Unity 3 Vs. UDK

don't get dragged in by flam-o-trolls, its not worth it.
Unity wasn't voted #1 on this years game dev mags survey and UDK didn't have several hundred thousand installs since its start for the fun of it. Both are growing rapidly unlike other engines where the company had to shut down cause the "serious engine with serious ^2" prices just killed them out of the indie business

 

Lonan sounds like a great guy!

+1 to Lonan!!... whatever that means

 

I can agree about your UDK comments but your comments about Unity are 200% false and no sense.
I've isolated your comments following with my answer to yours.

Only a renderer? I guess you missed the other parts of the engine, FMOD, PhysX, Beast, Umbra, Raknet, the Editor (including low level access to all those middlewares) and the list goes way beyond what I've mentioned.

You should then try UDK mobile (is the closest thing behind Unity and is miles slower than Unity).
Let me just give you an example of how fast unity mobile is, I'm using PC assets in a 3GS device, I'm using pixel shaders and dynamic pixel lights on my characters and world, i have 3-4 PC skinned characters on screen (each having 3500-5000 polys) and still fast and playable without any real mobile optimization.

Yes, they provide the engine, you must write your game and create/use your own assets.

You should then ask Brady and the rest of guys making lots of money selling their assets. Those guys are making quality good products and provide quality good support also. Though, I'm not saying that everyone selling assets here provides top class products and support, I only own EZGUI and my experience both with the product and support have been more than excellent.

It is me or you are throwing no sense comments just to keep your post larger? What do you mean by artifacts?

If you cannot create any game on Unity perhaps it is you not been so "creative". Again they provide the tools, it's up to you to create the game you want.

You totally missed one of the most powerful aspect of Unity, it's scripting system (which is normal programming btw), visual studio and monodevelop integration, you wont get any better.

Unity isn't perfect, neither Unity guys, they are just working towards it. ^^

Have a nice day.

 

Wow, really? This silly ass thread is STILL open? Hi, Tata!

 

lolz.. IMO, UDK is just like a mod and writing games using UDK is only more suitable for FPS or related games and different game engines will have flaws. I was using UDK for a few months before i gave up and came back to unity. Firstly i think that Unity have a good community support and the unity docs are just so well organized and makes it easier for me to delve into it. UDK is just like trying to drift with a ferrari when i don't know how to drive. Unity is good, i see a lot of good games out there using Unity, Give unity some time, Unity3 is quite powerful and can compare to UDK... Unity FTW!!!!

 

Why not? There is good debate going on.

 

Yeh this type of threads are always useful for beginner who are deciding which engine should they pick for their project. Doesnt hurt to have 1 thread open.

 

Unity wins!

 

dogzerx, care to share why (in your opinion) ?

 

cuz its awesome? :-0

 

right... not very helpful

 

To help your coding skills, no need to write unity = unity +3 you can simply say unity +=3

 

come again? what is it your try to say?

 

Some subjective opinion: Unity is much more better then UDK, because UDK is AAA buisness model oriented engine, while Unity feels warm, has large heart in its team ( or a very good PR skills, I dunno ^^), but I just feel right at home here with Unity 3D =) Somehow I end up feeling it cares about end developer

 

UDK has that mobster feel... when you make a profit, they show up and remind you to give them their cut...

Unity on the other hand... it's got that Riddick's "You keep what you kill.." thing going on...

 

@Kanly

really?
Unity is in that vision of yours is a mobster too.
Because you need to give them their cut too (if you want some common features)

 

And UDK even lets you use all features in the free version. From a hobbyists point of view the better business model.

 

In my opinion for cartoonish games unity is the choice but for making games like Gears of War UDK is the choice...

 

I am just wondering how many of developers who are complaining over UDK royalties did actually made over 50k in revenue? If you are making game where you actually expect huge ammount of profit i would understand that. I think that bitching over UDK royaltie cut is just unrealistic for 95% developers, where you are just finding something to hammer UDK down.

 

Wow, this thread is still open. A flame-war infested, 11 page long, thread about what binary is better with "valid" opinions coming from a lot of people that haven't really used either engine to its limits. Instead of wasting their time to read 11 pages of flames, people should try them both and simply make up their mind.

Tip:
Use the same assets to create a simple prototype in both. Clock the time it takes to do em and the sys. requirements. Check out the (almost surely identical) results or even create a voting poll based on said results. Problem solved.

 

Financial decisions should be made ahead of time, particularly with a percentage this big. A 25% cut could ruin a small business given the potential 30% you pay to say "Apple" to be in their app store(s), then of course the taxes. Let's say you make 100K with your game, that's 30% to Apple or whatever app market you use to sell your game (I don't know what Steam takes), so now you have 70K left, you pay "roughly" 40% in self employment taxes, that now leaves you with 42K, then you pay for the UDK license, that leaves you with 31.5K for yourself. So even though you brought in 100 thousand dollars (approximately 1.5 times my current salary), you only end up with a "net" of 31.5K, or less than what my take home pay is now based on my current salary.
The UDK license is cost prohibitive to all the "middle ground" players, and that's typically the majority of people who actually make money with something. Those that make millions can probably just negotiate the FULL license, and stop paying royalties, those under 50K don't need to care at all, it's those that fall in the 100K to 500K range for revenue that get screwed.

 

That was my point. Most indie developers fall into 50k or less revenue.

 

I find it silly that people make comparison between UDK versus, Unity they must be doing something right after all,.

Really the discussion should be with engines that are similar such as Visual3d.net Ogre and GameStudio, as a wannabe Indie developer these were hard decisions to make on engine strengths.

I needed an flexible IDE + Rich API that wouldn't lock me into specific game play had decent documentation loads of examples and not out of my reach to understand.

Then of course licensing and royalties

I'm happy with Unity and that is what counts

 

Look, this is simple, UDK doesn't have an integrated IDE. I have no idea how am I supposed to debug my code, and I don't know anyone or anywhere that'll help you in this matter, sure I've seen a couple of tutorials, but they're like... use this, use that... but they don't really help the little guy.

This is a graph that I made:


That illustrates the impact that not having an IDE has on UDK, and overlayed there's the unity graph, which exposes the huge amount of medium quality indie games made in unity that are available, while there's almost no mid quality udk games, only fps mods and real good looking AAA games

that graphs makes total sense, stop looking at it!

 

Then most indie developers are failures, because 50K is not enough to live on and be self employed unless you keep a day job "too" or you live in a non industrialized nation. Regardless, you need to plan for making MORE than 50K, not assume that everything you do will make you "less" than 50K. No one who is serious about making an actual commercial game goes in thinking, hmm, I think I'll only make 50K per year or less for all this work...

 

Actually it's worse than that, it's $50K TOTAL PER TEAM for the entire life of the business. I'd guess that the estimate that 95% of all indy developers make less than $50K per year is probably pretty close, but I certainly wouldn't call every developer in that income level a "failure". That's way to harsh a label when you consider that many developers do this as a hobby, class project, new venture, second job, etc. etc. Also, the Unity community is a -global- community, and for some people working in some countries, $50K is a lot more than they ever could hope to earn.

 

Not true. At least you defined it wrong and if what you said is true, you should bring one more cathegory in: high quality udk-indie games.
UDK has high quallity indie games: Hawken, Dungeon defenders, The ball, Medieval warfare and on and on. Unity barrelly fits with two games in this cathegory.


I just wanted to add: For those who are thinking what is the point of this topic, i think that it is good for beginners who are deciding which engine to choose for their project might be good to gather some developers perspective on certain engines. It is also useful for those who are using Unity and might consider switching to UDK.

 

I merely mean from an "income" perspective in an industrial nation (which I said). As far as I'm concerned anything that gets out and is published and even one person buys/plays is a success. However, this is a discussion about finances and why "not" to choose UDK, and from a small developers business perspective, having been self employed myself for a few years, the 25% is a huge chunk, and shouldn't be taken lightly with a "we'll worry about that later" kind of attitude, that's a recipe for disaster if you really plan to build up slowly to a sustainable business. Personally I find the number arbitrary and insulting. They give it out for free, then put in financial terms that will cost the people in the lower middle the most.
UDK is for three types of developers in my opinion, hobbyists that just want pretty pictures in games that will never make money, small teams trying to "buck the trend" and make a million dollar AAA title who believe that using UDK gives them a marketing advantage, and of course, major players who can buy/negotiate a fixed contract. All others are foolish not to use something else.

 

This is the same for Unity (you need a third party IDE with debugging support, like e.g. monodevelop or Visual C#

The graph is not displaying the IDE part at all, so there it's void already from the beginning. (since both Engines do not include an IDE to begin with.)
It only represents the Developer magazines outcome, roughly drawed. Nothing more. And even that outcome is partly wrong (not exact)


Back ontopic:

In general :
UDK has much more features under it's belt, and more stable tech. Fact is fact. Also the engine is optimized for performance, while Unity is not. (hence it's not needed for the target audience, fact is fact)
Casual games is the target, meaning the games one plays the few minutes they have spare time. (e.g. lunchbreak)
let's call it lightweight games.

For casual gaming, which is a huge (rapidly growing) market, Unity is king.
For high end games (AAA or not does not matter), meaning games that require advanced features, slick looks, top performance, UDK is king. (for now at least, lateron there will be CryEngine3 and I heared that another engine dev has plans to do the UDK type of licensing.)

Thus to conclude:

Unity for casual games (lightweight on hardware, which is a requirement for casual games)
UDK (and future other AAA engines) for high end games (heavier on hardware, top notch featureslist and optimization)

Both are good engines in their own field.

Seek the engine which works for your team and goals (the game requirements)

 

erm, when I double click a script file (in unity), I can instantly edit it, and debug it. not sure what saymoo's talking about.. maybe he's crazy! :-/

 

WRONGO.

Unity maintains their own fork of MonoDevelop, hence it has an IDE. Unity also has an integrated C# compiler and an editor (even if you exclude MonoDevelop).

 

ok, i stand corrected

but, the rest is true (what i mentioned).

However most people use the monodevelop for editing, or visual languages ide, because of it's completeness and better overview.

UDK is a professional tool, and needs a different approach (more professional in terms of programming, therefor the need of external toolsets).

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Game Engine List Scripting
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stalker's engine: Lua is the programming language
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CryEngine: Lua used in Crysis scripting
C++ used in the Crysis SDK Game Dll
Flash Actionscript used in Crysis User Interface production

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UDK Kit Unreal: UnrealScript

DevelopmentKitHome
UDKProgrammingHome
UnrealScriptReference

Calling DLLs from UnrealScript (DLLBind)

 

-Continued-

Unity Engine

Unity Debugger

Visual Studio C# Integration
Plugins - Pro/Mobile-Only Feature

Scripting Overview

 

Runner: nice to quote parts from somewhere, but what is your point with this?

- Scripting in Unity is also 20x slower than native execution (since it's runtime dependent).
- UDK rendered is 20x faster than (even with highly complex scenes) compared to Unity's performance. E.g. on the same hardware a fairly complex scene in a unity game, there is allways a certain drag/lag going on (not very smooth), while UDK games have an edge here, it's smooth and fast (no drag/lag going on).
- UDK still have a better toolset, though more to learn initially
(more complete, e.g. matinee (unity animation editor is a laugh), Kismet, Phat the physics editor, the material editor (very detailed compared to Unity), Cascade, FaceFX, Scaleform, Bink, etc etc)

Unity, outperform UDK on mobile platforms (at current state).
Unity is easier to get a grip on, initially, but is also quite limited. (which is ok, for it's target usage)
Unity, can run on lowend machines (hence the graphical limitation/performance), while UDK cannot.

It's apples vs oranges...

as i said: choose an engine that works for a specific project. (each project has it's own requirements) No engine suits all, since each engine has strengths and weaknesses based on requirements per title you want to create. For some projects Performance/graphic wealth is KEY (UDK), or sometimes lowend machines/mobile usage is KEY (Unity), just to give two examples.


For the record:
I'm currently developing a digital lessons system using Unity (free).
Reason: i need to be able to run it on MAC and Windows, and Older machines.
(and thus have to deal with limitations in performance/graphical features, but that fine and dandy for this project)

However, a future project might be with another engine, it depends per case.

 

I'm sorry but what?

Did you even read what runner posted? Programming in Unity is FAST. Not C++ with a life time spent optimizing fast, but far faster than traditional 'scripting' languages (e.g. unreal script). It is not 20x slower.

Source?

Define your version of *Limited*.

 

Unrealscript is far more faster than Unity's scripting implementation (on runtime), it's optimized for high end productions, where Unity is not (atm).
Both are not as fast as native, but since the engine itself is optimized, UDK can quicker interpreted code (access time, calc times) compared to Unity. (and as i said, it's not a big deal for unity, since it's targeting a different audience/usage)

I don't have to give you any source as reference, i explained how i measured it

Limited in handon features, accessible directly. (as you could have read in my post )

the rest of my previous post is ignored i guess... conviently? perhaps... don't know.

Anyway, i'm a Unity user as stated for the current project i'm working on. So i'm in the same ship.
No fanboyism towards either engine.

 

I'm sorry, but now you're just spreading misinformation.

First, Unity implements C# for its scripting engine. C# is a proven language used by millions of businesses, and is generally considered fairly quick. Usually the next best to some native implementation. UnrealScript wishes it has that pedigree.

Second, Unity implements DirectX/OpenGL along with shaders, just like UDK and utilizes the same hardware. So how can UDK be 20x faster? Under what conditions? Do you think Unity programmers just threw in random Thread.Sleeps in their code? While its entirely likely that under narrowly defined conditions, UDK outperforms Unity, a margin of 20x is laughable.

 

I think it was to point out you were talking through your hat. He did a fine job and you have not refuted it in any manner deemed worthy of reversing my opinion on such.

BTH

 

i said 20x faster, as an exagerated contra agrument. (since, runner focussed on that (abusing a quote in relation to context for it's own gain), in relation to Unity (implying the latter is faster))
It might not be 20x, but in the end it's faster ( and not a little too).

C++ engines have an edge above c# based engines (like Unity). Optimization wise that is.
Optimizing an engine free's resource load per cycle, thus more can be done at the same time.

Secondly, Epic Games has a 15+ years headstart of development time invested in the tech, with a lot of help from it's licensees.
This results in a higly optimized engine, for complex resource intensive situations (which includes scripting).
Tthis without noticible lag/drag during gameplay.

If you want the same experience as UDK/UE3 can deliver out of the box with Unity (performance wise, with complex scenes/logic), you must alter the engine quite a bit. (this is a fact)
Hence why is Unity still not being adopted by the big crowd (huge studios), if they can save millions on tech, if Unity could do it?
Answer: at current state it's not on par with high end engines (performance, feature wise)
Yes, there where some experiments with it, done by EA and others. However they did not use the default product (we can use), no they had the source and have altered it here and there, to match it to what they want.

Unity is targeted towards a complete different corner of the game development world.
It's targeted towards casual games, which don't require the same optimization levels.

Try it yourself, make a scene with a lot of scripts (complex ones), and complex render functions, all at the same time in unity, than do the exact same in UDK, and you'll notice the difference. UDK is smoother on runtime compared to Unity.

Is this bad? as mentioned before this depends on what you need and want for your project.
Unity is king in the casual games market (which has undergone a big growth, thus potential).
Also on the Mobile platforms, Unity is king. (is also part of the casual games market in a way)

Still spreading misinformation? i think not.

 

Yes, you are still spreading misinformation.

You just called Unity a 'C# based engine.'

Unity is not written in C#. It uses C# as a scripting language. UDK uses UnityScript as a scripting language. Both engines are actually written in C++. C# is a far superior language to UnityScript.

 

seems to me like someone's making up info! Unity is 50x times faster than UDK!

 

I heard Unity was written in SwissCheese.

 

Seems like someone is lying or either actually making up info. UDK is faster on complex scenes that should be clear to everyone. On IOS speed goes to Unity.

 

It is a C# based engine, it NEEDS mono to run! (look closer to the product stucture)

Howso superior? that's a blund statement. (and false too)
You cannot state such things, because it's the engine that executes it on runtime. (here comes the optimization into play)

 

finally someone who understands it

 

I don't think anyone is contending that.

I'm only contending made up numbers like '20x' and the laughable assertions that Unity is a C# engine, and that UnityScript runs faster than C#. Absurd.

 

So in short, your making BullS*** up, with no evidence at all. (What is the language policy on these forums?)

Unity3d is a C++ engine...

Great in theory, but you haven't actually provided any evidence to show that this actually applies.

Except even Unreal themselves say that their scripting is slow.

No evidence, just poorely researched theory.

Again, evidence.

It is?

Have you seen not only who uses unity, but what it is used for?

And in its current state it is far ahead of other high end engines in features and performance. So what is your point?

1) Point?
2) Evidence?
3) Evidence that UDK (when used in similar scale) was not modified.

And 3D gaming on low end systems... which needs incredible optimization.

Example:

Crysis 1 - Extreme high end systems, poor optimization.
Crysis 2 - Very low end systems, incredibly well optimized.

You say this like you have done it...

I would like to question what you classify as thinking.

 

It needs Mono to run because it uses C# as its #$%@#$ scripting language. Let me just fire up reflector and look at all the delicious MSIL code in Unity binaries.

OH WAIT, I CANT. Because it doesn't use MSIL.

Are you thick on purpose?