Hello all,

I know this is vague and could go everywhere, but this would definitely be useful for me.

I would like to know what engines are you using to develop your games. If you use your own home-made engine, if you don't really have an engine, or if you use a middleware that you pay/rent or use for free (and then which one). I want to focus on so-called engines. So libraries or frameworks (like bgfx) are out of interest for this topic.

This question does not aim AAA in-development games since I suppose such development will use whether their own stuff, Frostbite or engines like UE4, CryEngine or Unity... And anyway, this is far beyond to me...

I would appreciate if you give some details about why you use (or not) such a middleware. It might be due to the platform you target, the price, the license, the language, that it is widely available, that it allows to work in distance (if the team is spread not in a single location), or if the engine has some specifics features others might not provide, or because the engine provides some easy means (ie blueprint for UE4, or an intuitive GUI...) or anything else (beautiful graphics, website looked friendly, good documentation...).

Also, as important, I would like to know if you're happy with your choice

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: take it more like a market survey. If you use UE4 or Unity, this is fine. This survey aims mostly to non-AAA game development (which AAA is another universe for me).

The problem is, this topic has the potential to descend into a lot of very subjective comparisons. In theory it might be possible to crowdsource opinions and experiences with various engines, but we're not going to get enough responses to form a good answer about some of the lesser known engines.

If you are looking for an engine, why not specify what is important to you? And then recommendations can flow from that.

It's not clear why you're ruling out Unity, Unreal, and CryEngine, because they are widely used even by indies and hobbyists.

There are some other similar engines, like Urho - https://urho3d.github.io/ , Godot - https://godotengine.org/ , and more obscure ones like Coppercube - http://www.ambiera.com/coppercube/index.html plus a variety of older engines that have falled out of favour (Ogre, Irrlicht, etc), but if you don't want to use a 'big' engine you probably don't want these either.

48 minutes ago, Kylotan said:

The problem is, this topic has the potential to descend into a lot of very subjective comparisons. In theory it might be possible to crowdsource opinions and experiences with various engines, but we're not going to get enough responses to form a good answer about some of the lesser known engines.

If you are looking for an engine, why not specify what is important to you? And then recommendations can flow from that.

It's not clear why you're ruling out Unity, Unreal, and CryEngine, because they are widely used even by indies and hobbyists.

There are some other similar engines, like Urho - https://urho3d.github.io/ , Godot - https://godotengine.org/ , and more obscure ones like Coppercube - http://www.ambiera.com/coppercube/index.html plus a variety of older engines that have falled out of favour (Ogre, Irrlicht, etc), but if you don't want to use a 'big' engine you probably don't want these either.

 

I do not think he ruled out Cryengine,Unreal and Unity, he simply said that he wasn't asking from a AAA perspective. which tend to use these engines but does not exclude them from being mentioned)

Also from what I gathered he wasn't asking for an engine to use, he just wants to know what people are using and why/what they find attractive with them.

Unreal because

• Source code available 
• Constant improvements from Epic Games & Community
• It's more powerful than Unity (imo) and most of the things are ready out of the box (like Multiplayer)
• Blueprints/C++
• UE4's Documentation 

Thanks for your answer.

Most certainly my text was not that clear... So I will try to make it more clear.

I am writing my own little engine during my spare time. So I am not currently looking for an engine to use in order to create a game. I am looking to figure out what hobbyists, little crews developing 'little' games are using now and why. This will help me understand what attracts hobbyists and little teams.

If you use UE4 or Unity, this is perfect too. The limitation was for the kind of game you create not the engine you use. I mean, if most people creating 'little' games use UE4 or Unity, that's fine, but that would be bad

So take this topic more like as a little market study/survey if you want.

I hope I did it more clear now and that it is still relevant for this forum.

Thanks for the reading.

20 minutes ago, Zervoxe said:

I do not think he ruled out Cryengine,Unreal and Unity, he simply said that he wasn't asking from a AAA perspective. which tend to use these engines but does not exclude them from being mentioned)

Also from what I gathered he wasn't asking for an engine to use, he just wants to know what people are using and why/what they find attractive with them.

Exactly. Thanks to tell it far more clear than my brain and my english can tell it

5 minutes ago, _Silence_ said:

if most people creating 'little' games use UE4 or Unity, that's fine, but that would be bad

They do. Why is it bad?

11 minutes ago, Kylotan said:

They do. Why is it bad?

Bad for my survey, since I would not have wide enough different engines (ie price reason, licensing reason, technical reason...).

Unreal 4 because my interest is in making large living worlds.

It also is easy to use Unreal even if I am not a great programmer.

Unreal's blueprints also saves me a huge amount of time because I only have to build a thing once.

Saves me the time of trying to build my own engine, very important to me as I am not a programmer.

Unreal is also used widely so it cut's down on me needing to learn a new engine each time.

For my own hobby projects Unreal is free because none of them have ever made near as much money that I had to pay.

Also Unreal's tools are all working and high quality, never needed to buy a tool to replace it or buy software so that I could make a game in Unreal.

My 2D engine of choice was Cocos2Dx, because if it's ability to create beautiful 2D worlds.

I switched to Unity for my 2D engine because I only make 2D art for clients and Unity is used more than Cocos2D.

A large factor for artist is how commonly a engine is used.

Although all of us have at some point learned a engine while working on the engine. It isn't a fun experience and it's annoying to the programmers when we interrupt there work so they can explain things to us.

The most popular engine by far is Unity. Its reported market share ranges from about 1 in 3 to about 1 in 2, and the number is even higher for most indie and hobbyist developers who don't have in-house legacy engines to choose from.

https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2016/03/24/engine-dominating-gaming-industry-right-now/

A smaller number are using Unreal. The rest, probably about a third, are spread out thinly across the various other engines and frameworks.

I suspect that if you're hoping to find a deep understanding of why people choose the engines they do, you'll be disappointed. It's not so much about picking the right tech for the job, and more about picking whatever you think can do the job, given the experience and money you have available.

So in terms of what I use.. I tend to prefer writing engines .. so I like working on my own stuff .. more just building engine code than writing games... but if im using an Engine its either Unreal or Unity because its just pretty much the "standard" engines to have under your belt really.. I mean at some stage I plan on playing around with CryEngine because why not ya know...

But generally for development I either use my own Engine / codebase ... or just jump into either Unreal or Unity depending on like what the aim is.

I mean its like gone now but I did a research / engine comparison paper once about the Infernal Engine that Terminal Reality did, actually had some really nice stuff in it.. but yeah.. company is defunct so im guessing thats mostly just all gone now ;o