Unity or UDK or CryEngine or...?

It's terrible that you have to pay for something you want, which gives you value and potentially allows you to make money yourself?

Yes, UDK is cheaper up front, but it's more expensive in the long run - assuming your game is a success. Both licensing models are in fact pretty awesome. There is no clear generic answer as to which is "better", the question is what works better for the specific project in question.

Also, all engines have their flaws, and all commercial licenses impose significant restrictions. Anyone who expects otherwise is dreamin'.

 

I think as per market demands Unity's demand is more than UDK because mid segment comapny cannot afford its price and royalty that UDK's demand. So i think Unity is best engine and after 1-2 years Unity will rocks.

 

What an exciting new topic that hasn't been discussed here previously...................................................................

 

Indeed. Though it does somewhat resemble the other 100+ Unity vs UDK threads I have seen floating about.

 

I hate to admit it, but not that long ago - I downloaded and installed UDK. I needed more space for my Caturday pics, so I uninstalled it.

 

Lol
It never get's old for some people.

 

No, it's terrible that a feature in pretty much every 3D engine since 2002 is not available in Unity without a significant cash investment. Specifically, a feature that really, really limits some of the things you can do from a not only a visual perspective, but a gameplay perspective as well.

 

Dam, again I logged in this udk forum by accident... I'm getting old!
I've to delete my account here to avoid that...

 

We have like a thousand threads covering this topic. There is something like a "search" function, say Google with the mighty "site:" suffix...

If you want to go to UDK from Unity, go ahead... Nobody cares because usually these guys switch because of money LOL, which is pretty ironic, since you need A LOT more money in terms of development costs to do the same in UDK. The happy pile money starts somewhere in the millions, where UDK becomes more attractive in terms of dev costs and team sizes of 10 to a hundred people... Happy coding

And yes there are Indy games that were successful in UDK, like "Cubes". But they are always created by a bunch of people which are primarily artists and they are even less likely than in Unity. And further, all those Idy games could have be done with Unity in the very same way! No need for UDK at all... Just complicates everything.

 

For certain when UDK 4.0 comes out bidding goodbye to the dreaded UnrealScript with lots of improvements, Unity will feel the pressure.

On the other hand, as long as Unity keeps on moving forward, maintaining a decent pace of updates and feature releases. Good PR and clearly demonstrating through communication, releases, planned features, road maps (with appropriate disclaimers of course) that they will continue to strive be the best engine for indies working to grow their marketshare while at the same time going after the AAA market, they'll do fine. But no more miss steps especially as UDK 4.0 gets closer to release.

As UDK gets closer to release, as long as Unity ramps up the Marketing and PR efforts. Increase the frequency of updates and keeps the developer community happy, they'll be fine.

 

You use the word "no", but the rest of your sentence directly contradicts that. Just like you said yourself, the feature is there if you make the cash investment. You're literally complaining that someone isn't giving you enough for free.

 

Let me make it short.
No, UDK isn't better than Unity. UDK it's just a pile of disorganized mess compiled all together, only good for a quick eye-candy showcase.
Unity still have a lot to catch up, but at least it let's you create any kind of game, easily, quickly and use whatever workflow/methodology/paradigm/pattern/design you want for your projects (instead of forcing you to mod a pile of old sh*ts). This message also goes to CryEngine developers (ya heer me?) XD. Unless I'm not forced to mod an existing project, I'll call them "pile of mess", as simple as that.
I don't know how the next UDK (based on Unreal Engine 4) will be, neither the next iteration of CE, but we aren't there yet. As of now, Unity winds hands down. Until then, get your ass up and try to beat Unity workflow/iteration speed!

gud luk!

 

Yes, because it's a standard feature in everything else, that isn't contradicting myself at all. Render to texture is in everything and the fact that you have to pay to use it in Unity is absolutely ridiculous. It's like having to pay extra to get a house with windows.

 

Unity is easy, I don't care how capable another engine is, unless it matches Unity in that department forget it. UDK 4 is supposed to be the Unity "killer", but that is years off and until it happens and I can compare it against Unity 5 I don't care. Unity is extraordinarily indie / beginner friendly and that is what you're paying for.

 

So, we're seeing the same kind of thread from time to time here about people leaving UDK for Unity, should we create a discussion on UDK forums telling "I thought maybe they are right, what's your opinon" ... ?
Nope.

 

Eventually on udk forum the thread will get locked or deleted ^^

 

As a matter of fact it might do good for UT to really create a sticky thread or something say "UDK or Unity"? And analyze the up and downsides. People who can deal with UDK will be able to figure this out anyway... All others will see the beauty of Unity and stick with it, instead of trying UDK in the first place...

UDK has a LOT of advantages over Unity, but so does it vice versa... I don't see any reason why UT shouldn't make their advantages public for everyone to see and also tell people what advantages they have with CryEngine or UDK.

Honesty has proven advantageous in the past and frankly, Unity has no reason to hide... I rather think if UT ignores these threads, then it might send the wrong message like "Hell, please don't tell people about UDK and CryEngine, they might leave Unity, we have nothing to offer..."

 

The tolerance might be higher but threads or messages get deleted/locked here as well.

As for the topic, project related it depends when UDK will be based on Unreal 4 tech and what Unity will deliver with Unity 4, in terms of a real value, exactly. If Unity 4 will be a reasonable and stable iteration then there might not be a reason to switch but if it more steps into the shoes of the in quite some fields disappointing half baked V3, then it might be an option to be considered, if available.

 

Who cares about what one guy thinks.
Hell, I don't care what 1000 think

Use what you want. That's my response.

 

To an extent, I believe this tends to be the missing aspect of it. Whatever happened to researching what various engines/middleware/frameworks/etc provide - taking a look at which best suits your needs for a particular project? I simply do not understand this need to find the one-tool-to-rule-them-all, when in my mind - it does not exist.

In somewhat general terms, it's like discussing which is better: a Ferrari 458 Spider or a Hyundai Accent? It completely ignores context. Do you want to drive that Ferrari Spider down to the 7-Eleven to grab a Slurpee? Do you want to pick up the hot girl that finally agreed to go out with you in the Accent?

So maybe for a certain project, a person's looking at a BMW and a Mercedes Benz...er...UDK or Unity - they can go through and compare them within context of that project. Perhaps for another project, it's going to be looking at a Cadillac or a Kia...if the project would be best served by the Kia, well - take the Kia - don't take the Cadillac because overall you may have heard it's the better car.

Unity, UDK, GameSalad, Construct2, etc, etc, etc, etc... people need to do actual research. It's kind of like reading news for the NFL - do you want to get your info from NFL.com, ESPN, CBS/NBC/FOX, etc, etc...or are you going to head over to the Bleacher Report?

User experiences/case studies/etc can be helpful when you're at that point in trying to decide between the BMW and the Benz, but far too often the discussions in various forums - they're presented from the point of you should really drive a Yugo: doesn't matter if you're dating a supermodel, moving your four bedroom house cross country, or thinking about hitting up the local amateur race circuit...the Yugo is the car for you. And well, that's bs...outright bs.

 

Then—forgive me for asking—why are you still here?

Unity and UDK are just tools. They have different strengths and weaknesses. You can argue about UT's decisions about which features to include in their free version are entirely up to them. Sure, you don't get render to texture in the free version. You also don't have to pay five-figure sums or use godawful tools and terrible workflows. Which is worth more to you? Rendering to a texture, or a solid, reliable workflow? I know what I'd prefer.

 

Automatic workflow! Reliable workflow! What you see is what you get results!

 

If I ever get a computer powerful enough to run UDK, I may give it a try, but I'll certainly always continue to use Unity.

 

Yeah I think UT owes you an apology for earning money with selling Unity. Shame on them. They should have run bankrupt in 2006 already, how come this piece of crap is still alive, bringing in real cash ?

 

Excuse me? We're you being sarcastic?

 

Unfortunately, this is one of Unity's greatest downsides. It is NOT WYSIWYG... In contrast to what many people think. But I am also not sure if UDK is... I only know Unreal 4 is going to be truly WYSIWYG, and CryEngine 3 is also similar.

 

Honestly, it is a bit puzzling that render-to-texture remains a pro feature. If I were restricted to using Unity Free, I might actually consider the switch to another engine. It may or may not be 'fair' that this isn't included in the free version, but it does make the free version slightly less competetive in the space it is competing in.

 

The free version competes with nothing. Name me one free Unity Title that brought in a lot of profit ^^... Even if there is one, it's not going to help UT. If you wanna make money, you gotta give UT a piece of cake... That's how it works.

I would indeed be pissed off actually if Unity free HAD render-to-texture because frankly, with this tool you can implement a lot of the pro features, like image effects, shadows, refraction, realistic water, realtime-local-reflections etc. yourself... And if you don't need the static goodies that come with PRO (say Umbra, Lightmap, Navmesh, etc.), then this is basically all you need.

 

1. I won't be switching to UDK 3 since it really does suck compared to unity. UDK 4 addresses these issues and its a big danger to unity.

2. render to texture on free could be available if unity give us other reasons to want unity pro.

3. There's a lot of other reasons to go pro if you're not worried about RTT. That includes light probes, navmeshes, mechanim extended features, profiler, and so on. There's a lot of reasons to go pro and this list of reasons should be increased dramatically as time goes by. The GUI system should be completely pro only and so on as that isn't something you can't do in free, but is worth paying for to make life a lot easier.

So why visually, free is crippled, it shouldn't be. Pro should run faster, smaller and make working very great in unity as opposed to just making unity free titles look a bit S***. And unity free titles by large, will look quite a bit S*** compared to unity pro due to render textures.


I think its an immature thread that serves no purpose but to create drama where there isn't any btw.

 

I agree that UDK is a nightmare for a programmer. Constantly restarting just to test anything is a monster. Also, the royalties thing can be a pain. You have to pay Epic for the life cycle of your game. I don't know how long that's until but I think it can be for years.

 

The fact that free has less graphical features might be hurting Unity PR a bit as people look at it and go "meh, this doesn't look good" compared to whatever UDK has. Even a bunch of cubes and post processes thrown together look rather pleasing. UDK free is also much better for artists who just want to show off their works in real time like mappers, modelers or texturers. UDK also has their amazing material editor that is very useful for people mentioned before. The best unity has is Strumpy's editor but that still doesn't stand close to unreal's material editor.
Unity can do this but the tools either cost money(pro) or are not there(visual shader editor)
Is there really any use for DX11 if there still aren't shadows? Unreal 4 does look amazing and I can't wait when UDK4 comes out. Not because I'd switch but because that should make unity do something interesting. Competition is good for consumer

 

You definitely got a point there. But currently Unity free's major restriction is render to texture, since I even in a quite demanding project for a PC/Console title don't need much more (at least I think I do, but maybe I am underestimating the free restrictions )... I am not sure if what you suggest really is better. For one reason. Unity doesn't really want you to create good games with free. What they want is that you can try out most of the stuff start to develop your game and then get stuck because you discover that the PRO features would be awesome to give your almost finished game the polishing it needs, say RTT . So you just buy the PRO version "unlock" your visual experience and ship the game. Isn't that cute?

 

Hmm, I guess if UDK 4 doesn't come with major restrictions, like "Kismet only", and you really can utilize the engine, with shaders, with C++ API, then they got one more customer! But we shouldn't forget that UDK 4 is far in the future. I'd say at least two years from now and even then the broad consumer market needs to catch up hardware wise.

 

Unity: Easy to use and publish games for free with the option to purchase and expand the software to deliver competitive quality potential.
UDK/Cry: Difficult to use, higher resulting quality potential than Unity.

Ease of use sells Unity to the majority of people using it. Including me. Visual Scripting Tools are pretty much the only reason I can do anything anyway.

 

They could give away render textures in free; that opens up shadows, glow, SSAO and all the other image effects to free users.
They'd be much more competitive in the space they're competing in. They'd probably also be broke shortly after.

 

Anyone heard of UDK license revocation and disagreement?


That's a really ugly side of UDK if you don't fall within the social graces of their UDK license.
http://udk.com/licensing


Such as:
1) If you are using UDK internally within your business and the application created using UDK is not distributed to a third party (i.e., someone who is not your employee or subcontractor), you are required to pay Epic an annual license fee of US$2,500 per installed UDK developer seat per year. This license fee only applies to UDK seats used for development; no license fee is required for hardware where only the resulting applications are installed.


2) "25% royalty on" ... which is on-top of publisher royalties leaving many published game developers cash-strapped for money.


3) License revocation where Epic Games terminates your license due to non-payment of royalties. Either you discontinue your game OR re-code your whole game in CryEngine or Unity3D.

 

Imagine Jimmy who just wants to mess around. He downloads unity free and sees it has no features. He moves onto UDK. After Jimmy gets good, he will most likely stick to what he knows best(UDK). This is also part of a reason why UDK has so much more sexy looking maps and images done in udk. Because any artist can pick up udk for free and get all the features. An artist likes to have many graphical features.
It's 2012, I don't think there is a single game now that doesn't use shadows or PostFX. With unity free you can't even do something as basic as color correction.
Most new users will check out free, see that it lacks features and move on. They won't pay $1500 for pro. UDK is harder, but not impossible.
That's why I think noncommercial pro would be very good for unity. To prevent license monitoring simply make it like with a trial, make it write "noncommercial" on a corner or something. Or at worst release a cheap noncommercial version for like $50 or something. Making indie free was a good movie back then, now it's rather outdated and unattractive.

 

That much I agree with ...

I want the creators of unity to earn a profit selling their engine -- at a reasonable price, of course. This will allow the company to attract and keep the kind of industry talent that will create the ground breaking features I seek. If they go broke giving away the best features for free, the “extremist” free crowd will eventually get what they pay for ....

 

Thats likely the reason why Unity still wins the awards and still picks up more new users and pace than UDK.

You know, visual features are cool but many devs don't have the funding to even afford the stuff and optimize their games so it runs well, especially when it has to run on mobile.

your point might be valid for Windows only titles (the only place where UDK is stronger than Unity), but for real: which indie gives a damn about Windows only when all other platforms are infinitely hotter.

For Artists, their art should count, not eye candy they needed to make mid class to bad art 'shine more than it did in reality'

 

You failed to mention the end of your story. Jimmy will never finish even a half decent game... If your Jimmy could understand UDK, then he wouldn't have picked it in first place LOL. No one who does serious Indie development is going to pick UDK over Unity, unless he really needs some killer feature like mass destruction, DX11 whatever, but this is rather the exception. And those who still pick UDK just because they are too stupid to realize what bad choice they made, won't get anything decent done in UDK, so hell, who cares?

 

In all this discusion about how Unity Free lacks Pro features and will discourage new comers vs UDK...

Aren't you all missing an important point? The 30 Day Pro Trial?

 

Unity is actually getting very expensive when for larger projects and more team members. Per developer is around $6500 (Pro, IOS Prop, Andriod Pro, Flash Pro, Team), and there is upgrade cycle every two years which is $3000. CryEngine will be able to deploy to mobile next year, I've seen it a demo, and it looks sweet. I'm certainly considering it.

 

Yeah but, CryTek is yet to release a clear license model for the SDK. Would you start development with the SDK without a clear license model? You are referring to the CE SDK and not the full CryEngine license$$$, correct?

For large projects, UDK royalty models are very expensive after a point and appear to be structured to encourage larger developers to buy a full license. For developers with a business goal of making well over 50k with their entertainment products, learning tool, interactive visualization, factory simulation, etc…, are the capabilities gained with UDK really worth paying 25% of not only primary sales, but also the resulting sales from coffee mugs, t-shirts, action figures …the spinoff movie deal offered by George Lucas ... forever?

Even if you do not earn a profit, you still have to pay 25% of all gross over 50K. It looks like any development advantage UDK has over Unity would have to be significant enough to almost guarantee 50% more in product sales to justify kicking up 25% of your money to Unreal – this is money off the very top … before taxes, payroll, office lease, baby sitter, etc.

 

Hmm not to sound like im hating on unity or anything, but i think the free version does lack some kind of pro features, in my mind the free version should have most if not all low-level features, and some medium-level features, then 1 or 2 high-level features, where you would pay for pro to access the rest of those medium and high-level features, but at the moment alot of low-level features are still restricted.
A couple examples are render to texture, one of the most trivial and low-level features an engine can offer, also access to GL functions which we are gaining access to in Unity 4.x which is nice of them , as well as features that make your game run better such as LOD and the profiler, i can understand them restricting high-level features that make our games look better, but features that help our game run better should be a version wide upgrade in my opinion.

Not to mention those of you saying that UDK 4 wont be released for another year or two, but look at the time difference between Unity 3 and Unity 4 almost 2 and half years. Which means that by the time UDK 4 will being coming out that Unity will either be in the middle or end of its 4.x release cycle or it will be releasing Unity 5, well i sure hope Unity puts on there big boy pants for Unity 5 because to compete with UDK 4 when it comes out will be quite a struggle.

Of course all in my opinion

 

Do you have any information of mobile license fee of Android or ios of CryEngine?

 

I would say that considering latest UDK-UE3 update changes UDK4 should be released very soon. Under 1 year time, but hey thats just my speculation based on current update-release pattern of UDK3.

You wont get any information about this for quite some time, they even havent properly introduced PC fees and their desktop version has been released for quite some time.

 

I see so even less time for Unity XD

 

People are missing the fact that you can purchase the UE engine license for substantially less than 50k depending on circumstances. So if your title is a major hit you can just buy the old license at any time you feel you need to. This is what usually will happen.

Not grounded in any sort of reality. All polycount artists jump on UDK and stay there. That's those with AAA jobs and those without jobs. That's all of them. Sometimes you get an oddball who wants to try out cryengine, but none of them look at unity, at all. And never will until there's free shadows and render textures.

This is a fact and it will not change until unity changes.

Hint: you want the artists on board

 

Why are some people even mentioning Cry engine as if it is some piece of software that it's even possible to make anything with? The fact that it would take you 200 years of intensive study and a max IQ to even figure how to add a texture to the terrain in cry alone makes it entirely irrelevant to this discussion. We are talking about engines that are remotely even humanly possible to use.

 

*drools*