Rampant Games - To Swap Game Engines

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The Rampant Coyote's latest blog post as him wondering it he should change the engine for Frayed Knights 2. So what do you guys think should he keep the unity engine?

I love Unity. I’m very, very happy about it. My art guys… well, maybe not so much, but I think it’s more of a matter of what they are used to.

But although this article isn’t favorable towards Unity (it’s not really unfavorable, either), it’s an outstanding discussion of the analysis and challenge of switching game engines – and a little bit of why they chose the Unreal 4 engine in the middle of development.

An Unreal Decision

If I were in their shoes, I might make the same decision. And yeah, that’s me, Unity fanboy. The weird thing is, in two years, the analysis might come out completely differently. A year or two ago, it clearly *did* come out differently.

We live in a strange, new world. Engines have become a commodity within the reach of any indie. Grab ‘em off the shelf at indie prices. They compete in price, features, platforms, intended audience, and style. This is a great thing for game developers at all levels. Okay, maybe for us programmers, who historically were on the front-line of awesome creating the technology (and also making us the bottlenecks), it drops our importance down a few pegs. You know what? I’m okay with that. I’ve been okay with games not being tech-driven for many years.

I made the painful and expensive decision to switch to Unity rather than the upgrade of the Torque engine for the sequel to Frayed Knights. This meant having to rewrite a ton of code, and learn a whole new way of doing things. That took time. But I don’t regret that decision, at all. And I’ve had to let a ton of sunk costs go (including about a year of work).

I’m still sticking with Unity for the foreseeable future. Unity 5 is promising some new new features to compete on several fronts, and I’m sure the leading competitors will offer some outstanding improvements to match. It’s a win / win for me.
More information.
 
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I see no real reason to move away from Unity unless you have to drop too many ideas because of it's limitations.
If you do switch to another engine, pick any, all are IMO good. Except one.

The only engine still used in development today I grew hate for is RPGmaker. Please, pretty please, use anything just not that one. The tool itself is okay. The product that comes out of it however is just horrible in 2014.
 
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It's not like the frayed knights level of graphics needs the Unreal 4 engine to shine... so I see no reason for him to switch from Unity, still a big improvement from his previous engine which kind of died.
 
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I've yet to see a game released that was made with Unity that doesn't run like crap, compared to what it's doing.

This includes Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns - both of which could be considered quite professional.
 
I've also read about Unity's performance issues but this from users. I'd like to hear thoughts from a developer viewpoint.
 
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Obviously Unity has performance issues, it is far from an optimized engine, but in a game like M&M X or Frayed Knights, I don't think it is that bothersome.

I have also developed in it and the performance versus quality is really not good, but for the price you pay and given how easy it is to use, it is still worth it for a lot of projects.

To make things in Unreal engine is more complex.
 
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I don't know names of game engines or anything like that, but if you made it like Knights of the Chalice, that would work. Like, work awesomely. Just one opinion =)
 
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He should license the witcher 3 engine
 
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A game I have been following just switched to the Unity engine from the Cry Engine because of all of the bugs. It looks like development is going much better then it ever was with the Cry Engine so I suggest sticking with Unity.
 
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I've yet to see a game released that was made with Unity that doesn't run like crap, compared to what it's doing.

This includes Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns - both of which could be considered quite professional.

This, the system requirements and performance issues for the engine are just totally ridiculous. Might and Magic X is still all kinds of sluggish on my mid to top of the line PC, which is flatly unacceptable.

The worst are the stories of GPUs being overheated and fried. It makes me wary of playing any graphically intensive Unity game until a few months after release.

If I had to choose I know I would pick UE4 any day. I have much more confidence in the Epic engineers to make an engine that is actually optimized. UE3 could run smooth as butter with great effects on even low-end PCs.
 
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Hidden in one of the two articles linked here is the info that until a short time ago Unreal was not an option for Indies because Epic demanded 25% of the revenue above 50k. The situation is different now.

Unity is probably going to lose a lot of market share if they don't counter Epic's attack adequately, meaning with improved quality for the same price.
 
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I belief access unreal can be get through a cheap subscription for some time now. Make it a lot more accessible for indies during development. Only when they release they have to pay revenues I think
 
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My opinion of Unity is that it's kind of crap. I could list out a million technical computery issues that people would not care about/not understand/or think I am making up.

However, it is MUCH harder to change engines than you could POSSIBLY imagine, especially if you are not planning this out from the beginning. It's also a SURPRISINGLY big pain to just update an engine for a game if it's being developed on actively.

I've changed engines several times on the game I am making. I had little choice with Torque because it was mostly crap, but I'm never going to change engines again if I can possibly help it. It's almost like starting everything over from scratch.

If I had to start over I just would make my own (very simple) engine that works directly with OpenGL. That way I could make all the tools export right into the engine with ZERO hassle and get a nice art pipeline (one of the biggest pains on most engines), be able to make things act exactly as I want and keep performance tight, and not have to worry about updates breaking things constantly. You would not realistically be able to get as many fancy features as a top end game engine in but if you don't have millions to spend on art assets it doesn't really matter.

And besides that Unreal sucks in a lot of ways, too. The license SOUNDS a lot better than it is, and it's not exactly easy to use or bug free. There isn't any perfect engine out there, they all have their issues, especially if you don't have a big budget.
 
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I also guess that now engines have reached a state where even the ones that target low end machines like Unity (which can be used to make easy mobile phone ports) have graphics which are good enough for most games, especially indie ones. I played The Golf Club, which is based on Unity, and it's also on next-gen consoles like PS4 and Xbox One, and looks good.

Unity has supposedly a very easy and thorough development environment, but optimization is a wholly different beast.
 
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I also guess that now engines have reached a state where even the ones that target low end machines like Unity (which can be used to make easy mobile phone ports) have graphics which are good enough for most games, especially indie ones. I played The Golf Club, which is based on Unity, and it's also on next-gen consoles like PS4 and Xbox One, and looks good.

Unity has supposedly a very easy and thorough development environment, but optimization is a wholly different beast.

If it's first person game it is probably a pretty good choice, though with the licensing you never know how they will jack up the prices.

Most of the game engines look pretty good today but having something do FX and still be optimized well is another story.
 
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