Leadwerks vs Free Unity

[crocdude]

Hi Everyone.

 

I have been browsing the public forums for a while now and you all seem like honest folk I am planning to move on from the 2D Flash development into the 3D world. I'd like the low down comparison on Leadwerks and the free version of Unity (the 2 engines I am looking at). I am looking at developing in a niche market and it is possible that this market may mostly use low end machines. Having tried the demo part of the evaluation copy of Leadwerks on my wifes laptop (Intel mobile graphics adaptor) and having it fail, makes me considder using Unity, but the Leadwerks engine seems to allow you more freedom in coding. Any input on this subject would be most welcome and if I have missed another good engine in the same price range of Leadwerks, a mention would be good too, but be aware that $1000 engines are out of my price range right now.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

P.S. I'll be offline for a couple of days but I'll be back to check on this thread soonish.

P.P.S I am good with C++ and JavaScript so these should not be an issue.

[Canardia]

Leadwerks Engine is the best 3D engine for Virtual Reality Simulations and AAA games (like Crysis, Delta Force, Flight Simulator X, etc...).

 

If you want to make only non-AAA games, you can use any engine which runs on the hardware your target audience has, or even just code directly without any engine.

[Michael Betke]

I think my art looks better in LE because of the lighting engine.

But crappy art assets will look still like **** in a top engine too.

[Laurens]

Considering the fact you said your are targeting mostly low-end machines you might need to reconsider. Leadwerks is extremely easy to program and puts out incredibly beautiful graphics but it comes at a price.

 

http://www.leadwerks.com/wiki/index.php?title=System_Requirements

 

Unity has a watermark though, which only 1500 dollars will remove (Unity Pro). I don't know about you but watermarks make me puke blood.

[Jardar]

if you are looking for free and your market will consist of mostly low end machinery you may want to consider ogre3d.

I have no personal experience using it, but a lot of mates swears by it as being a good engine to run on most low to medium range computers.

[Laurens]

I have used Ogre3D before I moved to Leadwerks.

 

You should consider the fact that Ogre is a rendering engine and not a game engine. It has no physics, no sound, and no networking. It has GUI support through CEGUI (eeew) and input through OIS (OIS is OK).

 

Additionally, Ogre is a lot, a LOT harder to get into.

[Niosop]

Unity is a great engine. If you're looking at making a casual game that will run on lower end hardware, and you don't require real time shadows, then I'd go that route.

[Canardia]

I have also Blitz3D and BlitzMax+MiniB3D(+ext), which are also great engines for making non-AAA games. They are as easy to use as Leadwerks Engine, so you can make a rotating cube with 10 lines of code.

[Mumbles]

How low is a low end machine? Considering the price you can pick up a GeForce 8800 for these days... I don't think anyone here is going to say that unity is awful, but remember that most people here have paid for Leadwerks Engine, and I haven't really seen anyone here who is seriously dissatisfied with their purchase. So there's bound to be a lot of positive attitude towards the Leadwerks Engine here.

 

Back to point of low end machines though. Leadwerks runs practically entirely on the graphics card, so it uses very little CPU time at all. As little as 5% on 3 GHz processor. The only obstacle older machines have with running this engine is the graphics card. Also laptops would have the same issue, if conventional laptops are your target, Leadwerks isn't such a good choice... (High power alienware laptops might be able to run LE games)

[Josh]

They're really different products. Leadwerks runs great on the laptop 9800M cards, but it won't ever run on your integrated chip. On the other hand, the graphics of Unity free are very limited, and performance is slower on good GPUs. So it's a question of what you value most and who you are making a game for.

[Sooshi]

They're really different products. Leadwerks runs great on the laptop 9800M cards, but it won't ever run on your integrated chip. On the other hand, the graphics of Unity free are very limited, and performance is slower on good GPUs. So it's a question of what you value most and who you are making a game for.

 

 

They are both awsome engines, Leadwerks has a great ease of use just like Unity and the graphics just happen to be the icing on the cake.

[flachdrache]

Plus dynamic lighting costs plenty of gfx power - however, if we go a generation back (like the original xbox) it still looked very good.

On my little card i still got 60FPS to 120FPS if not having silly expectations which are leading to flood my memory with a bunch of 2048 diffuse + localmaps.

So, even if the gfx Card does need a certain set of "arb" extensions for GLSL by simply good old faking and less dynamic shadows (just character shadows etc.) one can spare

the newest generation. Guess a check for shader model Vs. terrainshadowing etc. might be an idea anyways.

 

I wonder why people forget about the XNA if developing for the PC. If one is capable of and willing to spend the time to write tools like a worldeditor for XNA it is a very nice option too.

[Rick]

I wonder why people forget about the XNA if developing for the PC. If one is capable of and willing to spend the time to write tools like a worldeditor for XNA it is a very nice option too.

 

I agree. If an API was over XNA it would be good. I didn't enjoy working directly with XNA 2.0. Things were still a little to raw for me. Animation support was horrible too.

[Davaris]

I chose Leadwerks over Unity and Unreal, because I preferred the look of the Leadwerks renders. Also I didn't like the cost of Unreal (25% of all earnings over $5000?). With Free Unity, apart from what people have said about shadows, it has no C++ and no C++ was a deal breaker for me, because I have tons of old code I want to reuse. Also there are lots of great open source C++ libraries that I wouldn't be able to use with Free Unity.

[Niosop]

Well you can use C++ DLLs even in the free version (they don't advertise the fact because it's a selling point for the Pro version), but you won't be able to deploy to the web or to Mac's if you do so. It's just .NET so you can use using System.Runtime.InteropServices to call external, unmanaged DLLs.

 

But LeadWerks does look better with the same assets....although Unity does have the lightmapping plugin now which can help a lot. Not as nicely integrated as UDK's lightmass, but still a nice feature to have. Josh was talking about some type of GI system, was he thinking realtime or as a pre-processing step?

[L B]

Josh was talking about some type of GI system, was he thinking realtime or as a pre-processing step?

Real-time. Or else it loses all of Leadwerks' charm.

[Niosop]

Hell, I wouldn't mind a pre-processing system. One of the awesome things about the UDK and Lightmass is the great results you get from the static lighting preprocessing. I love the dynamic lights in LeadWerks, but even with a deferred rendering system they still have an impact where as with baked in lighting the extra prettiness is basically free (not counting the pre-processing time which can be significant). A good balance of realtime and baked in lighting could really help both performance and visual quality.

[Josh]

You can make an ambient occlusion map and use it with dynamic lighting. Several people have used this technique.

[Guest heyjeebus]

If you're going for a free solution I'd recommend Irrlicht. Ogre3D's art pipeline is a bit of a pain while Irrlicht is generally easier to use and has a level editor (also free) not totally unlike Leadwerks's. Features wise Unity isn't as good as Leadwerks and the 1500$ price tag makes it mostly for professionals, so if you are just a hobbyist and willing to spend some money I'd recommend Blitz3D. Oh and there's UDK too, but I only spent a few minutes with it so I can't really talk about it.

[crocdude]

Thanks for all the replies everyone I have downloaded Irrlicht and I am checking it all out. Seems very promising for the low end stuff I am doing, however there seems to be a lack of sound effects without getting an irrKlang pro license (about 92USD). This would not be too much of a drama unless I wanted to set up a company.

 

I do have some ideas for games that would benefit from LE so I may still buy it as well. This would also mean that I could possibly use the audio engine included in the LE

 

Some more questions (sorry):

 

Those who have the 3DWS, is it worth getting in terms of streamlining creation of worlds in LE? May be a silly question, but I think it would be sillier not to ask

 

What effect would using the LE audio engine have on low end machines? I would imagine that this answer would be "not a great deal since it doesn't use the graphics pipeline" (or does it?)

[Marleys Ghost]

Those who have the 3DWS, is it worth getting in terms of streamlining creation of worlds in LE? May be a silly question, but I think it would be sillier not to ask

 

 

For me it is, but THIS maybe of interest to you on that front.