The top 10 game engines as selected by Develop continues
The top 10 game engines as selected by Develop continues today with Unity 3D. We will be revealing a new entrant to the list every day until this Friday, so keep checking back to see which other tech providers you should be looking at for your next project…
Unity 3D
Developer: Unity Technologies
Platforms: PC, Mac, iPhone, Wii
Browser support: Yes
Cost: $199 (Indie), $1499 (Pro), $399+ (iPhone), $15,000 (WiiWare, per title), $30,000 (Wii, per title)
Published titles: FusionFall (Cartoon Network), Zombieville USA (mikamobile)
Titles in development: Secret MMO by Funcom, other unannounced products
Middleware integrations: PhysX, Mono, more to come
We first covered Unity in these pages about a year ago, as it started to make more of an impact in the indie/low-end development market. For all its virtues, though, it was hampered by being Mac-only.
Unity 2.5, launched at GDC, finally brings the Unity toolset to Windows and all those developers unwilling to switch to Macs for the sake of a nice engine. The editor differs from many in being entirely visual-lead – assets can be imported into projects by a simple drag-and-drop (that actually opens the host application in the background to export with optimal settings) and scripts are linked visually.
The editor is also now completely scriptable, meaning that new workflows and interfaces can quickly be made up. Several members of the community have made new editors freely available, including a pathfinding module with automatic (and manual) nagivation mesh generation and behavioural tree editors.
The community is something that Unity Technologies considers a big selling point of the engine: the low entry point means that many hobbyist and indie developers are ardent supporters. As they rationalise it, when big triple-As like Funcom and EA embark on development, they’ve got a wide (and educated) support base and also a pool of ready-trained talent to recruit from. Parts of Cartoon Network’s MMO FusionFall were developed by community members, for example.
It’s also got arguably the best iPhone support, with the actual device acting as an input method to the editor to fine-tune accelerometer controls. According to the company, a new Unity-powered iPhone game is added to the App Store almost every day.
Other console support is currently limited to Wii, but support for Xbox 360 and PS3 is firmly within the company’s roadmap, as are the MMO functionality updates spun out from the success of FusionFall.
Contact: Duevej 94 a, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
E-mail: info@unity3d.com
Web: www.unity3d.com
Unity is amazing 3D Engine. The best engine on this side of one millione dollars on the planet.
I realy love it.
It needs some graphics update IMO.
And restricting dynamic shadows to indies is dumb
WhoMe, not to sound fanboyish, but needing a graphics update doesn't make any sense. You provide your own models and textures, and you can write your own shaders. You can also use blob shadows or create your own 'dynamic' shadows. You just don't get real time automatic shadows. It's kind of just an extra, since adding shadows yourself is really not that challenging.
You are wrong. Since "Render to Texture" functionality is disabled in Unity Indie _no_ shadows or post effects can be implemented (or very crude FFP maybe).
So limiting this side of functionality is really bad decision (you can get shadows "out of the box" with Ogre with no cost at all).
UNITY INDIE IS NOW FREE, yes I said FREE !!!!!
Yes,! is free!, easy to use, is great, but badly has no dynamic shadows, that was the great exception to be the perfect engine :`( no more than lightmaps to get a good looking scene, is incredible that the step to get shadows coasts US 1000 :( .,, only the shadows i need! only the shadows!! and no more... :( , but yet using it because is easy to use and do fantastics things,, ..... just shadows..... bah.
i don΄t know.... the titles of this engine are toon, there are too mucho iphone titles, the games looks not so incredibles, there are just 1 game that took my attention, "Avert Fate"... the engine is enough fast to do very looking good games... why ps3 xbox360 or at least ps2, are not released for this engine?, however this is in 4th place, but Infernal is 6th, and GhostBusters was made with it, and it has a incredible graphics, people pay attention to the demo games or currently released and then will pay attention to the engine... Unity is great!, i know!, but needs to release less toon games and more nice looking games...
ShiVa 3D by Stonetrip is a single license for all platforms, so you don't have to spend more money everytime you want to port.
Souce engine is has pretty good gfx, its supports
xbox360 and ps3
how can you say Source supports PS3? have you played Orange Box on PS3? it's awful, the worst crap ever. To say it supports PS3 is like saying a car supports flying... if you drive over a cliff...
When i opened and installed Unity3D i had an errors called "NSIS Error" so i can't install it on my pc. Can anybody give me 'another' url that can i download this program. Or anything else that i can download and no errors. Thanks and please reply...
but hey check out this game called interstellar marines by zero point developers its amazing.
Hi Sanderson (and others with nsis error),
NSIS isnt directly related to unity, it's a common error in windows. In this case you could re-download the software without the use of download accelerators and such and save it to a different folder then you already did. Usually this does the trick. For more info : http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Why_do_I_get_NSIS_Error
Unity 3D is awesome. It's relatively easy to use and is incredibly powerful. We used it to make a simple Petanque game. Check it out here:
http://www.petanqu3d.com
oops, address was wrong....http://www.petanque3d,com
@Sam try to learn how to spell the name of your own website. The graphics in that game of yours look pretty horrible.
David, pretty harsh words. I think it looks pretty ok for some game just randomly made in a small time frame, I personally wouldn't play it though, but it doesn't look that bad, good lighting.
UNITY HAS A FREE VERSION!!! Don't say it mendatory costs money!!!
Hi, does Unity support HMI applications?
Thanks.
http://gamestart3d.com/
Same graphic power as Unity (if not more), running on Windows, Android (and iOS to come).
Free beta test so far...
My favorite, definitely :)
best in th world
Unity = Pricey heap of French crap!
Great tool. Been using it for 4 years now and I think it's one of the most approachable tools for game development. And it hardly feels inadequate for the advanced user. The user interface is the best I've seen for any game editor. What's more it is completely extensible. The current GUI system seems to be lacking quite a bit but UT is working on a replacement. Platform
Support just works. It also has the biggest community compared to other game engines so your questions literary get answered in minutes
@ 22 - You are a moron! " pricey " you get indy version for FREE and as for calling it french crap, you are aware that UNITY is a global collaboration? Thought not.
People like you that have no idea should learn to shut up and only post if you know what you are talking about.
Unity Free no have dynamic shadows, Unity pro cost $1500 and much more with the license for mobiles and consoles, Shiva 3D is free for web games and $199 for all platforms (mobile and consoles)
Forget game engines learn a programming language like Pascal!
I can see these major issues with using Unity:
- I prefer to use GNU/Linux for my daily work and Unity only provides support for Windows and Mac. Thay said they would be releasing a Linux version, but I haven't seen anything yet.
- Second, Unity is proprietary software and it is instead open standards what will drive the web in the following years. The problem with using proprietary solutions is that in such a volatile game market, if Unity goes wrong then all of its developer-base and designers will be urged into learning something else and their previous knowledge will be rendered unusable. Something like this is now happening to Flash, which has been a proprietary initiative since the very beginning.
- Third: The license costs are quite prohibitive for me right now. I would need to spend too much money first on Windows licenses and then on Unity.
- Fourth: I hear that Unity has some buggy features and that it crashes often. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I have to pay for it I would expect it to be bug-free and to have a good technical support.
While I understand that Unity can dramatically reduce my project time, the issues presented above become a stopper for me and I would rather learn to program 3D games using open standards, like HTML5, which requires more concepts, but I'm eager to spend extra time on that if necessary.
Does anyone know of any other options?
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