Unity 3 Vs. UDK

It's immaterial at this point, Unreal Engine 3 is quite different from Unreal Engine. As it stands now, any game can be done in either engine, but will almost certainly look better (and cost more to produce) in UE3. The same can be said about Cry, it's expensive and very capable.

 

I've worked in both the UDK and Unity and personally, I prefer Unity. I find it's much more user friendly, and much quicker to get thinks up and running to a playable state, even just for debug/testing.

The UDK is still a great platform, but it takes much more to get setup and the documentation is hit and miss - with much of it being pretty far out of date (note that UE3 and UDK are different). Additionally there's a heap that's documented, but has changed (again UE3 vs UDK) and scripts have to be compiled before you can run - which adds another layer of error.

Unity, on the other hand, has some great documentation (comparatively, you can always use more docs), and can quickly either run your code, or tell you exactly where it's failed (and with the new debugger....).

I won't ever say one is better than the other - they're both excellent - but I'll say I prefer Unity.

-V

 

Just take a look at crymod.com and you will see that's not the case.

The feature set of Cryengine 3 looks pretty yummy. And the ability for crossplatform development is great. The question is how will the licence work? And what is with the performance? Cryengine is 100% realtime unlike UT3 or Unity. So you have to aim for high end computers and consoles.

I guess, they will it release after Crysis2 is out.

 

Yes indeed. Everything in Cryengine is realtime. What this means is that Cryengine is probably 10 times better optimised than Unity for example, but it does indeed require higher computer becouse of its standarts comparing to Unity, so it makes no sense to create some current gen or very low poly game with it. You would cut huge part of potential players right of.

 

The power of the improved Unreal Engine, is really impressive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3XeCHywNYM
It seems that this stuff comes with the next UDK update. However, they need two graphic cards to get this going in realtime So its pretty useless at the moment and made for the next generation of hardware.

Furthermore, a guy from Crytek stated, that a free version of Cryengine3 will come this summer( at the end of the video).http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gdc-11-cryengine-3/711318

 

I love cryengine for the reason that it's fully realtime. No lightmaps, no nothing and it looks amazing.
I do wish unity improved more in the realtime frontier, but I suppose it won't be happening anytime soon.

 

if unity happens to have 100 programmers out of the nowhere to support only windows - ps3 and x360, who knows ... at the time I recall that its like 50 for another 7 platforms aside of these 3

 

Yeah Cryengine is great. Personally I like it more than Unreal (don't like Epics attitude too).

As Dreamora said, Unity won't reach that level soon (or never). And I guess, this is not what Unity is aiming for anyway. The major part of Unity users don't want to create a high end game. Unity is perfect for low end games and mobile devices. Its not that complex compared to UDK/Cryengine and easy to learn. Thats what people attracts. So the whole discussion about Unity vs. UDK is quite pointless IMHO. Both playing in different leagues and Unity is the best in its own league.

 

Lets face it, compare UDK and UT games on youtube, and there's a difference in graphics, for some reason(s) there's plenty of AAA graphics in UDK, although they're 90% FPS, while unity game's have basic graphics, yet gameplay/logic vary widely.

Although, that doesn't mean UT can't have AAA graphics, check out warsoup, that looks like your regular awesome UDK game.

I guess the end result for games aren't just on account of what a game engine is capable of, but well it exposes those capabilities to the user.

 

UDK games only pretend to look better cause UDK is filled with presets and shaders for exactly this kind of game.
If the teams would have to make them on their own I've some doubt that they still would look like this.
Just take the set of postfx that udk offers and which are used by many of these games.

Additionally various projects are "fake" they are not UDK games but were originally UT mods, which were brought over, some of them had more dev work already prior the UDK switch in them than the majority of Unity games ever might need.
Unity projects just are more casual and approachable oriented and there gameplay and style is more important than useless eye candy.


That naturally does not make UDK worse or anything but it is a fact to keep in mind on the comparision if it is meant to be done on a fair base. UDK exists now for quite a while already but the amount of released games with it is minimal, a fraction of what unity alone on iOS has released (even a fraction of the top 10 games created with unity on iOS) so it seems that in the end, the Unity devs create much more appealing titles than UDK devs which try to fight in genres where they lack 10M+ in budget to create anything competitive at all

 

UDK looks nice, Cryengine looks nice.

Shame that their most high profile 'demos' are both ultimately wasted on Unreal Tournament, and Random Aliens vs Asians island peril games. Why Epic don't remake their original Unreal single player game/story is beyond me *hopes someone replies to say they're going to*.

Unity games (the real ones, not the mmo pipe dreams) tend to be a lot more creative and varied. Sure, graphically often nowhere near as impressive. But fun games > pretty ones. Besides, with the same effort, I honestly think Unity could quite happily hold it's own against the bigger boys, and requiring less fancy hardware to do it. Fancy realtime GI and all that looks nice, but when the end result is still pretty static (which is going to be the case to keep it running on most machines) then it's not much more impressive than lightmaps n stuff.

 

So what exactly does Unity have to do tech wise to hit the CryEngine level of graphics? What is the trick or technique which brings forth the look that is considered superior in quality? What stops Unity from hitting this lick? Aras seems pretty damned knowledgable about the whole rendering pipeline. What could he do to drive it towards the CryEngine look?

BTH

 

Giving PC users DX11 would be a start I suppose. Unlock the extra Beast abilities, baking normal map lighting, point cloud lighting etc. (though I'm guessing there's some issue preventing that since it wasn't done at the start.. unless they're waiting to put it in v4 to get more sales). 64bit support (someone is gonna suggest it, I might as well get in first). Allow different lighting models in Deferred mode.. is that actually possible? I don't know much at all about that, but I'm sure it would make a big difference if it could be done. I suppose improve on the terrain side of things, I've seen a few keep wanting that worked on, mostly with allowing more advanced terrain shaders.

Really though, a great deal of it is down to us, the people creating the games, we've got the tools, it's up to us to do a good job with them.

Oh, and shoot people wanting to make MMO's.. no real reason, it would just be amusing.

 

Fun is cool and all, but the option to make your games both fun and good looking would be even better.
Seriously, if there is an optional option to enable GI, why not?
Unity is used not only for games, it's a rather good realtime viz environment. And visually appealing features would make it even better viz too.
Viz because unity can be used to showcase not only architecture.

Also crysis 1 was fun until the alien levels. The suit and levels gave a lot of freedom and different ways to complete the level.

 

I'd be interested to see what many users (including Unity ones that think it will automatically make them amazing) would do with the Crygengine (without using stock assets from whatever beach sim game it ends up shipping with this time). I don't think there will be much difference in quality to what they would have done in Unity, regardless of the Krypton like power everyone says the engine has. Though they will realize early on that the bar was raised and suddenly the bottom level is far higher than they're used to. Buying expensive assets would be common place if you can't do them yourself, those unwilling to shell out a fortune to the artists doing the heavy duty work, will simply crash and burn, become forgotten, or release things that look 10x worse because everyone else will be expecting perfection on it.

My point being, only a small number of users would be close to using it to it's fullest, the majority I'm afraid will simply be very lazy in their creations. It's happened with every single engine ever made available to the public and it will continue to happen evermore. You can count on one hand the companies that made use of Unreal3 to it's fullest (including Epic themselves), and I can't see many.. if any, of us "indie's" coming close to the visual quality of Crysis, because of the amount of sheer work involved, so it's like buying a sports car to run to Wal*Mart and back. Hence all that power is useless to all but a few companies.

There's gonna be lots of Crysis style mods, maps and half baked stories with maps attached and all using Crysis 2 assets, except a couple that will add a few out of place weapons, some bad acting, some "improvements" that just look worse. Oh and some smartarse will think he's clever cause he did a texture pack where he resized all the textures twice. And call himself something something Studios, and act like he's some kind of pro and expert on all things CryEngine, and will hint at having worked on a game once, which months later is found to have been a high res texture mod for Morrowind, that never got released.

And then everyone will move onto Unreal4 and do the same thing, but in the style of Unreal Tournament and Gears of War.

Oh and at some point id will make some engine that is kinda cool but not really very advanced.. again. And create something called supermegaubertexture and a thousand doom fans will urinate in unison at all that they're going to make with it.. before realizing that wont happen when id ends up using another really really lousy editor, so quit and go give Crygengine12 a try.

Unity doesn't have that to fall back on. Most Unity users are basically FORCED to be creative, which I think is a wonderful thing, even if it is frustrating beyond belief when you need something relatively simple to others, that isn't to yourself. Even then though, the Island demo and bootcamp, the assets crop up a lot in other things. Just not on the same scale as the other engines, because there's less to use.

 

I think there is a false assumption that Unity users tend to be more creative than others. Creating games are really hard and with being creative comes a bigger chance of failure and that lies in the very nature of creativity. This is one of the reasons why most commercial games are very similar. The financial risk doesn't allow for crazy new ideas. So by all means it is understandable that lots of Unity projects has mounted up to nothing. But I can't help to think that the amount of good innovative games would be alot more were it that the Unity users are populated with so many creative minds. I can list the number of decent Unity games I've seen on one hand and most of them haven't been overly creative. To be frank the only game I know of that I'd be willing to dish out any money on is Max and the magic marker which I think is a fun creative and polished game.

I admit that I haven't got the best knowledge of all iphone games out there and I know many of them has been successful. Actually I would very much be interested in seeing a more updated list of Unity games overall cause the one on the Unity site seems very dated. Maybe we could knock something together. Start a thread and populate it with only finished Unity games and possible a ranking system?

Actually I'm home sick on a Saturday and wouldn't mind some tips of cool Unity games I should play so please steer me in a direction of fun

 

Well I agree that there's a lot who aren't creative, who just go with the flow, want to copy what everyone else is doing. In many cases there's nothing wrong with that, as you say, it's a safer bet.

By creative, I suppose I should have clarified, I mean the actual creation of things. You don't get much given to you off the bat. Yeah you get the standard assets, a few extra's, terrain stuff, things like that. But after a couple of days messing with those, making your first map and so on, you pretty much have no choice but to start making your own assets, or find someone to work with who can. The other engines though have so many extra's, there's far less incentive to make that jump early on. I guess you could say if these engines were all bicycles, Unity's stabilizers come off a lot sooner than the others, and I think it's a more rewarding experience, even if, like I say, it's very frustrating to need something you don't yet know how to make *cough* scripts I really need *cough*

Once you separate the decent stuff from the constant background noise of inferior quality products, there is quite a lot of creativity going on in Unity circles.

Now I personally don't care in the slightest about androids or iPhones and think a phone is for making phone calls not playing games. But considering the very limiting things that can be done on them, even today. I can't help but be impressed that many manage to do anything close to what they do.

I'd actually go sofar as to say I think it's -harder- to develop something great for mobile devices these days, than it was to create games for desktop computers and consoles way back when 3D was just something you saw on the Last Starfighter. Even though a typical cell phone is probably 10x as powerful than any of those old machines and can do things none of them could even come close to. I'd be terrified of even attempting a modern mobile phone game.

Back "in the old days, lol", nobody really had that many expectations, and nothing really to compare it to, everything game wise progressed for the most part, together, even bad looking games weren't judged too harshly. These days though the consumer expects so much more because they see CG in the movies, they see fancy looking desktop and console games, and with lack of understanding of what goes into these games, they automatically assume mobiles and hand-helds should be the same, and god help anything that isn't.

So yeah, might think the whole mobile thing is silly, might have an issue with the whole profit over fun attitude that seems to be everywhere when mentioning phone apps. But I can't fault the talents of those working on them that knock out really cool games.....



... Other than the fact I wish they'd release them on the PC too, so I could play them *grins*


Oh, there's another game like Max, it's B&W though, but not some Limbo clone, I can't remember the name though, Paper something, Paper moon? I'm not sure now. If you can find it give it a try, I remember really enjoying it.

 

Dude you're mixing up MOD and GAME makers.
There's a big difference between that.

 

Nope, that was quite intentional. For the purpose of my post they're the same entity, and do make up the majority of users outside of commercial setups that are paying for full licenses.

 

It's a really bad comparison seeing as most "mod" games made in unity consist out of default primitive shapes

Not to mention countless demos/games that use bootcamp soldier

 

None of those tree engine are genre specific engines, they are all general purpose engine. An engine isn't creative, it's up to their creators.
The problem with UDK is that they provide a demo of UT and is very tempting for people (specially new and ancient UT modders) to pick it up and create quick FPS games with. However, even with its huge rendering and fancy post-process/lighting effects, creativity doesn't come from the game camera system, whenever is FPS or TPS or top down, etc. I've seen very few little so called "creative games" in the last decade (amateur or pro). As someone pointed out, being creative is very very risky, not only on the game industry, in anything else, you can't simply spend money and time on a new fancy idea. You are risking your business and it can quickly collapse.
I really like to see Unity being improved on the rendering (specially on the real-time) side as cryEngine/Unreal Engine. Unity is also being used on training sims and Architechtural Viz. High end rt-rendering is a key feature in those purposes. Being able to show dynamic lights in a room with some SSGI (and not baked with beast) it's just amazing! It will also remove the "casual" badge that people are giving to Unity and use it for real AAA titles. Unity have the power, talent and resources to compete with big engines why not follow that route?
Cheers,

 

I'm not 100% on this, but I think the reason there's mostly just FPS games in UDK is because there's this little "no script editor" issue for UDK users, although they have kismet which allows them to setup a FPS easily.

Unity users are a double click away from start coding... and be ready to create unique things. This isn't a minor detail, and I still can't believed UDK overlooked this for so long, I'm amazed.

Anyway, the result is overall a wide variety and creativity for unity games, and mostly FPS games for UDK.

 

UDK has nFringe(free for noncomm use)
But I do agree, they need a proper IDE

 

Kismet have nothing to do with setting up an FPS game easily.
In fact when you inherit your gameinfo from UTgame (the one that holds the FPS camera, fps huds/menus) it's done through UnrealScripts not through Kismet.
However it also support TPS cameras, top down and even isometrics. Derive your game class from higher classes and you'll see there's no FPS camera, not even any hud/menu.
Epic should remove their UTdemo from UDK so you won't complain anymore about UDK being FPS specific.

 

UDK needs streamlined workflow change, complete UI revamp and integrated IDE.These things are years behind Unity.
On ther hand Unity is years behind UDk in terms of raw power and tools. If Epic makes UDK easy to use for newcomers + keep their licensing thing (with free updates) it will make Unity abandoware.
Also I don't understand Unity licensing (1500$+1500$+1500$?),and the price doesn't reflect power behind software. As far as I know only few make real money out of games, rest are indies and enthusiast who are "forced" to use 'free' version which is stripped out of essential things like realtime shadows.

 

UDK is by standart used far more for FPS games that anything else. Please stop finding some meaningless reasons that it is not.
UDK ships with FPS ready scripts and some other minor stuff. Unity does not ship with any demo on other hand.

 

Oh and also FANTASTIC news about Cryengine. Cant wait. Timing is perfect for summer. If it would be sooner my project could suffer.

 

That would be great if at the same time they created more scripting tutorials that were geared towards building a game up from scratch.

I'm definitely curious how CryEngine3 will turn out. I've worked on a total conversion mod for Crysis/Crysis Wars (www.mechlivinglegends.net) and there was not a lot of documentation on the programming side. So we had do it a lot of deconstruction/picking things apart, try things, find out they don't work they way we want them to, etc. Hopefully that will be improved with whatever offering they have for CryEngine3.

 

Unity ships with an fps and tps controller

 

UDK and Unity3D are two very different products, with two very different goals in mind. They are competing for the indie market, sure, but it's way more a question of "Which engine and developer environment are better suited for my project?" and not simply "Which engine and development environment are better?"

Unity3D definitely has some major strengths in terms of ease of use, but that doesn't mean UDK would even benefit from trying to copy a lot of those features - different products are different, very different.

Personally, for my uses, Unity3D is a no-brainer. If I was starting from square one though, and I didn't own a Unity Pro/iPhone/EZ Gui setup for iOS development, the newer UDK would certainly be attractive.

 

As a UDK user I find that making a Turn based / RTS (Similar to the Total War) games in UDK is rather difficult. Which is why i switched over to unity.

UDK = WIN

Unity = WIN

But each are unique and specialize in there own field of Games

I also found the 64 player limit in the UDK frustrating.

 

You can think like that if you have one average-big project ( 18 months of developpement ).
For several small projects, you can't invest "learning a new engine" for each project, or you will double your developpement time for each project.

 

Isn't that pretty much exactly what I said? "If I wasn't already invested in Unity, I would consider UDK now that it can publish to iOS."

As a programmer/contract developer though, only being able to work with a single platform is basically hamstringing your own ability to get work. Every new platform that you learn to develop on opens up a new pool of prospective clients. I don't think UDK is worth the time investment for my own situation (as Unity is better suited for most of the work I do), but flash, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript (especially learning to use libraries like jquery) all absolutely pay as a developer. It just depends on your situation, and what you want to do in the future.

If you are in a situation where you are making your own games and can choose to work with only a single tech, that's awesome. If you're working on a lot of smaller projects, I definitely feel as though Unity is still the more nimble engine - but I havn't given UDK a fair shot in a while, maybe they've made some big strides there.

Personally, even if I had to start over I'd still go Unity - but again, it's a very specific situation based on individual needs. I need to be able to deliver a product that a client understands and "owns." The UDK license would obfuscate my situation quite a bit.

So yea, for me personally in my unique situation - Unity3D is a no brainer.

 

Sorry KyleStaves, maybe I misunderstood you.

Other thoughts:
UDK is pretty much a standard in AAA Fps title and try to conquer smaller budgets, wich is also a big market after all.
It's not yet the case with Unity, which do the exact opposite and try to get AAA titles ( PS3, 360 support, premium support etc...).

 

Not a problem, I can see where it's easy to make that assumption about what I was saying. I guess I should have said "what engine best suits my situation" and not necessarily my "project." You look at the list of big-budget games using the tech (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games#Unreal_Engine_3) - which isn't even a comprehensive list, and it's hard not to be impressed.

Personally, I was surprised id Tech never really took off - but then again they never had a business model based around licensing technology like Epic does. id Tech 5 is easily some of the most impressive engine technology I see on the horizon though; supposedly it will have a significantly more user-friendly tool-set for content creation. However, I'm also pretty sure you'll need to publish through Bethesda to even have the option of licensing the technology, so I doubt we'll see real wide-spread usage anyway.

Anyhow, that's a good point. It is easy to forget (when it comes to AAA budget games) just how established Unreal technology is within the industry.

 

the id tech didn't take off cause their tech while theoretically stunning sucked practically ... look at quake wars, the "showcase for mega textures", even on ultra quality the terrain looks as bad as terrains did last back in DX7 / DX8 days detail wise ...
Or take Doom 3, never saw that little polygons in any game of that day, even indie games were more detailed, the tech used shaders etc etc for stuff where just using 2x the polygons would have been 3 times faster and much more detailed for the vast majority.

in the end though the major reason for it not taking off is likely that their team for engine + support + game dev is smaller than epics support team on its own ... id never focused on engine middleware development, they developed what they needed and licensing out was only done to those willing to work in their environment and with their focus (shooter). Epic understood early if they want licensees, their engine has to become a usable engine for more than just "modding + minor source modifications" like id tech was used with id tech licensees

 

The beauty of megatexture, isn't really the graphic quality... It's in the production pipeline!!
You don't need to regularly control ( as a programmer ) the artist production, and say to them that they need to reduce the texture size they just produced.
Even when you give to the artists, very clear technical limits, they always try to push the beast
With megatexture they do what they want, and at the end of the production, they reduce the texture size to make the game fit on a DVD/bluray disc.

For a programmer like me, that's a big relief...

 

I played Doom 3 not so long ago, and was surprised how nice it still looked. But completely agree that it sure is very low poly. I always get the feeling with Carmack that it's not about making games, but being "hey look what I can do guys!" instead, like a lot of demo makers from the early days.

I was always more of a fan of Valve's Source engine rather than Doom 3's tech (the fact Hammer was considerably easier to use than whatever the hell that was that id shipped with Doom 3 had nothing to do with it... honestly..). Though never really liked the whole bsp way of doing things (yeah I know why it was needed), the complete lack of bsp or any of that in Unity practically sold me completely. Feels a whole lot more like editing Morrowind or Oblivion (medieval lego!), only with a nice editor instead of the TES CS.

That doesn't sound any different to how Unity works. You can use whatever huge size textures you want, and Unity quietly handles converting everything to whatever in game sizes you need, without you having to mess around batch processing hundreds of files in other apps if things need changing.

 

Megatextures aren't about saving you disk space. It's about freeing you from worrying about VRAM usage. No more texture budgeting. You allocate a couple buffers and load in only the data you need for what's currently visible on screen. If the corner of an object with a 4k texture is visible on the edge of the screen, you don't need the whole 4k texture loaded into VRAM, just the data that's needed for that corner. It also allows you to use much larger textures than are supported by the video card. You want a 50k texture? That's fine, only the portions of that texture are visible need to be loaded. If the whole texture is visible, then it isn't at full resolution, so it loads in the mipmap version (or more likely versions) of the texture chunks that are required and it still only takes up whatever VRAM you preallocated for the buffers.

So it's both a pipeline improvement (don't worry about texture budgets) and a runtime improvement - you can allocate the buffers at runtime to fit in available VRAM and not worry about scaling the textures as a preprocessing step.

 

That actually sounds really helpful and cool (I admit I was a bit confused until now, as to how exactly it worked), so thanks for explaining it in a way I can actually understand, lol. How come it didn't take off and begin to see use in other engines?

 

I'm really not sure why. Rage is making good use of it, and there's an SVT plugin for Unity (search the forums) that gives us access to it, although without texture stamping support in the editor it doesn't live up to it's potential, and it's kind of hamstrung by Unity not giving you direct access to texture memory buffers. SetPixels is fairly slow and you can't write compressed data directly, so you have to use a lot more bandwidth to write uncompressed RGBA data.

Something like Leadwerks, where you could populate the buffers in a separate thread and just Bind() them when they are ready could give a lot better performance, but this is really an area where you want core engine support.

 

Most other engine will use texture streaming wich basically will already do a good job, ( one exception: terrain ). Texture streaming is 10X time easier to implement than megatexture and you still have the benefit of no texture budget for closed space game.

 

Doesn't texture streaming still work on full textures and just modify the mip level that's loaded according to distance and available memory?

 

Ok found the thread, so THATS what that thread was about. Finally it all makes sense to me, haha. I'm gonna check out the videos, see if I could benefit in it in some way. Thanks for the heads up!!


Oh and I made fun of Leadwerks in another thread, now I feel bad.

 

Shrug, it's got a lot of problems (which is why I'm not using it at the moment), but hopefully most of them will be addressed in version 3. But it does render stuff quite nicely, the same models tend to look a little better in LE2.4 than they do in Unity because of the lighting. The workflow and usability of Unity are miles ahead at the moment though, which more than makes up for that in my usage.

 

I've heard that said a few times about the workflow, a friend and I originally tried out Leadwerks (him) and Unity (me) and one of his first comments were about it not being very friendly toward artist types. While Unity I think is almost an Artists dream. Was a while before U3 so he did keep throwing Deferred Rendering at me, hehe.

 

@niosop all models tend to look more nicely in LE than Unity .Leadwerks lighting is very good and realistic. I would compare lighting rendering to Cryengine, take a look at some of their latest videos in that room. LE has very specific lighting everything in that engine looks very different from other engines.

And yes workflow for now is still bad, engine has lot of issues comparing to Unity, it crashes a lot. It also requires very high specifications even higher than UDK. But it is young engine and it will become a serious competition to Unity in some time.

 

Very useful info, thanks for sharing your experience

 

This discussion you have about what engine is good for what sounds a bit odd, as you indeed address quite irrelevant things, if any. UDK is surely an engine for shooters, as not only it lacks power to create a really dynamic, interactive and persistent gameworld you need for a strategy game or RPG, but the way UDK is done makes creating such worlds a real pain. UDK might be good for premade levels, but once you want to store and manage complex dynamic data - it fails, and you are forced to use solutions which are in fact hacks, violating the logic of the engine.
On the other hand though, Unity is good for nothing, as the only real thing it provides is a renderer (of doubtful quality and performance, if you ask me). You have to write the rest yourself, or use assets made by other developers (of still more doubtful quality). And the integration in Unity is far from perfect, not to mention utterly glitchy and giving you many moments of joy watching atrefacts of all sorts. Maybe it makes you "creative", but it pretty much ruins any chance to create any advanced game on Unity. Should you want to create one, you'll rather switch to a serious engine with normal programming tools than deal with what parody of those Unity offers.

 

You are violating Dept of Agroculture hogwashing regulations. And on your first post too. I think alot of "serious" game makers around here could make you swallow those words with a hat, kitchen sink and maybe the family dog to boot. Maybe Lego, NASA or EA could give you a lesson or two on seriousness.

BTH