Torque vs. Unity for the Mac

#1 Haven't tried Unity cause I dont have a mac, but it looks pretty good, but does it play well? How easy is everything to use? Right now I see an engine that looks a lot like Shader, but with a higher pricetag. Dunno. This will be interesting though. Anyone remember that forum about the C4 engine? Which one was better? Well, C4 looked pretty good, but eh..the demo wasn't great and it played horribly. That's why I'm sticking with Torque. :)

#2 From what they say, Unity sounds cool. Torque is, of course, cross platform, and much more MP and mod oriented; that said, I'd also be interested in hearing what anyone who has Unity has to say about it!

#3 Torque is certainly cross-platform, but as of a few days ago Unity is now offering one-click publishing to the PC platform (as well as Mac dashboard widgets, too). It costs more (you need the Pro license to get PC-publishing), but it sounds slick.

I think the biggest concerns about Unity right now concern its ability to handle large outdoor environments, as well as large buildings/indoor environments. Supposedly this capability is coming soon. I don't know much about its networking capabilities, but I'm certain Torque's is much further along.

#4 But... the authoring tools don't work on PC or other platforms, and since you don't get source, porting to linux, xbox is tricky.

#5 Not sure but it sounds like, from their forums, that linux porting may be coming as well.

I still think Torque is the best thing out there, especially because of all of the support here. It's really interesting to see a tool designed specifically for the Mac, though. I wonder how far they will take it.

#6 I changed to unity!!!!

A lot better than Torque, a real mac-like GUI, javascript as a scripting language and great support from the developers ( just think about all the compile problems here!) - great docs and tutorials even for beginners!

Although more expensive, but there is a ongoing improvement and extension; and especially, you can use custom file formats and not so strange formats like dts and others which only pc apps can use!

sorry folks, but choice for mac users seems pretty clear!!!!

#7 Enjoy rawi.

I personally hate the Unity GUI interface. I'm not a big fan of the TGE world editor one, either, though. Both are extremely functional, but both irritate me.

I'm not sure what you mean about strange file formats that only PC apps can use. I use Lightwave on my Mac and don't have an issue with DTS's.

Perhaps you meant DIF's, which are more of an issue on Macs--I use my Tablet PC and Quark currently and house them on an external drive. But then, I also house my own CVS repository of source changes (and not just to TGE).

The widget contest was a lot of fun. I'm hoping to see more from the community. As a single-player game engine with an easy artflow, it's nice. As an extensible product, it's in its infancy. People with Game Maker and Clik 'n Play have made some excellent games, so it's not necessarily engine fortitude but the designers who are at issue.

The two tutorials are nice. I'd love to see something on par with them here. But there's really only two, nice as they are. But the engine is in its infancy and they're making quite a leap with it. The developers are nice guys who have an excellent start.

Good luck with your choice, rawi. I'd like to see what you do with it.

#8

Quote:
( just think about all the compile problems here!)

Eh? Never had compile-problems, ever. Has nothing to do with Torque, the problem has to be somewhere else. Make a guess. ;)

Quote:
Although more expensive, but there is a ongoing improvement and extension; and especially, you can use custom file formats and not so strange formats like dts and others which only pc apps can use!

Torque/TSE improves all the time. And there is no such thing as DTS for only PC.
Your comments leads me to believe that you haven't invested alot of time into TGE yet, because if you had, none of those statements would had been made. That's sad, because TGE is great.

Custom formats are not engine specific either, and are very general.

Unity sure is cool, but comparing it to TGE without having tried TGE extensively is pretty lame :)
I wouldn't compare Unity to TGE because, infact, I haven't tried both.
Good luck!

#9 Well I haven't heard of any games made with Unity yet. Going by their website, it looks like Gamestudio A6, with fewer features. I would try it out, but of course it will only run on a Mac. The only part that I find interesting is that they use .NET for scripting. Which makes me wonder how much of their engine is written in C#. I guess we will never know though, since they don't give you the source code.

#10 I spent about four hours playing with Unity over the weekend. In general, it felt a bit like what Director 8.5 was trying to do when they added OpenGL support to it (yes, they actually did that...) only Unity gets all the stuff right that Director got oh so wrong.

First of all -- my first four hours with Torque were not as productive. My first FOURTEEN hours with Torque were not as productive. (Ah, beating the dead horse is fun!) Overall, my experience was good. I ran into some quirky stuff with UV coordinates and spent more time in GimpShop than I wanted to, but everything was starting to come together for me.

When I last read about Unity, they were talking about using C# for their scripting, so I was surprised to find JavaScript instead. Not a bad thing; it's nice to have a familiar syntax, and lots of helpful code snippets are just a google away. Looks like you can use C# if you prefer, too.

I liked the development environment. Certain things remind me of the Constructor screenshots I've seen. The built-in script editor won't win any awards, but since it's a Cocoa app emacs key bindings work automagically, and all of the text services and right-click menu options I set up for BBEdit are available, so it's not at all bad. (Note that none of the 3rd party Torque dev environments will run on a Mac.)

Also, it feels like a Mac app when it runs. Torque apps always feel like an invader from DOS-land when they run. It's a small point, but felt nice.

No engine source code doesn't seem like a huge problem. Especially not for people graduating to 3D from Director or Flash game development. The web plug-in and dashboard angle will especially appeal to folks using those environments for casual games. I think those folks will absolutely love Unity. In fact -- look for Macromedia/Adobe to buy them.

But still -- even though my Mac-based single-user project is an ideal test case for Unity -- I'm not converting over. Yet.

#11 Rob,
Following up on your post...
with so many plusses you mention here, why not explain why you decided NOT to convert over?

#12 Unity looks very designer friendly. Too bad the tools only work on Mac. It reminds me of a stripped down Virtools, another game engine geared towards designers. I really hope GG learns from products like these and starts realizing that a designer friendly app is the way to go. It seems like they are finally starting to get it with the announcement of Constructor.

#13 We've gotten it for a long time - the hard thing is balancing core tech dev, tool dev, game dev, support, sales, and community dev. :)

If you're into tools, this year is gonna be a cool one. ;)

#14 I actually use Unity for prototyping since I can move from Lightwave/Modo -> FBX -> Unity and quickly prototype gameplay elements. But I use it in the same vein that I used to use (pre-T2D) Game Maker for 2D prototyping. It helped me develop a control scheme for a top-down action-RPG that uses a scroll mouse (actually, it uses three buttons, though I would use the scroll butting as a down-swipe/up-swipe ) very quickly.

But I use TGE for development.

Why? Because I have quite a history with Torque now. In fact, I've completely trashed several prototypes (including a top-down Smash-TV clone which is actually seminal in my ARPG) made in TGE. I've acclimated myself to the codebase and the community.

Unity is a nice engine. Some of the features are great for prototyping, but finalizing textures and polycounts still takes an amazing amount of work (just like with any engine). The one-click creation isn't much of a sell to me since I've been seeing that for years. I've automated my TGE build process on a shared network space so I basically hit "compile" on whichever machine I'm testing it on (usually my G5 or Mini, though often my Tablet PC). Taking A6 content and porting to the Mac with Unity would be an interesting process, though (export to map, then convert to 3DS or OBJ).

The widget contest was a lot of fun. The community's come up with some fun stuff. It's definitely an engine to keep your eye on, but I'm still firmly rooted in the Torque camp no matter how much they want me to leave!

#15 I have the personal edition of Unity. It is fairly damn different than TGE. It is substantially better in some ways, and wholly lacking in others when you compare the two.

Unity lacks any networking (I'd like to see how to combine it with TNL).
Unity doesn't give you source code.
Unity does give you impressive physics built right in.
I think Unity will enjoy a far higher proportion of licensors who would describe themselves as successful than TGE will.

I'll throw out a few things I found encouraging in Unity:

1. all objects in the world can be added to parent objects and will preserve their local transforms relative to the parent. It boggles me that TGE is not centered on this approach (and one of the things I'm adding to TGE now).
2. collision model is simple and just works. Walking on a non-convex shape which itself moves in the world just works, and your means of controlling the computational complexity of it are straightforward.

Bad things:
1. I don't like their mixture of GameObjects (think SceneObjects) and Components (think of collections of data and behavior a SceneObject might be endowed with). For instance, your camera is a GameObject that has-a camera component, rather than simply being a derived object from GameObject. This characteristic reaches out to the scripter in the language, requiring the coder to recall where various capabilities reside when cognitively they are intrinsic to their SceneObject equivalent, e.g.: myCameraObject.theActualCameraComponent.getFOV();
2. I break out in cold sweats when I consider the ubiquitous use of capital initiall letters in method names. Superficial, I know, but myGameObject.Activate() is galling to see or type compared to myGameObject.activate(). Must... stop... twitching!

Unity's scripting is substantially more "real" than TGE's in that it uses languages extensively documented elsewhere which are truly object oriented. That said, I am not in love with a few things about Unity's scripting model, which is behavior-based and inconvenient to work with object classes representing the physical game entities. I also don't like how they've chosen to expose to the scripter the hideous .NET capability of having variable assignments inflict side effects on the code (e.g.: if you assign a value to an object's transform relative to its parent, the world transform changes. Had this been done via a method, one would have a method to document or examine to see why this was so, but as it is it is undocumented and in my words promotes mystical side-effects to a standing of business-as-usual. I have to go wash my hands now! :) ).

I think the best advantage Unity possesses is a clean start and substantially lower conceptual clutter. They are moving more quickly than GG at the moment, I feel -- but this doesn't imply that a simple "better or worse" descriptor could be applied to all who would examine it.

I doubt either engine would supplant the other (especially for the Windows-entrapped developer) soon, and both would be well advised to see what the other one does well.

tone

#16 Hey Ben, I meant no offense. I am really excited about the tools being developed for Torque. It's really that I have only recently "got it" myself. After taking a game design and level design course and working with Virtools and lately with the Unreal Editor, I am realizing how much tools like Constructor will mean to game designers using Torque. The ability to completely lay out levels then iterate them from within Torque will be great for designers.

#17 @Joshua: Sorry I was gone for so long and missed the request to elaborate. I'm not pro- or anti-Unity, just checking it out and kicking the tires. I haven't bought it, and don't plan to in the immediate future. But I do plan to keep an eye on it. I know more TGE, and I'm not eager to learn more Unity until I've evaluated it more.

I used Macromedia Director professionally for a long, long time. Director forces you into a one-man-against-the-world development model, which can be great when you're actually one man against the world. However, once you try to move beyond that -- add dev team members, use SCM, etc. -- your tools really hold you back. I need to check these aspects of Unity, seeing how a whole dev team can work with it, before getting serious.

Also, I need to have an artist really evaluate the art pipeline. My success with programmer art means nothing. ;)

@Ben: bring 'em on. Credit card is at the ready.