Unreal engine 3 vs Id tech 3 vs Unity

Question

I'm trying to decide which engine I should start using to try to start building a game in.

I had chosen Unity, but upon hearing that Unreal engine 3 had just become kinda free to use, I found myself questioning my decision.

Technically unreal is still the most expensive commercially, then Unity, then Id tech 3(free).

But, it also could be the fastest to work in? Or is just the most powerful, but unity actually does so much for you, that it makes the most sense to work with this, and take a hit on performance/tuning (like java/c#).

Thoughts please, can anyone speak from experience of all 3?

I have experience with modding since the doom days, then in quake 1 and half life. I also have experience in 3ds max. I don't have a desire at this point my life to really get into the nitty gritty of c++ animation and rendering issues, I'd rather get something up and running quickly, to see if it's possible. But Unreal experience temps me greatly.

Answer 1

Depending on your goals, Ogre3D can also be a valid option. It's free, open-source, portable, and there are quite a few high-quality toolsets to support different features you might be interested in. Their development community is fairly active and responsive to questions and suggestions as well.

Answer 2

UDK, id Tech 3, and Unity are all vastly different tools.

With UDK, you have script-level access, not native. As such, you are somewhat limited in the modifications you can perform. Additionally, UnrealScript is extremely slow; as such, it's difficult to optimize any product you do end up creating.

Overall, it's not very well crafted for anything that drastically doesn't match Epic's product line.

id Tech 3 will give you C++ access. That being said, it's much older technology, the tools aren't as robust, etc. Personally, I've never used it; but, it's not something you're going to build a commercial product with (unless you're looking for something scaled back. Check out this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id%5FTech%5F3#Projects%5Fbased%5Fon%5Fthe%5FGPL%5Fsource%5Frelease).

As for Unity? It's a great place for a beginner/someone that doesn't want to have to delve into the complex details of an engine. Additionally, it's more flexible.

Can you release a triple-A title on it? No. That being said, you're not going to be using it for that.

With the ultimate goal of educating yourself without having to dive into C++, I'd highly recommend Unity.

Answer 3

@optician - Short answer for your question, of the 3 pieces of software you mentioned, you will do best with Unity 3D. You don't want to dive heavily into C/C++ so that rules out id Tech 3 (it's also a bit dated). Unity works with Javascript, C#, or Boo scripts attached to game objects and components so you can do as little or as much code as you feel comfortable with. Unreal is okay as well but I find the learning curve with Unity to be much shallower. You will put out a finished game more quickly and I think that is your ultimate goal, to make games. @Andreas - I am currently using Unity 3D v2.6 to learn the engine for a personal project. I don't want to say it is impossible to make a AAA title with it but at the very least it is very unlikely. For a prototype all I did was import a moderately detailed model of a large space cruiser and Unity choked on it (meshes must not exceed 65,000 vertices). Granted that's an extreme example and it's fairly easy to use lower detail models but that's not the only issue. Being a space concept, I used accurate astronomical scale distances in a test using 1 Astronomical Unit between a planet and its star. Only to run into 32-bit signed floating point precision errors that caused the camera to jitter, stutter, and gyrate like a crack addict despite the values being several orders of magnitude below the 32-bit limit. I could set the far viewing plane to a maximum 1e+15 units at 60 degrees viewing angle before the camera started to go wonky. Don't get me wrong, I like the engine and am a big fan. But for the purposes of AAA game development involving large teams with multi-million dollar budgets the currently available (to beginners) version of Unity is not as robust as Unreal Engine 3.5 ... id Tech 3 is a good place for a beginner to get a look at the C++ source code of a AAA quality game by the standards of several years ago but again, unless you want to go out and use someone else's tools written several years ago you will be spending a lot of your time constructing tools for the rest of your team before you can even start producing a "AAA" quality game. Note I am not saying you can't make a good game or even a great game. But it will not be competitive commercially with Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3, Gears of War 2, etc. That market is unforgiving with a different set of expectations and will not accept pre-DirectX 9 graphics quality.