Unity vs Unreal, Before we hit any technical term, let’s just know this really nebulous thing we keep hearing in the gaming world. What are Gaming Engines?
The main functions performed by the gaming engines are known already: it exists to abstract the details of doing common game-related tasks, like rendering, and input, so that developers can focus on the details that make their games unique. Engines offer various components that can be manipulated to bring a game to life. Loading, displaying, and animating models, collision detection between object, graphical user interfaces, and even portions of a game’s artificial intelligence can all be the ingredients falling in together to complete a gaming engine.
Below here in this article, we’re gonna compare the two most hit gaming engines : unity vs unreal, there attributes and features, and which one dominates the other, so that we can conclude the best one out by the time we reach the end.
Unity
Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, and has been used to develop both two dimensional and three dimensional games. At first, it came out only for OS X but now, it is targeting 27 different platforms while six major versions of it has been released till date.
The picture shows the basic architecture of unity search engine and the way it provides different features.
For 2D games, Unity provides features such as importation of sprites and an advanced 2D world renderer. Talking about the 3D games, Unity allows a wide range to select for texture compression and resolution settings for each platform that the game engine supports, and provides support for bump mapping, reflection mapping, parallax mapping, screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO), dynamic shadows using shadow maps, render-to-texture and full-screen post-processing effects.
LICENSES
The licensing details are as follows. Unity comes with four license options-
Unreal
The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter gameUnreal. It was mainly developed for the first-person shooters, but it has been widely used in a variety of other games such as fighting games and the ones including stealth. The base code of it is written in C++.Since years, it has been providing a lot of features to its users such as high portability.
The engine has been in news due to its modular engine architecture. It also includes its own scripting language called as UnrealScript, which in turn makes it easier and includes total conversions. Thus, while creating the multiple generation games, the skills of the engine can be made better due to it’s modular nature.
Now that we’ve a basic idea of what both the engines comprises of, let’s go through a quick session of there pros and cons.
Pros & Cons- Unity vs Unreal
Unity
Pros:
- Has a proper balance of ease of use and power.
- Its platform support is a rare found.
- From basic low level games to higher complex games, its performance efficiently is worth relying on.
- Even hybrid games, apart from 2D and 3D games are totally supported by the workflows.
- The base code in C# is easy to learn and use.
- The built in Mechanism animation system is really powerful, it lets you drive animation of any value and kind.
- Widely flexible asset store containing a lot of useful content and also works as a potential revenue stream for developers.
- Active development maintains the regular fixing of bugs and keeps releasing new updates in time.
- The best of all, full feature set is totally free until you earn $100K revenue in one year.
- All the major Useful services like Unity Ads, Unity Analytics, and Unity Cloud Build built right in there.
Cons :
- Subscription model has an additional cost for mobile.
- Closed source.
- Still works on outdated Mono 2.6 runtime, and lacks the important newer C# features and doesn’t provides .Net compatibility.
- Not so good garbage collection because of the outdated Mono 2.6 which can cause performance hitches quite often.
- Version control is really annoying in use due to meta files that create multiple issues, such as the restoration of deleted folders.
- Asynchronous content streaming is really in a pitty condition, doesn’t work really well with other features.
- UnityScript (its own scripting language) is a junk that many developers waste there time with.
Unreal
PROS:
- It supports ~6 platforms (Mainly PC+Consoles).
- Has a record on its name for being one of the nicest looking engine.
- Drag and drop options for basic interaction.
- Provides a bunch of learning tutorials for designers.
- Free if you make 0$<$50K from it.
CONS:
- So so documentation.
- Hardly provides any learning material for the coders community.
- It’s really difficult to do non FPS games with it.
Current status comparison: Unity vs Unreal
The Unity game engine is far more popular amongst developers than any other feather of the same hat. The number of Unity users and the ones using it as their basic gaming search engine has been widely growing.
As a matter of fact, 34% of top 1000 free mobile games are made with UNITY, while that of only 2.2% rely on UNREAL, though EPIC Games says Unreal Engines added 1.5 million users in past year.
Following is the statistical data that shows the pecentage ratioo of Unity users, and that od its closest competitor Unreal, including the users of other gaming search engines on third-
Comparing the features: unity vs unreal
- Scripting languages used by Unity are UnityScript and C# while Unreal uses C++, and other scripting languages such as Lua.
- In Unity you need to get an asset like PlayMaker to do things if you wanna do them without code while Unreal includes Blueprints which make things easier .
- With Unity, its more like a one-man game while talking of Unreal, it favours teams with separate skill sets and working.
- Also, Unreal is far better in graphic capabilities and gives better performance sometimes.
- The complete source code in Unreal can be attained at no cost. Unity gives some open source components but if you need the full engine, you gotta pay for license, which can be said expensive.
- Till now, it can be said that Unreal is more stable on console platforms as compared to Unity, but Unity wins over for it is easier to develop for mobile devices.
Conclusion: Unity vs Unreal
With major features such as it’s open, very flexible, and easily adapted to a lot of uses, Unity wins for a standard PC. Beside that, it also cultivates, a worth it supporting ecosystem containing the app store, wonderful educational material, and a huge community of active users.
UE is a worth a pay for fancy custom workstations. It mainly has a better performance and is more efficient in what it does. If your task is close to what UE wants to do, it’s hard to beat; but if you’re trying to pursue something that isn’t made for it, it’s gonna be HARD!
They’re both great. The top end performance of UE is better, though Unity’s is pretty good. The end choice lies with the user and the kind of requirements he posses. Apparently, If you need an open, flexible and easily adaptable gaming engine, Unity’s the first choice while if you’re heading for a highly optimized one, go for Unreal Engine. Both of them are firm options for the developers to work on!