New UDK features [Video]

Why do UDK feature threads always end up discussing price factors ?

Yes, they have some really great new features. Yes I'd like some of them translated into Unity. No, not worth switching too unless they develop their development frontend and multi-platform features a lot more.

 

coder view:

BETA its not more than a bunch of a tools with gillion bugs + nice graphics.
example: return from editor play mode `esc` still cause crush editor 100% of the time.

- As a developer using the Unreal Development Kit, you will have access to a limited amount of documentation via the Unreal Developer Network, as well as tutorials and Reference materials specific to game development and games developed by Epic

non straight - forward framework\editor
non active community
available through udn docs\tutorials is not more than unrelated to real coding basics in udk

learning udk is a bloody pain in the azz. using it even worse

 

Price is important to a lot of unity users. This is a sign that unity is being embraced by professionals who want to make a living for it. Features and price usually go hand in hand

 

This is two bladed sword. It is hard for small teams that are are doing indie development for living. If you are in this basket then you have to be sure that you can deliver maximum (maybe even AAA) quallity and sell your product very well (Hawken, Dungeon defenders....). If you are great artist or coder and if you want to make quallity game you dont need to complicate. Pick UDK and when you earn thousands of dollars from title with small team you will be fine.

Now there is whole different bunch of developers which are hobbist developers, full time developers in third world countries or in countries with much cheaper living standart than USA or UK, developers who want to make some very small game demo to get their portfolio up and get job in good company, now all of those they dont care about those licencing as much. And this people represent for sure more than 50% of overall game development community on UDK.

 

I think that the price of the engine is not less important than productivity. The most important question you have to answer is: how long it takes to develop my game with this engine?

Unity fits well my needs. For example, in my project I spend 60% of the time doing GUI stuff. UDK has not a more productive GUI engine so there's no reason for me to use UDK

 

Alright, so let's say an individual needs $40k a year to live. That brings you right back to Dreamora's example: UDK costs 10x the amount of Unity with the average team size of a successfully released indie UDK game.

 

plus, lets not forget guys... unity is awesome!

 

Really? UDK has Scaleform which is more or less as good as it gets as far as I'm concerned. I would love for something like Scaleform, or even something like HTML/CSS, to be in Unity because I find the current GUI system a real pain in the ass to work with.

 

TwiiK, so you use UDK? How do you do the scripting? How do you debug? I have so many questions!

Is it true you gotta close and open the editor every time you change a script?

 

I was wondering the same. Why wouldnt you like Scaleform? It is for sure more productive than Unity GUI, and lol......at least it is optimised.

 

Last time I used it, yes this was true... And the main reason I bolted back to Unity. I write my code by testing frequently, with each new line of code almost. How can you work if each time you have to close and rebuild the project etc? Each time I changed something it took a few minutes to get back into coding. Maybe things have changed now?!

 

Maybe things have changed now?!
nope
but still udk have very serious bunch of tools like scaleform

 

I do think with the new advents in UDK unity should make it's unity ios platform more enticing.

The ability to completely build and run your game on your iOS device for free with UDK is going to get alot of attention I think. For all the hobbyists out there who do not expect to ever even make 50k, they will probably flock to UDK because of this. Even though Unity Remote works on the free version, Unity Remote is not enough to actually get a feel for what your game will be like on an iOs device.

It would be really cool if Apple agreed to basically deny all iOS app submittals made with Unity if they were built with Unity Free. So then Unity Free could come with the ability to actually build and deploy an app to iOS through an ios developer account, then someone could fully develop, and fully test their app on their iOS device without any money put out upfront. Then when they are ready to put it on the store, they give unity the $400 for the basic license and then they can submit. Although I know something like that will probably never happen.

One thing though that still bothers me about the licensing of iOS pro, and even Pro, and I think this issue is greater highlighted now that UDK iOS is out. But the thing that bothers me is that they have performance optimizing features as a Pro only feature. Fancier rendering effects, asset bundles and full beast lightmapping are great examples of features to go in a pro version of software. But things like static batching, umbra and build size stripping. Those are things that are their to optimize perfomance, why is Unity making features that allow a person to make their game run faster and lighter a pro only feature? I think it makes the engine look bad. You have all these games built with Unity iOS Basic that could be running faster if the person could of just ticked 'static batching'. Or if the person took the 10 minutes to set up Umbra, or the download size could be smaller if they had stripping. You should be able to build a game as optimized as possible whether or not you have pro. A basic license should not gimp the performance or optimization of the engine, the basic license should just cut out advanced, fancier features like post effects, GI, asset bundles, deferred rendering, whatever, lack of those things don't gimp the performance and optimization of the engine.

I've tested a number of iOS games on the app store and some of the ones built with iOS basic I can't help but wonder, how much smaller could the download size of been if they had stripping? How much quicker could it run if it had static batching and umbra? And in some instances I could tell the game really needed these things, and if they had it, it would of made a huge difference. But consumers don't know this, they don't know that the game is running in iOS basic and the performance and optimization has been gimped because of that, and it gives Unity a bad reputation.

And now with UDK available, people can build a better optimized game for iOS for free than someone can with Unity iOS Basic out of the box. We'll probably end up with a bunch of poorly made UDK games on App store now that run better than alot of the amateurish Unity iOS basic games and this will start to give UDK a reputation of having better performance.

In short, Unity features that improve the performance and optimization of the engine should not be pro only. I think doing that is a huge mistake. I mean imagine if Unity 3.5 came out and 'Multicore rendering' is a pro only feature. I bet any of you working at Unity can instantly see how bad of a choice that would be. Why would you gimp the performance and optimization of the engine if it's a non-pro license? You wouldn't. So then why do this with things like static batching, umbra and stripping? Just because an optimization comes as a tool like umbra does not mean your doing anything different than if you gimped the basic license by making multi-core rendering pro only. Your still making full optimization a pro only feature. I think any features which help to optimize should be standard in all versions.

 

Yep you are 100% right. For those who think that Unity will catch AAA engines on PC platform are not just wrong, actually it is high possibilty that Unity will lose leadership on IOS platform too. UDK is getting a lot of updates on IOS, Cryengine 3 is getting on IOS soon too.

 

Yeah but I want to know my money (I bought both pro's) is well invested in the mobile platform. I want to see shadows done fast and stable in iOS. I want to see a ton more shaders that are wicked fast.

This is because at some point I will be expanding to buy more licenses. And in a year I'll be upgrading to 4.x licenses. I want to invest I want to throw money at unity. That is why I am publically stating what I want.

Note: I am not moaning or criticising unity. I think the current unity pro and ios pro is actually worth the money. I just want to see continuing value for money down the road. Keep up the good work.

 

@janpec

i don't think so, regarding the AAA engines thing. Unity has lots of potential, but many features people would like to see are just not build-in so you'd have to do them yourself or hope somebody did it already and is selling it (or is even giving it away for free). One point were i definitely see a problem is, that some things in unity simply can not be changed to work the way you'd like it. I sometimes have a look at papers or presentations, thinking this would be cool in unity, but when they're talking about the implementation i'm thinking "crap, there's no way i could get this done in unity". Though this is quite annoying, it doesn't mean unity isn't an engine you can make AAA games with. It just needs more work in some areas. (which is btw. okay, if you keep in mind its much cheaper and if you spend some money and the right assets i guess)

 

You need to be more specifc what do you mean with AAA games exactly. In general no it is not possible to make it, i am working on graphically heavy indie game right now and speaking from my experiance and a lot of stress testing i have done, no it is not possible. Thats why i brought project to Cryengine. And those "AAA" projects that might be doable in Unity just wouldnt look that good as they would in some other AAA engines like Cry or UE.

 

Janpec is right here. AAA represent a certain quality constraints to be met.
You guys (who states Unity is on par with AAA) need to stay within reality and accept that Unity is not on par with most AAA engines, graphic qualities wise.
This does not mean Unity cannot get there, or never will be.. it's just nowhere in the near future.
Unity's aim as engine, is focussed towards Casual/Indie quality, which is fine, nothing wrong with that at all.
Just don't expect the same quality, as you would get with a AAA engine.

 

I think you guys are talking nonsense to be honest, Unity is perfectly capable of very good looking games, i cant think of anything it doesnt really have to do so, i'd call it a failure of the art people (programming and creation) if you cant get much decent looking out of it

Actually I feel like proving this so i'll have a look into something i can do quickly to illustrate my point, still may take a few days though

 

Graphic quallity is worse than with other engines especially rendering and lighting but thats not that much of problem. This can be somehow "replaced" with very good quallity of models and it would look decent. Not nearly as good as in other engines but acceptable.
Now the biggest problem is unoptimised engine, rendering, posteffects and many other things. This is true killer why nothing serius can be made from it. Posteffects are for sure worse than in UDK for example but i would honestly accept them if they would be optimised. Spending 150 frames only on three or four posteffects is a joke.

I am waiting for this prove for two years
And please dont work your ass off just to prove me wrong I have already done testing for our game, and results are quite terrible. We are developing fighting simulation simular to Mount and blade. Now if you can give me sample scene with 50 active characters (1k texture), terrain, and three posteffects and actually be able to play in some healthy frame rate be my guest. I would suggest you to do this test, just to see how much frames you lose even with only those characters on screen, without any scripts running.

 

Are you deliberately obtuse? a game with piss poor engine quality will hit number 1 on the charts for months running and feature AAA graphics.

AAA is production quality, it doesn't mean the engine. Or are you going to claim world of warcraft isn't AAA? because its engine is a load of old tosh and pretty poor by anyone's standards. The art quality and media and everything else isn't though.

AAA has nothing to do with the engine and everything to do with production values.

Um, unity has gone on record stating clearly that it isn't just for indie. They are aiming at AAA. And they are already there. Just because the goal posts move, it doesn't make you right.

All I see is you moaning about unity in some form or other.

By that you mean epic and id's rage engine and crytek right? Guess what, they all have limitations too but you haven't looked at those.

I'm going to hazard a guess by AAA you mean that someone out there bothered to write more shaders. I'm guessing you aren't referring to tesselation/dx11 which is on unity's roadmap. I'm guessing you're saying "I don't see the special shader I want written for me, and its not in my copy of unity free so unity is not AAA.". I must be warm.

 

Combining post effects in one script so you do rendertextures once seems to perform just fine for me. It requires a bit of coding, especially if you want the resulting script to be elegant, but it's definitely doable and fast. And the included post effects are really good.

The only real outdated one and that is hard for someone to code himself is the motion blur effect.

 

How about speaking up WHY it is not possible for you? Have you hit a wall in your programming ability? why isn't it possible? will we see you hit that wall with crytek's engine too? quite possibly. But do explain what the wall is so unity can fix it.

 

I'm genuinely intrigued by all this though to be honest, i've messed around with UDK and created good looking stuff, and I dont see anything i cant also do in Unity. Now if youre talking actual performance you may have a point but the fact is you can still make a very good looking game in Unity

What would be your target platform or specification? What effects are you using? In the end what i'd like to show is that a game can be very pretty and made with Unity

I was just going to make a non-game related thing, really, just a room with a view and whatever stuff I can get going on without it being too much of a pain in the butt

I honestly think there my only bottleneck will be lightmap rendering times in Max

I don't want to sound like i'm getting at people but honestly it doesnt take much to make something pretty in a modern engine and if you want to talk performance then sure but it's like you automatically need say, post effects for prettiness, the only post effect i'd say was particularly important for pretty visuals is tonemapping/colour grading, DOF, HDR, no big deal

There's so many variables with what you've just said that i'm just intrigued, i want to find out for myself, i've been aiming my efforts at mobile so far so keeping myself on a leash but i'll try do something that makes my desktop upset

No promises though, it might just be too annoying waiting for max/vray to render stuff when i'm just trying to prove a point

 

Ah now we have the truth: you guys aren't capable of writing post effects, so unity suddenly sucks. Did you know you could write one post effect shader with it all combined and unity would run the same speed as epic or whatever? shader programs are shader programs. There isn't anything epic or crytek can do more to speed them up. But you can.

You have to appreciate that what ships with epic and crytek engines, are post effect shaders optimised for the games they have made. Namely, FPS games. Unity is built for any kind of game right from the start.

I'm amazed you judged it on the available shaders. I guess thats what makes an AAA engine these days. It all depends if someone has written the shaders for it. I think your comments are unreal.

You are aware you need to be in deferred to gain any speed back from those introductory shaders right? Nobody chains post effects in the game industry, they write one dedicated post that takes care of it. Or swap between them. Chaining them is FPS suicide.

 

AAA is indeed about production (in general).. granted.. but it's also... about the Graphic quality.
AAA is easily spotted, by the art/rendering etc quality coming on your screen, done by the, guess what? that's right: the engine.
So, going along the quality part for just now, as i did above... Janpec and I are correct in that perspective. If UT states their are going to focus on AAA, this also includes art tech quality. Focus means, wanting too, going too, but not being there... so there is quite a road ahead for UT before they reach that quality. Like it or not, i don't care too much..
You are a Unity junky (like being addicted) , and don't like any, what so ever negative sounds regarding your drug (unity). If it does happen, you start aggressivly defending it, like you are being hurt personally.
Come on now, hush... nobody is kicking you, don't act like it...
Unity is not perfect, never will be. (no Engine/tool will be for that matter, even UDK and CryEngine has weaknesses... )
We (Janpec and i) where just pointing out some weaknesses Unity has over the competition.
I really don't see the problem there.

Well, you appear to have a very limited vision on what makes an engine optimized. All you can think of is shaders.. Well, shaders are just a tiny part of optimization. What about render speeds, which has nothing to do with shaders technically? Memory optimizations? handling textures, normals? IO? and the list goes on and on and on.. just to point out, it's not all about shaders..

Just take the real pointing to the weaknesses in Unity, as told before, Unity is not perfect, never will be. Perfect means nothing wrong whatsoever.. so don't act like it is.

 

@AcidArrow I stand 100% behind what i said. Unity posteffects (with some exceptions like bloom and flares) are all outdated and looking way worse than in UDK or Cry. Please dont try to prove me wrong on this, download UDK and Cry and see it on yourself. I am speaking especially for sun shafts, SSAO, Bokekh depth of field, color correction.

Ok to both upper repplys seems like none of you read my whole reply. I said that optimisation is was a huge problem on testing that i did.

Test scene with 50 animated "soldiers" all using one 1024x1024 texture, 3500 polygons and 1 animation. The only running script (not including posteffects) was simple FPS movement script. There was 1 terrain in scene and some prop models. Frame rate was just horrible, nothing playable can be done that way, it was tested on three different computers. One computer was high-end i7 3ghz, 8gb ram 1Gb graphic card, one was bit less and one medium-end.

Just wanted to say that frame rate is way too low even if all posteffects are turned out. Thats the point, posteffects are killer, however wihtout them frame rate is way too low.

Instead arguing with me you can save some nerves for yourself and do this:
Make some test scene from what i described. Terrain, terrain bump+specular shader, some vegetation, posteffects, 50 soldiers, 1024x1024 texture, and some scripts maybe some very simple AI. Turn on shadows.

Tell me what happened.

 

@saymoo:
Thing is you aren't pointing out the weaknesses. You haven't yet. In detail, why don't you clearly state the weaknesses case by case. Here's a clue "unity isn't AAA" "unity sucks" doesn't count.

Give me a case study where unity is bad vs crytek's engine. Why would I want to use crytek's engine and not unity? please explain so I can stop morbidly attacking your posts and thinking you haven't got the slightest clue about game development. Stop me thinking that about you, and I am happy to change my opinion.

Like I've said before, when unity slips up or drags their ass, I will be all over them. But I don't see what you're seeing right now.

@janpec:

Would you care to do this test in crytek and unity, WITHOUT post effects (since we can write one of those custom that'll be as fast as crytek's) - and report in with the results?

If it turns out that just the soldiers rendering without post, are considerably faster in crytek's engine then this IS a problem that needs addressing in unity. I for one do not think dynamic batching is the answer. I think thats a pretty slow and clueless way of doing things and we need more control over that. I think unity pretty much sucks at lots of multiple boned meshes. But that is only a feeling right now - I do not know if crytek sucks the same amount of ass at that job. So I am looking forwards to your test results.

Oh, make sure you're using 3.4 while you're at it.

 

You are not pointing things out though, you are just saying that Unity suffers in graphics quality compared to UDK without any specifics, like it's a vague and general truth that doesn't need to be explained (not saying I disagree completely though.. ).

(also hippo replied to both of you, so.... I don't think there's anything personal towards you)

 

This is absolutely the crux of it I think, it's that they cant write shaders, dont know how to use shaders and think the quality of an 'engine' (i hate the word engine) = shaders

This is ridiculous, if you want a material effect in a game you write a shader for it and you make sure your artists know how to use it, you can use Unity shaders in fixed function and put Cg and GLSL directly into them. I'm not a shader programmer and I know how important shaders are to the visuals of a game but shaders are down to the ART TEAM (including any programmers involved with the art), not a middleware provider writing shaders for them

The shaders you get with Unity Pro, the post process ones, you could see as just an introduction to post process shaders even if they are already quite good, what you get with Pro is the ability to use these types of shaders at all

As for the rest of your art, your modelling, textures and materials, they rely on people talented in these areas and how to use them along with suitable shaders

 

With all that said, I think we should all recognize that Unity as of now is lacking true HDR rendering (there has been some changes with every version, but we're still not there) or proper gamma handling, which are kind of a problem for ... "quality" post effects (at least for some kinds). Luckily it seems that the Unity folks are actively working on them.

 

I just get annoyed at people putting down a quality of rendering to post effects at all, while they're important i think making a game pretty without them makes a nice starting point before you start relying on them to fill in holes left elsewhere

 

i disagree, tech has evolved, and therefor embrace it as we go. (otherwise you would need to return you mobile, your modern computers, and go back to the old days in hardware.. you don't like that aswel, do you?)

 

Of course it should be embraced, but each technology should complement skills, not be a one click solution for replacing them

 

Still waiting for that side by side comparison, saymoo.

 

That's not what he meant. He just meant, post effects should be used to make something that looks good, better. Not to cover up something that looks bad with a ton of bloom.

 

Seems like you are threating me like some kind of troll, no offense. I wouldnt point out statments on blank if i wouldnt actually do testing on myself.
I did tests both in Unity and Cryengine 3. I will break it point by point where you can clearly see weaknesses.
Both scenes were tested with SSAO, Antialiasing, Sun shafts, Bloom, Blur effect.

*One important thing to add, i cannot compare from the same starting number of frame rate in those two engines, since Cryengine 3 has somehow "cagged" frame rate which should be changed later, but for now this means that starting frame rate in Cryengine was arround 80 frames (all posteffects i counted above are included in engine on start by default and ocean is already applied in scene).

1. Results with rendering just simple terrain scene with few textures applied on terrain surface:
Difference in performance drop was huge, quallity difference was huge. When loading Unity terrain with bump+spec shader that is provided from Unity community frame drop was 80 frames and more.
Now you might want to state that i should writte my own shader, but that is not the point. If i would want to do that, i would need to hire programmer, which could cost a lot.
I dont want to use Unity pro 1500$+2000$ just to get some decent shaders that actually have better results.
Unity specular and normal shading on terrain looks bland, plastic, meanwhile in Cryengine looks realistic. Frame drop in cryengine when creating terrain is arround 10-20 frames, with textures applied.


2.Stress testing with character models. I have put 50 character models in Unity scene, all of them were using shared 1024x1024 texture.
All characters were animated with 1 animation and were not moving. Performance drop was amazing.
Cryengine 3, imported the same number of characters, performance drop was about 5-7 frames when all characters were rendered.
This was the biggest hit on me. Cryengine runs perfectly smooth with dozens of heavy graphical objects while Unity is crawling behind.
All of this was tested without shadows in both engines.

3.Posteffects as i explained before, quallity and performance worse in Unity.

4.Cryengine 3 test scene was running with all FPS example scripts attached and guns active, in Unity only simple movement script was enabled, which means that there is some +points to frame rate on Cryengine again.

5.GI (global ilumination), plus to Cry since Unity does not have it. It has good impact on visuals.

6.Quallity of shaders (especially skin shaders SSS) and lighting difference is huge. Some shaders can be changed and rewritten in Unity, but thats not the point. Its what you get with SDK or engine and is not burned on your budget where you would have to pay S***loads for some programmer to do it.

 

Hang on you're complaining about the graphics performance of a game making engine without actually any graphics programming involved? Are you mad? Do games look pretty by themselves?

 

? Your sentece makes no sense to whatever i have written before. How does rendering impact of solid meshes and textures has anything to do with graphic programming OF USER? This is source code related stuff duh...

 

You wrote this, its a bizarre thing to say, when criticising the graphics performance of something when you develop games

 

I am indie developer more likely a hobbyst so i am speaking from point of view where there arent rives of cash flowing under me.

You might be right on shaders but everything else is as i said: part of source code (lighting, rendering), and this is the biggest dissadvantage not the shaders itself.

 

@janpec:

1. No one would state that if you compare something don't use something thats not part of the technology if you aren't willing to risk that its not opted and not willing to pay for it. Use whats inbuilt, UT has its reasons why the terrain does not support more and anyone using unity long enough will pretty surely find out why on his own

2. Cry also needs DX10+ to do this all that well as the mesh instancing + skeleton animation on DX9 has some serious limitations. Keep in mind, unity is a DX9 only engine, so it has to live within that limitations (actually its focus for nearly everything thats integrated is SM2, not even SM3, while cry is SM4+) So yeah there are naturally some major deltas

4. Now try to do the same thing and create no shooter with cry and compare how much longer you needed to get anything going there. its barely never an adequate thing to compare engines if one engine has a clear favor and over half a decade of optimization for one given genre. Would be as if you compared cry to the startcraft 2 engine in the field of RTS, even a blind one knows who is gonna lose and its not SC2

5. Yes unity has it. Beast calculations on Unity Pro support light bouncing and GI

6. Thats right, but again see the point on top again about the shader model targets the engines have


Cry is great, no question. But you pay a price for its non baking of the stuff, for lower end games cry is likely the "loser" against UDK and Unity which both have a strong focus on baking instead of just realtime and for casuals its the only of the 3 thats unsuitable from the start.

naturally for a shooter that for example wouldn't be of importance (but as if there is a 2078th boring shooter needed for this world, we have already 2050 that shouldn't have been released )

 

Yep i see your point dreamora, but clearly i have been talking only about high-end graphically heavy poluted games i havent been speaking anything about how certain engine fits good for low end pipeline or whichever fits better for IOS games. I have clearly pointed out what kind of project i want to make and Unity just isnt good for it, as you said each engine has good points for certain genres, types and quallity. I dont know why others dont get it.

Same story beginns as it was with UDK. Cryengine 3 shooter example doesnt restrict engine to shooters only. It can be just as much used for RPG or RTS. Unity would be clear choice for platformer, while for every other genre with its current limitations and problems Cry could be better choice.

 

Hi Janpec,

No, not a troll, merely someone who prefers to get to the point as soon as possible, thanks for the reply. On with:

There's two issues at stake here:

1. crytek has this "look" on by default, and so those default looks are basically built in from stage 1. This is great and good until you need something that isn't that look. Interestingly, that look is desirable for most games.

2. Unless deferred rendering is enabled, unity will constantly do each post effect in a different pass, which will slow it down a hell of a lot in forward rendering. Deferred at least shares some of the buffers which leads to speed increases. Did you try deferred?

3. I agree: unity needs a bunch more highly optimised COMBINED shaders to compete. It is something pro-only that would increase the value of pro. I would like unity to do this. It is business sense. These shaders could have hard conditionals which don't reduce speed but do allow some things to be turned off or tweaked. Mobile equivelents also welcome (full screen blur, with tint and optional distortion, DOF via alpha for example).

But I still haven't seen a proper speed comparison. Because such a post effect setup isn't available in unity at the moment. Unity's default shaders are inferior to crytek and epic, but I still don't see that as a judgement of a bad engine. I see that as an opportunity for unity to correct this omission.

 

This looks is hard coded in engine that is true. However advanced graphic options are comming soon in SDK update so there will be ability to specifically select or desect elements that you want to use (GI, posteffects, 4x AA, shadows, else). The looks is good for all cryengine games that have been made with but with all those settings applied it is true that making cartoon game with it would be epic fail. Just look at Cryengine 3 SDK sample game (not sure what company made it). It is semi cartoon game and it looks awful when you apply this realistic rendering settings.

Afcourse all testing was with defferend.

I have posted speed comparision, take a look a little back in threads. In short Cryengine when all tons of models were in action frame drop was bare minimum, in Unity totally different story.

 

I think what we can take away from this is that unity needs to improve a few things, and hopefully will read this thread with interest. I'm not blind, I want unity to be the best it can be, because I've invested and (hopefully if they do) will continue to invest.

The next exciting thing I am waiting for is the shadowgun stuff. I want those shaders and I understand as part of a deal unity are bringing them to all of us. What is next? I hope the company continue to work on "set looks". Vignetting is one "set look". Perhaps more?

 

Those lighting models used in CE3 and UE3 can be re-created inside Unity. Obviously, it would be awesome if they came as build-in features (like CE3 and UE3) which i guess is the main point of the latest posts in this thread?
Unity ninjas are watching very closely this thread (and all other similar ones).
Believe me, they are adding a bunch of optimizations and eye candy features to make Unity more AAA appeal. Not only eye candy features and performance enhancements but even more flexibility (which till now have been the strongest selling point of Unity).
I'm also waiting for a set of ultra optimized kick ass mobile shaders but my biggest hope is build-in real-time shadows on Unity mobile.
Implementing your own shadow system not only is slower than any build-in one but also workflow is a nightmare (I'm currently using a slightly modified version of the planar shadows one). I mean, if Unreal (which is a tad slower than Unity mobile) already got real-time shadows for mobile, Unity should also add some sort of build-in rt-shadows on UT mobile. I know is a bit tricky (and mostly slow) but i don't really care, I'll simply pay attention to it. ^^
To add a bit to the CE vs UT, i don't think CE is a threat to Unity, the real competitor to Unity is Unreal Engine which also targets mobile platforms.

 

As a beginner game developer , without a lot of techincal jargon to roll on, and as someone that has used both UDK and Unity , i think both are great, but the problem with the UDK for a complete beginner, is that in order to create much outside of a FPS based game, you need to learn a fair bit about uscript. Now most beginner game developers have a little taste of programming via html, javascrip, c# , or other misc snippets they picked up on their journeys, even most 3d artists have a little knowledge of both sides of the fence. But with UDK , you need to learn those uscripts , and be able to write around , and extend off of those scripts alone.

Now along comes Unity , with a simple drag and drop system, that allows you to create an empty script file , that automaticly generates a decent game loop for you to work with , and allows you 100% flexibillity to your class from the ground up, without ever having to look to an exterior source ... with the exception of the Unity Reference Documentation. ( And conveniently , they have that hotkeyed, and well organized)

Not that UDK doesnt have documentation , but i think that this is where , at least for me , between UDK and Unity , the ease of workflow for a beginner is just not there with the UDK. I did manage to play around with Unreal Kismet , and thought it was pretty cool , but it didnt seem as flexible as being able to just write a quick snippet on the spot.

Again , im not a tech junkie *yet* , but just a lonely solo hobbiest learning the ins and outs , and for a guy like me , Unity is the ticket!

 

Cryengine IOS support will come soon as they announced, which leads that they will become competitor on that area soon.

For above comments, i think that Unity problem isnt in adding more features but rather starting on core problem. Why is it taking such huge impact on rendering just basic solid animated meshes? This the real problem. Not adding tons of lighting features and whatnot. If they do that the same story will happen again. If you bulk all Unity graphical features performance will be mono-or dual frame. This is where they need to make changes.

 

I agree and I'm pretty sure Unity staff is also aware of what's missing and what's not. That's part of their next huge update (performance improvements, better skinning, multi-core support, RNMs, light probes, etc). Those additions will really help improve the performance by miles (while improving the visual quality of your Unity scenes).