Poll: Unity or UDK

[yomer]

Since I haven't seen an official poll on this, let's build one for those just getting into the scene. Let's pretend that you could use Oculus integration with Unity Free Edition. Or those who own a license for the Pro please respond based on using your edition. Which platform would be best for the indie developer or those who are just getting into game dev? Please respond appropriately and objectively with valid arguments for and against. Arguments pro-UDK could also be based on the full Unreal Engine 3 license.

[NiceGuyAndersson]

I'm not a exactly a developer, but I've used both for about a week each.
I prefer UDK because it's so easy to make something that looks good visually, and I frikkin love Kismet (Can't wait until UDK 4)
Though it seems like Unity is easier to make simple stuff and coding? (haven't tried unrealscript but I've heard it's pretty bad)

[cTool]

I'm also in favor of the UDK. I know well unity but i don't own a pro licence.
Since i just want to toy and be able to distribute some demo (which you can't with unity free), UDK seems to be the best tools to do that. Unity is a no brainer when it's come to portability, or for indy devs.
But for garage game, amha, this come at a price way too high.

[OlivierJT]

Bonjour Yomer,

I was hesitating between Unity and UDK about a year ago, I had some previous (very little) testing with UDK 2ish
I can't compare Unity as I haven't used it but this is what I like about UDK and I am sure some Unity user could tell you the same ?

It depends of your project and what you want to achieve. That's the first question you should ask.

In my case I absolutely wanted to have all the advanced tech for lights, shadows.
When I saw that for advanced shadow and lightmaping you needed a Pro license... that did it for me...

What I like about UDK is that you have it all.
No limit, nothing is taken away, it's the full real deal, and with Unreal engine 4 right at the corner you know where the boat is going.
These days I am doing some advanced shader in the UDk material editor using 3d motive tutorial, it's visual programing, very very powerful stuff.

Regarding the technical aspect of coding and scripting, my experience with UDK has been ans still is amazing.
I am a very well all rounder Maya artist in video game pipeline, one of the very few people who can manage a 3d project from a to z, and establish a production pipeline for a game. with support form dev.

For about 1 year I have been focusing on my own project without any Dev support and teaching myself some programming and some UnsrealScripting.
What amaze me is that on UDK, the engine has been around for so long that a google search will give you 90% of the solution that you need.
The quantity of tutorial, training video (like 3dmotive's), forum post and blog about UDK is phenomenal.
You have a problem ? google it...
When you work alone, that's really really cool.

About unreal scripting, I have been learning it for like 3 months, with a book, and well it look like english, and it's the same "language" as Kismet.
Kismet and matinee are amazing.
Depending on your project complexity you nearly could do +80% of the coding in kismet.
The 20% is mostly (for me) setting things up, and telling the engine where and what is my content.

On the Unity side, i looked at the integration of code to enable Oculus, and even to me it looked like : mmm okay, I can do that, seems easy enough.
I have yet to get my rift (it's on the way, I am a august 1st Kickstarter), so I still have to manage the integration in the engine and see how it goes.
I just can't wait ^_^
So I am getting everything ready asap.

About Unity ? well maybe some unity user can say exactly the same about the engine, I can't say.
Let's hear them out !

Cheers

[OlivierJT]

Oh I forgot to tell you about one important aspect : the license fee and costs

Most of the studios are favoring Unity :
You pay 1500 Usd for a pro license (add 500usd for android... etc...)
and that's about it.
It's cool.

Don't forget you'll need software license : Maya ? about 4000 USD, 3dMax ? a little more. Blender ? what ? well mmm... I don't know how well it integrate with Unity or UDK.
Via .fbx exports I guess, so it should be good (no experience there)

But you know for me.
I prefer UDk style :
After 50.000 usd in earning you pay 30% on revenue :
50.000 usd all for you.
You make 50100 : you pay 30 usd for you license...

30% can turn as a lot of money if you sell a lot.
But you know what ?
Who are we kidding, if you sell you own game 5 usd, do you really think you will sell 10.000 of them just like that ?

Well if you do I am sure you'll be very happy to pay the 30%, because they will mean success, not money.
(I like paying for what I get)
Most of the people don't want to pay for anything, EVER...

The reality is that it depends of you distributing platform.

Steam ? 30% off (I think)
Apple ? 30% off,
UDK 30% after 50.000
I am not talking about Playstation, Microsoft and Nintendo, that in another league of things. You just don't get in like that.

So yeah, but today, it's not difficult nor expensive to set up you own distributing platform, and it's not going to cost you 30% of your first Dollars...
(but this is an whole other subject)

So instead of paying a Unity Pro license i bought myself some software, tutorials, trainings and books on UDK.
That's a much better use of money in my view !

[3dcoffee]

OlivierJT: I agree with you. After reading the forums and comparing the pricing schemes and look, I am all UDK for my projects. I am now in the process of watching e-learning videos and reading manuals.

[Mystify]

blender works great with unity. Unity can read the blender files directly. You make a change in blender, save, go over to unity, and the change is already represented. I decide I want to add another arm to my model, I pop over, add an arm, go back to unity, and I have another arm. Plus, Unities Mechanim animation system is really slick.

If you do get your game on steam, do you really want steam taking 30% and unreal taking 30%? Thats leaving you with 49%, assuming their cuts are sequential, 40% if its not. I'd much rather sell a game at 70% of the price and get the same return per game with higher volumes than shovel the extra cost at unreal. To me, going for unreal with its royalties over unity is planning for failure. Do you think Notch expected minecraft to be popular? Not at all. He was just making something for fun, and it grew in popularity far, far beyond his expectations.
And say you want to make a second game. Well, with unity, you still have pro. With unreal, more royalties.

I haven't tried UDK, but the general consensus seems to be that Unity kicks UDK's butt in regards to the workflow. And having used unity, I believe it. The workflow is great. The power is there. The languages are sane, and widely used beyond unity. Unity is also a more generic engine; my understanding is that UDK is really designed with FPSes in mind, and does not easily break away from that. Unity can make a FPS easily, but it is well suited to many things.

[MrGreen]

Unreal starts collecting only after the first $50K or something like that though right?

[Mystify]

Unreal starts collecting only after the first $50K or something like that though right?

right. Unity gambles that you won't be successfull, and tries to scrape a little btit upfront. Unreal doesn't care about the unsuccessful people, they just want to wring the successful ones for a ton of cash. Which bet do you want to take; are you going to roll over and say "nope, I'm not going to be successful, lets go with UDK and hope I'm not", or are you going to go with Unity and say "Hey, I will be successful, and your $1500 startup cost is a steal"

[Dakor]

No it is wrong!
You may call it peanuts, but if your UDK game goes commercial (including Kickstarter) you have to pay 99$ for the license.
That is all until you reach the 50k mark.

Just read the official License Terms - they are correct and easy to understand. There are also some examples.
Link to the UDK Commercial License Terms.

[Pingles]

Unreal starts collecting only after the first $50K or something like that though right?

right. Unity gambles that you won't be successfull, and tries to scrape a little btit upfront. Unreal doesn't care about the unsuccessful people, they just want to wring the successful ones for a ton of cash. Which bet do you want to take; are you going to roll over and say "nope, I'm not going to be successful, lets go with UDK and hope I'm not", or are you going to go with Unity and say "Hey, I will be successful, and your $1500 startup cost is a steal"

Well, to be honest it has nothing to do with my profits in my case. I just find Unity to be very straightforward in execution. I can make a bare bones concept in minutes and then build on it.

Was just easier for me than UDK. I'm sure others have the opposite results.

[nateight]

Thesis statement for the knowledgeable, short of time, and/or semi-literate:
UDK and Unity Pro both present advantages and drawbacks; will Torque 3D be the open-source savior of Rift development?

I didn't vote - this poll is missing an "Open-Source Alternative" option (and adding it now will destroy the votes already cast). I'm hoping Torque 3D will meet my needs; it is a fully open-source, MIT-licensed, C++ engine with features to rival UDK. GarageGames makes their money by selling art assets and special effects tools through their own asset store; while there isn't nearly as much content as you'd find on the Unity Asset Store, even a small yet growing base of additional content would seem preferable to UDK's huge in-built asset browser with no official store on which to buy and sell additions. The lead developer of Torque 3D hopes to have full, free, drop-in Rift support released within the week, and should be setting up a MTBS thread in which to further extoll the virtues of the engine then; GarageGames' own forum is a good place to direct any questions now or in the future.

OlivierJT is correct about UDK - it really is a fantastic toolkit for building complex games. I've yet to use any of these engines, but in my research on the topic I keep encountering several entrenched opinions:

"UDK is perfect for creating first-person shooters like Unreal Tournament, but becomes increasingly cumbersome the more you try to make a game that isn't Unreal Tournament." People have successfully bent UDK to their will and built stuff like side-scrollers, but it's clear to me that Unity is vastly superior for creating experimental gameplay types as well as any game more suitable to a mobile device than a console or PC. First-person games will necessarily be the Rift's bread and butter, so UDK seems a natural fit; Torque 3D's roots lay in the shooter genre, so it will likely be similarly useful for Rift development. Please also consider that Chivalry: Medieval Warfare ultimately became a UDK game, and it features the best melee combat system I've ever seen. UDK can clearly do anything you want it to, but this leads to the next caveat...

"UDK isn't a toy, it's the real deal. The learning curve is potentially excruciating, and the toolchain is tailored to a full-fledged studio. Solo developers, embrace UDK at your peril." OlivierJT's opinions would seem to contradict this somewhat, and that's very encouraging, but the underlying point remains something to consider. Unity's accessibility is its primary selling point; with zero experience, I was able to create a demo for some VR hardware in a lazy afternoon, and other people have had similar successes. Unity is the perfect engine for solo tinkerers, which is why I remain so annoyed that Unity demands $1500 for Rift support (and please note, that juicy-looking 4-month "Pro Trial" deal won't actually let you release anything you create with it!) UDK is so fully-featured it seems to anticipate a studio that has a 3D modeling team, a texturing team, a level design team, a gameplay mechanics team, etc., and lone developers working with UDK run the risk of being crushed to death by all the individual hats they're forced to wear. Torque 3D is attempting to position itself between these two - accessible to smaller developers like Unity is but more graphically powerful and with a deep toolchain like UDK - but the very idea that you might see some source code is as off-putting to some developers as it is attractive to others. To my knowledge, Torque 3D has nothing like UDK's Kismet visual flowgraph scripting system, it's C++-esque Torquescript or straight C++, period.

"Unrealscript (UDK's only scripting option aside from Kismet) is a plague upon the Earth. Anyone coming to it from another language will hate it, and anyone learning it as a first language will inevitably go mad." This is perhaps overstating things, but the general opinion is encountered often. Unity helpfully provides support for C#, Javascript, Javascript-like Unityscript, and Python-like Boo; this is a major boon to developers already familiar with one of these languages, but unhelpfully fragments the community and documentation among these various factions (just try to dig up an A-Z Boo tutorial, I dare you). Epic seems ready to finally acknowledge Unrealscript's reputation by completely dropping Unrealscript from its upcoming Unreal Engine 4, resorting to further increasing Kismet's capabilities and accepting pure C++ as necessary. This only serves to muddle the entire issue at present, however, because UE4 is the super-expensive source-included big-boy version of UDK, a UDK based on UE4 may not follow these same principles, and UDK4 may not even be released until UE4 has been available for months or years (and there's been no announcement of a release date). Scripting in Torque can be done in C++ and the C++ source code is as free as the engine itself, so it would seem to be the perfect option for anyone looking to build a first-person game that would run into the closed-source limitations of UDK; UDK's FPS-focused toolchain may make it a better fit for anyone not straying too far from the basic tropes of FPS gameplay, and Unity is very probably an even better option for anyone straddling genre lines and/or exploring new and different gameplay tropes.

"Okay, Unity sounds great! Why would I ever use anything less accessible?" Well, for one thing, $1500 is a lot for a solo developer to shell out, hardly what I would call a "steal" when all its competitors don't charge a dime up-front; UDK's 30% cut past $50,000 in revenue is far more comfortable for microstudios but UDK's workflow may not be (and 30% is a painful slice to cut off of any kind of project expecting "real" revenues). I can't say for certain how Torque 3D will compare, but a free engine with a cash asset store seems considerably more appealing to all developers than a $1500 paywall or a(n eventual) 30% royalty. What may be a larger but less apparent reason to avoid Unity is a potential conflict in the deferred rendering implementation when viewing scenes through a Rift. I can't find more than some very general speculation about this, but apparently shadows aren't where they should be when viewed stereoscopically; this is obviously a bug (and one Torque 3D has already squashed), but it remains to be seen if Unity fixes it in a timely manner. In general, I agree with Aabel's preliminary assessment: "At first glance it does not look like as much care went into the Unity implementation as went into the UDK implementation." Consider the contents of Rift KS Update #25: UDK has "Optimized low latency VR rendering - sensor update on the render thread, disabling GPU buffering and adding full scene super sampling (1.5-2x)." This is a very exciting line to anyone following this stuff, because if any one thing can kill mainstream adoption of VR, it's people getting physically uncomfortable due to latency and mismatched vestibular cues. What Epic is saying with that line is that they've placed the headtracker sensor output in the optimal place in their program loop to minimize latency, turned off the buffering that normally allows extremely complex geometry to load and play smoothly but impacts the speed at which frames are pushed to the player, and added an anti-aliasing method that may provide a pleasing lack of polygon jaggies (hopefully!) without the massive performance hit normally associated with this operation. That's a lot of latency reduction, and it's clear to the Abrashes and Carmacks among us that every damned millisecond counts in VR; Unity has made zero such announcements regarding optimization for the Rift, saying only that it "works". The Torque team seem confident they've arrived at a number of latency optimizations, and their further progress on the subject may rival UDK's. I do fear that many people will pour countless hours into Unity development only to realize the engine's inherent limitations make it a poor fit for any kind of VR use, but this is only speculation and Unity may yet update their engine to get back on equal footing.

Expecting a TL;DR after all that? There isn't one - the whole situation is a morass of confusion at present and the "best" engine for your project is largely subjective. From my (limited) perspective, assuming Torque 3D really is more suited to small development teams than UDK, the most basic flowchart looks something like this:



I wouldn't go pinning months or years worth of work on one guy's ramblings, though, so get researching!

[DFP]

Unrealscript is being taken out for UnrealEngine 4 and being replaced with C++. So probably best not to get too attached to it if you plan to make more than one game. Kismet will see improvements.

[Aabel]

Nice flow chart Nate, those are pretty much my thoughts on it as well. Thanks for bringing Torque into the discussion as well, it certainly more than deserves a seat at the table. Torque is taking VR seriously, very seriously. Much more so than Unity and Epic, they are just behind in technology. However that is not a situation that I expect to last. VR is pretty close to a hard reset in engine technology priorities anyway making the lead position up for grabs.


Anyone considering Unity should really exhaust the trial before they go plunking down $1500, there are some real concerns about how viable it will be as an engine for VR. It is however a fantastic prototyping tool and can not be beat for that purpose. Even free Unity should suffice for that, you can get the hydra working in free unity and it looks like it will be possible to get the rift working in free as well, even without the distortion shader that should be good enough for prototype purposes.

The ability to quickly implement and iterate on game play ideas is Unity's #1 strength, nothing else comes close to it in that regards. Even if you are using UDK or another engine for your final game you should probably be using Unity to nail down your game mechanics.

[OlivierJT]

@ Nateight
I am very impressed with you post , I tend to think I am writing too long posts ^_^

You know about unity, I went to UDK because I like the rendering "quality", I can tell if CG has been rendered with Maya, Maya, MR ou RM, and Unreal has a thing I like.
I went to it also because I had, like 10 years ago, some tinkering experience with it, and it was well integrated with Maya.

So a year ago I went to the easiest.
I looked for info and tutorials about unity and at that time there were not as much things about it on training, books and all as there is today.

I would love to have someone doing a Unity Demo to me, and showing me the nice workflows.
Maybe i will switch, 1500 USD up front is not an issue for me.

So I am very impressed by UDK, but I need someone to impress me with Unity (not a game, the production pipeline aspect of it)
That was my side of things, using UDK.

If anyone knows a video of a unity workflows that shows all aspect of production, please post a link.

[Pingles]

Some of the demos on YouTube are pretty spectacular in showing what can be accomplished in a short amount if time.

Before choosing Unity I watched quite a few of those videos to see what the workflows would be like.

[Aabel]

Infinite ammo guys on youtube know their Unity

http://www.youtube.com/user/infiniteamm ... ture=watch

Yesterday a new interview went up with Basenji games, a 2 man team doing an adventure game that will target the Oculus Rift, be sure to go to their blog as they share a ton of workflow information.

[ChrisJD]

There is cryengine3 as well http://mycryengine.com/index.php?conid=70

Free for non-commercial. 20% royalty license for commercial Indie dev.

No official Rift support that I can see. Although from a quick read of the forums it sounds like the things you need are available in the engine. Sid-by-side stereo rendering and the ability to use external c++ dlls. The only thing I couldn't quickly find reference to was render-to-target / screenspace effects for the warp shader.

Pretty sure this is the engine they're using for Star Citizen and that's planning Rift support so I'm assuming you can get the Rift going with it. It just might take more work than other engines.