Worth switching from Unity to Blender?

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
#1

Hello there, I’m new to the forums.
I couldn’t find a thread on this topic, so I thought I’d start one. I hope this is the right forum.

I’ve been using the Unity game engine for a while now; but all of my modeling work is done in Blender 2.49 before being exported to Unity.
I’ve been happy with Unity so far, but a commercial license for it does cost $1500 I don’t have.
In addition, I’ve lately seen new projects done with the Blender game engine that could put Unity projects to shame.

If anybody here has used both; what would you say the advantages, and disadvantages, of an engine switch would be?

#2

I’ve only dabbled in both, but one thing that I think is a lot better with Unity is making your games into executable apps.

#3

Ah, well that is a big thing for commercial development.

#4

For that reason I was actually thinking of learning Unity instead of BGE, however BGE is quite nice and easy to work with. I’m hoping that the issues with BGE and commercial game development will be solved sooner or later (license and exporting issues, BGE itself has the capabilities to make professional games). In the meantime I’ll just learn and practice some more on moddeling/texturing/animating/scripting/…

#5

So if I understand it, Blender game engine is technically capable of producing commercial-level games; but is currently somewhat crippled as far as
producing sale-able commercial games?

#6

There are also a few cards Unity has got, that blender lacks: performance related ones. The BGE is great and fast to work with, but is also very row, and lacks a bit of Nitro on the rendering engine. The row part can be a good or bad thing:
Good because it leaves a lot of room for creativity. Bad if you have a big project and can’t spend too much time setting basic things (such as LOD).
In any case, I’ve considered using Unity for my project, and found that most of the problems I have with the BGE, I’ll have with Unity.
Besides, performance isn’t everything!
Welcome to the BGE!

#7

i would say that bge is capable of doing a great many things if you can figure out how to do them for examples look here:http://blender-games.com/.
yes u can sell anything made with blender look up the gpl terms on the blender website.
@torakunsama:- hear,hear!

#8

If I can… I want to make a good game with Blender or any other engine. Give it for free to play.
Make a forum for my games. Gain some income from ads. or maybe some big company will hire me… but, I think I have to be good and produce good things first.

#9

While Unity has features that the BGE doesn’t have, that reason alone is not going to make your game commercial quality.

While some engines today make it easy enough to create gorgeous backgrounds and shaders, all that eye-candy is not going to help if you’re not skilled at making the assets using the shaders or if the logic that makes it a game and not a walkthrough or just something to look at is poorly done. Unity though, as I’ve heard, can make use of ready-to-use logic ‘components’ where you can just bolt them together and get some basic gameplay out of that and I think has a UI creator as well. The natural disadvantage to that in a popular engine is, and I’ve played enough Unity browser games on Kongregate to say this, a lot of games end up having the exact same walking system and UI button style, so you still would have to make your own system if your game is ever going to stand out.

Unity having advantages doesn’t mean that the BGE doesn’t have any, the BGE offers several features only available with a commercial Unity license and you can’t make the asset pipeline any shorter than where you make the game in the same program you model them in, it may not have any clear speed advantages, but the Python API allows multiple ways to greatly increase the speed of your logic with hundreds or even thousands of objects.

#10

Ace is correct - Unity’s a great engine, but so is the BGE. It’s perfectly capable of making great games, though, like any game engine, it will take effort and work.

#11

You are in a right place! I still would lkike to choose Unity! It is pretty great for my situation!