I remember being sad long ago when the Blender Game Engine was removed from the official version of Blender. Years later the decision ironically led to now having 3 Blender game engines: UPBGE, Range, Armory. I looked at each of them and I love what they’re doing, so much so that it’s becoming difficult to choose one! So I figured I’d ask which one others think is the best at this date.
From what I know so far: UPBGE is the official Blender fork intended to revive the defunct BGE, Range is a similar fork but based on Blender 2.9 instead of 3.0, Armory is an addon intended to add the game engine to the latest official Blender. A few advantages and disadvantages were listed: Some don’t like UPBGE because it’s GPL exclusive, since I want everything I make to be open-source I actually prefer that… Range seems smaller and less developed, being based on older Blender I’m not sure if it benefits from as many improvements… Armory is said to care more about their own painting tool now, I’m not sure to what extent its addon is keeping up with every Blender release and able to guarantee top functionality as a mere addon.
There are a few things I’m primarily interested in: Being sure the project is still actively developed by a team that doesn’t risk running out of funds or abandoning it for any reason. Ease of use seems to be on par, each engine uses logic bricks or logic nodes which is what I plan to stick with. Performance is of course equally important, I’d like to know if anyone benchmarked the same scenes in all of them and posted their results. Graphics wise they seem to support roughly the same effects… I like the idea of using Eevee as a realtime engine which is what I understand at least one of them does, I also hear realtime compositor nodes might be supported. As far as export goes, I don’t personally care for Android as I only plan to make projects intended for PC, knowing there’s support for other platforms is still welcome just in case.
Before anyone asks, I’m already using Godot as my primary engine, I love it too and know it’s the ideal pick. I still prefer Blender based engines because I know Blender best: Godot is a struggle to figure out and overly technical requiring a script for anything… BGE lets you do everything in a single editor (modeling, texturing, logic, etc) and offers various forms of visual scripting which I find much easier to work with. As such I may do different projects with each one depending on what works best.
and so I’ll just give the advantages that, in my personal opinion, engines have - Armory is an addon for blender that adds a game engine - it’s fast and powerful enough with support for a good render, scripts are written by Haxe - it’s not python, there is visual programming in the form of logic nodes - Armory has a wider range of platforms that you you can import your game - Armory supports past the standard GPU skinning animations - this gives a higher animation speed - cons as far as I know, the author rarely posts updates for the engine, although more activity has appeared recently and there are plans for development
now let’s move on to UPBGE a good engine, the team makes constant updates following the releases of the official blender, the graphics that are available to you from eevee next - you can make any level of graphics that your computer supports, UPBGE is closest to the old versions of BGE in terms of game logic - there are both logical blocks and logical nodes for programming - all that artists make a blender in their lessons, you can transfer it to your game - and in 99% of cases it will work great and look cool - in discord they constantly help beginners with their questions or help with examples - cons the skeletal reinforcement animation system has not yet been completed - if you use animated models from 12 to 30 thousand polygons - be prepared for the fact that you will have to do the logic of clipping animation playback at a distance from the game camera or culling animated models that the player does not see, I tried to run 10-12 models on UPBGE 30 thousand polygons each 10 models worked well on 11 I lost 5 frames, on 12 my fps became 45-47 frames if you use the system you will get a stable 60 frames per second of geometry nodes for animation, but I found very little information on how to do this
Now the Range Engine - it’s young, it’s still based on BGE 2.79, but a good optimization of the skeletal armature has been carried out - and there are no problems for the animation of the actors, even 40 actors did not lower my fps Range is as close in game logic to BGE 2.79, you can create good graphics since PBR material is supported as in previous engines, but you will have to use many shaders through scripts - such as blooming, volumetrics, and some post-processing graphic effects are available only through scripts - until the update of version 1.6 or 2.0 is released, there is also a community in discord where beginners are helped with examples and shaders - the engine is developing from the pros and the developers plan to make it good as an alternative to Armory and UPBGE, you can also learn more about this engine on patreon - I’m not campaigning for any particular engine, I just gave my opinion about the engines, it may differ from the opinions of others
your choice should depend on your game - if you have a lot of actors in your scene, for example, you are making a GTA clone or something from the CoD series or a real-time strategy in 3d, then I would make a choice between Range or Armory, if you want to make a beautiful game that does not require a large number of animated actors, then take UPBGE - this will give you excellent graphics and a huge number of training lessons on YouTube - you will be able to make any effects on the lessons. Maybe I missed something, maybe I said something wrong, because I’m writing from my position all the engines are very good and the use of these engines depends on your task
Thanks, that is a great description! In the end I’ll likely end up going with UPBGE as it seems like the most official and supported, but I really hope they get support for proper GPU animation to fix that limitation with a lot of actors. Range would seem like my second pick after that… I’d wait for proper post-processing if they aren’t using Eevee Next, people also complained they don’t have a public Git repository and only share the source per release which is unfortunate. Armory I’ll be watching but it worried me they seemingly moved to developing Amory Paint and posted few updated to the Blender engine on Youtube, I like their approach too as being able to still add a whole engine to vanilla Blender with just a Python addon is amazing though I wonder what they use for exporting since I presume it’s not the conventional Blender Player.
I am glad that I helped you with the choice - I also hope that UPBGE eevee and Range Game Engine will be optimized in the near future for full-fledged game development - I mean UPBGE’s animation system without frame drawdowns and Range shaders in nodes so that anyone has access to graphics without resorting to coding
