweeter.

How about you?

Unity 3 vs. UDK.

Go!

 

Well you are asking it on the Unity official forums, what do you expect?

Unity because it has never seen before cross platform and deployment options. Is very easy and fun to use. Has a variety of scripting options. Can import almost all the well known files for every media. Continously improved. Unity staff, they are the nicest guys I have ever seen in game dev. business. Every update makes me say "I wanted this since I started game development!"

I can list more and more things I love with Unity though so much love can get some people sick...

 

There is no vs for me.


If I would do a shooter or multiplayer shooter it would be Torque VS UDK, where you go depends on your need of low level access and your willingness to invest the money into a team to usefully unleash and utilize something like UDK as you can no longer handle a monster like that with a 2 person dream for more than "prototype" / "indie contest" usage out of my sight

For anything else its Unity, especially when its about more than just windows only distribution, as that is the only thing you can do with UDK
I personally care only little about the deferred rendering of Unity 3. For me the upgrade of mono to finally get professional development functionality and the required stability, the upgrade of physx and the integration of beast but especially umbra (PVS is the major optimization aspect ignored in Unity 2.x, closely followed by the UI, but there GUIX closes the gap easily)

 

you can learn a lot from this thread too

Is Unity any easier than UDK?
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=36040

 

Is difficult to compare Unity and UDK because they are extremely different, unity is a indie engine for iPhone, Apps, web Apps and stand alone mac and window applications therefore made with low quality settings in mind, UDK is a resource heavy, state of the art engine subset of the 1 Million dollar worth unreal 3 engine and UDK is only available for high end pcs. As you can clearly see they are completely different beasts.

The BIG problem about UDK is that is not designed for small teams with small budgets, if you want to create a free modification or minigame of sorts using it and you have every intention to make it completely FREE then you should definetily try it, specially if you are interesting in entering the proffesional (not indie) developer industry later on.

However if you even think in releasing a commercial game with it, you should reconsider, the price of entry is almost the same than unity pro ($99), but you have to pay 20% royalties of ANY MONEY made from the game, not just directly from sales, that includes: advertising (google ads), grants, publisher deals, loans EVERYTHING pretty much is like adding epic to the pay roll. Unless you have a cool million lying around to buy the whole thing, so you can stop paying royalties.

Probably for a large company thats no problem but for a small team barely making a living 20% of your revenue can and probably will break you. (you could even end up in debt)

If you are an accounting/manager god with a team than knows their way with ease around the engine, and you have a great idea that can profit a LOT from its use, then by all means. Otherwise stay away.

 

And the UDK licence - 25% ??????!!!!!!!

Hmmmm ....

Unity 3 should have the new lightmapping features and render-to-texture in the indie version tho

 

The reason I stopped using the UDK is because it's practically undocumented. When I use Unity I just open up the API reference in a browser window, #unity3d in my chat client, and I'm set.

When I use the UDK it's like I'm all alone in a maze of features.

 

Unity Indie ceased to exist in autumn 2009
There is only one free license (Unity) and one payed license (Unity Pro)

 

UDK != Intuitive

I took a course at college in computer graphics that used the Unreal editor and the UT2004 version of the Unreal Engine(Unreal Engine 2?) Anyhow, that software is crazy, ctrl-s does not save your level, it subtracts the current geometry from the level with no undo! There are numerous other wonky things that hopefully they fixed, but when I used the old Unreal Editor it was a nightmare.

UDK is good for big budget large team developments that can invest in such technology and only want to produce games for top of the line pc's.

Unity is allowing me as a single person and no money create a game! How awesome is that! I can even sell it and take all the profit so long as I dont exceed $100,000/yr(anything more requires pro license) if I remember correctly. And all the tools are easy to learn/very intuitive. Unity is great for small to single person dev teams. It also has cross platform and web deployment. It's growing to support more and more platforms and runs on almost any hardware configuration.

Unity is the do all run almost anywhere game engine.
UDK is the high end gaming pc only market.

 

I'm sorry but look again, you clearly were not looking close enough! The one major thing that the UDK has over every other 3D engine out their is docs. May be you looked when it was first released I do not know, but now it has eclipsed unity, torque etc many times i.e buzz 3D, eat3D, the udn and 100's of hours on youtube and scattered on private web sites across the net.

I like the editor in Unity much more than the UDK (which I find a bit clunky) and the asset pipeline is really easy to work with, my major gripe with unity is networking and lack of docs for scripting. These are big head aches for me (may be not for you :wink but I have found the opposite to be true of the UDK. I am not saying any engine is better, both have strengths and weakness.

Which you choose will depend entirely on your project but people please stop saying that UDK requires a massive team, has no docs, is only for large commercial games etc this is simply not true! The UDK is just as fast and easy to use as Unity (although will take you a little longer to learn it because their is so much). $100 and 25% on anything over $5000 might be too much for some. In these cases Unity is def the best option and you should run with it, the guys here do a fantastic job.

Sorry for the rant but these threads are pointless, comparing apples and oranges and filled with miss information. I use both and I am quite happy with both, they each have a place in my heart

Cheers,
Jiff

 

Just 5 threads down you can find a 23 page thread named : Is Unity any easier than UDK? Ofc, everyone compares the two instead of offering tips. NO need to go there again.

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=36040

Just to add something useful to this thread:

As it is right now, leaving all else aside, the UDK has rock solid networking support, a HDR rendering pipeline and integrated Steamworks(darn) over unity. The community is in it's infancy stages from what I gather over at their forums but is shaping-up quite nicely.

Unity has multi-platform support and an indie-friendly workflow (fancier dynamic lighting system too).

Both binaries have a lot (and by that I mean a lot) of docs, both video and text, free or paid. Both sides should do their homework on this.

 

Bingo baby

 

I come from UDK, and I have to say, this is far better. Although, its not impossible to make something good in UDK. The reason I switched, is because in UDK, you have to exit out of your engine, write your script, recompile with frontend, restart the engine, and test. While unity does this all really fast right as I save.

 

I won't learn another engine unless I have to (and with unity I had no reason to switch) :wink:

 

This is critical. You will make a better game with a so-so engine that you understand well than a great engine you don't understand at all.

 

The difference between Unity and UDK is like the difference between a sailboat and a navy carrier. Yeah, the navy carrier is going to be better than the sailboat, but unless you have a team big enough, and trained enough to man it, its useless. If your team is between 1-6 guys, and you don't have a huge budget, probably best to use Unity.

 

That's a hell of a quote.

 

I second that!

 

I don't get why people say the UDK isn't friendly for small teams, just look at the unearthly challenge, people had 8 weeks to make a level with the theme end game (and most people had full times job while doing this challenge). I believe most teams used the udk.

http://www.unearthlychallenge.com/2009/prefinals.php

 

Unity 3 wins

 

Perhaps they're referring to something other than creating a level for a FPS that someone (effectively) already created.

 

UDK is a great tool, but very hard.


btw, even if it's a sailboat, it can still look amazing. And even if its a navy ship, it can still look ugly as hell.

 

The difference between UDK and Unity isn't so much the tools/abilities, it's more the people behind it than anyone else. Experience is really all that's required. I can know nothing of Unity and probably still work my way around a game, however if I know nothing of UDK I won't get very far.

Coming from UDK I know that it's hard and can be easy in some parts and hard in others. The point is, is it requires more work to make a game with UDK than Unity, but still outputs a much better result. It's like SNES vs. Sega Genesis. Both equally good in their own rights, but still the SNES is better because it had more games and more fun experiences.

 

Its like comparing Maya to blender, even though they are both tools that do basically the same thing, and you can get similar results with both, they have completely different targets in mind. And whats really important is the artists/programmers behind the project. You can make an awesome puzzle games in both engines, but they each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Unity is awesome for just plugging stuff in and playing, but if you try to do something with it that's not really built in or planned for, it can cause lots of issues and require programming. Also unity interface and set-up is focused for small teams. UDK is awesome for the current generation of games, setup to work well for larger groups of artists/programmers, lots of cool but graphic intensive shaders/environments/lighting/etc.

At least that's what I'm getting from barely using them both

 

That one always kills me! Tell me this, how long would it take you to implement a reflective water surface in unity? Is is possible? Would it require scripting? ....I know from personal experience to do something like this in unity takes days of searching/asking questions/reading (and trying to decipher the docs). Want to know how long it takes in UDK, two clicks of a mouse!

OK I hear the 'unity is easier rhetoric' coming so lets have another example shall we. How long would it take to code interactive foliage in unity? ...I say code cos anybody who has used unity long enough knows that unless you are placing and sizing assets the unity editor doesn't really do much! In UDK this would take longer than the first example (you have to make a material) but in effect you add a static mesh apply the material (15 mins to make) and your done! So that's around ~16 mins then. This would take days again in unity, if indeed it is even possible :wink:

I could go on and on and on but I will not! The point is that unity is very good at what it does and yes the UDK editor is complex in comparison BUT once you know the basics in UDK it is actually a lot faster to do complex things, so the argument that UDK is not for small teams in guff, ill informed and actually the contrary is true with regard to unity. Like so many have said, it is like comparing apples and oranges but casting aspersions and blatant fanboyism doesn't help people wanting to make an informed decision either! Like it or not unity requires scripting to do just about anything which is just as steep a learning curve to non-programmer types as learning the UDK editor (if not more, since their is lots of docs). I like the rapid level setup in unity, the multi-platform options which it brings as an indie dev which is why I continue to use it BUT crafting a game is no harder or longer in UDK. Enough said really. This applies equally to non fps type games.

Cheers,

Jiff

 

I was very excited about UDK when I downloaded it, I thought it was going to be very simple to make games with it in no time, they say their engine is user friendly and it's for "everyone, anyone, YOU".
I spent hours trying to figure out how to even start making anything close to a game.
I just couldn't do it, after researching I found out you had to type the code in some other program (notepad for instance), and bring it into UDK in a very mysterious way.
Also, the documentation? http://udk.com/documentation is a joke!
Where's the UDK scripting manual? IT DOESN'T EXIST... HOLY SH*T.
I wasn't let down, I was ANGRY for making me waste my time.
With unity you begin making your game with 0 knowledge after the first 5 minutes, and it's all uphill from there.
I'm making a game, and I'm learning on the FLY man... i'm learning how to do things as I go, and i'm progressing fast with my game.

I don't know UDK community, but we got a very supportive community here, I get my questions answered in half an hour at unity support.

Many of us work on our own, and big games aren't an option, so we focus on casual games, and being able to have them on web browsers is great.

UDK games are slow, I played a very simple underwater game, for what it is should run at 120 fps in my old pc, but I got about 15 fps, and long loading times.
So UDK games are for next gen pcs while Unity Games are fast on any pc.

 

The wiki for UnrealScript is here: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:UnrealScript

Their is also countless example scripts all over the internet for almost anything you can think of, the benefit of 10 years of modding communities.

The documentation is massive but very well written
and easy to understand. Unity has very good docs too, the one thing that I wish many in the unity camp would entertain is the idea of user generated tutorials, UDK has thousands on Youtube and on private websites. This is a massive help! I beleive that this would be a great benefit to the unity community.

Why angry? sure to begin with the unity editor is very good to use, clean, easy and relatively fast but once you want to do anything more complex it doesn't lend its self very well. This is where the power of the bundled tools with the UDK comes into its own. This is the point when the UDK becomes easier to use :wink: I'll admit when you first open UDK it is overwhelming but what did you expect? It's a massively advanced engine and with everything it packs in it is pretty easy to use!

The UDK community is very helpful, every bit as much as the great folks on here! These are the primary reasons I use use unity, web deployment, great community and ease of putting together casual games! I'm not having a poke at unity or it's users (I am one), it just gets on my wick when people slag off something they have no clue about. The UDK is massively powerful, much more so than unity but that is not the point! The point is that unity is great for casual games, something that you wouldn't even try to achieve in the UDK. On the opposite side though, if I wanted a commercially viable fps I wouldn't dream of using unity (It's just far too much work to write all the scripts necessary and get the graphics anywhere near what is expected in the current AAA games market). That said both are excellent engines in their own write and people should choose based on the project at hand

Cheers,

Jiff

 

If UDK ever gets a friendlier front-end, and creating a new project is made as simple as 'File->New Project', I think people will start to see it's not nearly as complicated as they think. To me, it seems like a bunch of people don't even get a new project started before they throw their hands up and say it's not user friendly.

Unity is easy to start with, and it's C# support and overall component structure blows UDK away imho - but it is severely lacking in the tools department. You don't get very far before you have to start coding your own.. which I suppose has it's own charm (and is probably why this community is still very engineer heavy) - but isn't nearly as productive in comparison. Honestly I still scratch my head at the inclusion of things like a Tree Editor in the new version while it's still missing basic things like animation graphs, official BSP support, visual shader/logic/fx editors and the like.

 

That's me, but that is just because I don't like my interfaces to look like they were made for windows 2000.

When I tried it last, it was like that.

 

Yeah, you have to learn UDK just like you learn unity. It's not like it's going to say "click here" (although that would be nice). And I hated the scripting. I am working on a game and we are still getting the team together. But my boss asked me if I wanted to be a secondary programmer because of my C# background. I said sure and started learning. It was a horror.


Write script, save, recompile, reopen udk.

It took like, 5 minutes just for some small fix. And it was a different language (unrealscript) so if you mess up, you have to redo it.


Thank god the project has switched to Unity.

 

Ahhh how shallow but so very true! By the way, your sig should read: 'Time you enjoy wasting, is not wasted time' not 'Time you enjoy wasting, is not wated time'! It's also a Bertrand Russell quote too

Cheers,

Jiff

 

Fak, I have been using that for a few hundred posts.

 

You know, it's interesting that I see people point to unity as mostly for smaller games, when you have small teams that can create games like this baby:

http://www.interstellarmarines.com

And I'll bet that it runs faster than if it were made in UDK.

 

That's another thing. UDK is SUPER slow. In unity, I get 60FPS. In UDK, I get 10.

 

No prob glad I could help mate. Think it changes retrospectively so no worries unless it's archived. Yeah got to say Interstellar Marines is looking good! Like the idea of how they are marketing it as well, unique in that sense. Top show on that one
Cheers,

Jiff

 

It is archived.

 

I wouldn't say UDK is SUPER slow... infact, i would say the opposite, it's just a different kettle of fish to Unity. UDK isn't meant for low (or even middle powered PC's), infact i think they have taken out all support for sub-shader model 3 in the latest beta.

Where as Unity likes meshed batched, UDK likes instances. I did a few tests with an earlier version of UDK and I couldn't get it to slow down at all.

Yes, I agree you don't get frame rates in the hundreds but with that much toolage, rendering power and pure eye candy would you expect it.

With a recommended dev machine spec of 8GB ram and a Shader Model 3 gfx card, it is a different beast all together.

 

I feel boring when lauching UDK and waiting 5 min.
After that to create a package asset when importing my stuff...

I also enjoy very lot the prefab option on Unity.

Pre-production work on UDK is very slow and I prefer to work on Unity as an artist.


Now I think Unity should learn a little more about the shader editor from UDK.

 

With what project. Have you setup the exact same scene in both engines?

 

You are right. Secondly, I have never seen any environments even remotely like the UDK stuff running in Unity. I installed the June UDK Beta today and opened the DM-Deck level and was blown away by the detail levels of the environment.

So you can't say UDK is slow when it's pushing that much stuff around. What is the most graphically impressive thing in Unity... in another thread, 'Interstellar Marines' has been mentioned... I don't think there is even remotely a comparison between the detail levels.

 

looks like there is no commercial game released with UDK yet.. maybe it take years to finish a game with UDK.

 

While I have practically no knowledge of UDK, are you talking about the free UDK version or the Unreal engine in general?
If second option, then most of the latest games you see are developed using Unreal engine, like bioshock 1-2, mass effect 1-2, transformers etc.

 

They've spent so much time on custom coding and shading and its just a target game (well the free online game is, there is a running man mode now that's a bit more complicated than a moving target game)

The UDK could've made that game a lot quicker and easier for the most part, and I'm sure it'd run at similar FPS, optimization is key and you can poorly optimize in ether engine, some engines like things done one way, other like things done another way.

Like unity likes all the meshes one piece of geo. The udk doesn't mind floating geo in a mesh, and really loves instances. It gets more complicated once you start talking about shaders/LOD/transparency/ etc.

 

Well yeah, udk isn't for smaller machines. But that also lowers the amount of people that can even buy your product. And yeah, something happened in the last release where a bunch or people were having super lag (including me) that ran the editor itself at about 1fps

 

Unity can't produce graphics like this

http://www.udk.com/elements/img/galleries/features-rendering.jpg

http://www.udk.com/elements/img/galleries/features-lighting-hero.jpg


We use both ( own the actual Unreal engine ) and are waiting to see how good V3 Unity is with BEAST, that said Unreal is a different set of tools all together. We also own the Cry engine, that is another step up from Unreal.

We have pushed Unity to it's limit regards graphics, its simply no match for Unreal at this stage sorry, yet it's still a VERY good engine and we use Unity day in day out.

You can get very nice results from Unity very fast, you'll need some resource and talent with Unreal and $$$ let alone Crysis.

Regards
A

 

Be really interesting to see some screenshots from what you have done if you could share. I'm just curious.

 

I'll second this request

 

Some old stuff on this thread, i'll post some newer works the guys have done of late

Thanks

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=118549&highlight=#118549

 

I'll third it as I always find these "pushed the limit" quotes interesting but somewhat vague.

 

I have experience with Torque, Quest 3D, Unreal3, CryENGINE2, Hero Engine, and Big World as well as several industry specific engines like VR-Context's Walk-n-side, OLIVE (Second Life "competitor"), and Teleplace. Now looking at Unity for some projects.

I will say no two engines are ever alike. EVER.

Ok so Unreal and CryEngine are nice to look at but I would never hit that level of detail in an MMO. Hero Engine and Big World (MMO engines) are great but not practical for a FPS or Casual Game. Unity and Torque are nice for prototypes or games that can have long development cycles as you will be making a lot of your own tools and be writing a lot of code to make a good game. So functionalities will vary based on your needs. But I would never say that CryENGINE or Unreal Engine will meet all of your needs all of the time and is the best engine ever, because that simply is not true.

I actually have a comparison matrix that I built in excel that compares all these engines based on needed functionality. So basically you answer a series of questions and it spits out a list of engines that can do what you need ranked according to which ones can do it better. And guess what, for a lot of the projects I do the million dollar engines don’t give me what I need.

Some advice: when comparing engines start like this. #1 Budget, how much money is at my disposal and how will that money get used (pay people, buy technologies, do you need office space, ect). #2 Time, how long do I have to do what I need to with the money I have (only have enough money to pay people for 2 years?, only enough money for office space for 1 year?, boss set the deadline based on factors out of your control, no time limit because this is an indy development, ect). #3 Goal, what does success look like for my game ie what is the end product (RPG, MMO, FPS, Racing Game, number of levels, Art Direction, Functionality Spec document, game design document, ect).

You will find yourself going back and forth with these three things tweaking them until you get a plan you are comfortable with. Once you have that Plan, THEN start looking for technologies (game engines). The more technologies and middleware you buy the more likely you will meet your time estimate and less likely that you will meet your budget estimate. However, as long as what you do supports your goal and stays within your time and budget estimates you should be ok.

tl;dr: (To Long; Didn't Read No 2 engines can ever be compared, instead define your project and find an engine that fits those specific needs. All projects are unique; all engines are unique; so find an engine that can live happily with your project.

I hope this helps some of you who are always looking for engine comparisons. Unity seems like it is great at iterating through art, 3D assets, and level design.

Ninja Edit: here is a good example of an RPG made in Unity3D http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rx7xeqadFQ