Pages

Sunday 28 March 2010

Long Time no E & Unity vs UDK

So I forgot about my Blog. There's a surprise. Very few people probably read it anyway.

So I kind of stumbled across it again from a link on another site. It reminded me that the blog was a great way to get my thoughts out in a (semi) coherent manner. So I thought I'd start trying to blog again, even if it is only for my own benefit.

So the big development in a personal project regard is that I have ditched XNA as the development method for my own project for a couple of reasons:

1. The Community Games on XBox has been a fail in terms of sales potential.
2. Unity and Unreal decided to go free.

So I had spent a long time creating an engine and an editor for use in XNA and I really learnt a lot from it. But the prospect of a complete engine available to use for free was just too tempting.

So I started with UDK. I use Unreal at work daily and absolutely love it. The editor and Kismet are so well formed that it makes design implementation a joy. However, my experience with the scripting side of things when I downloaded UDK were a nightmare. For a start - no IDE as standard - and the nFringe mod licence means no commercial release - I refuse to pay the prices they expect for a commercial version for something that should be standard. Then there is the sheer overcomplication of getting a project started. I managed to get something running, but it took an age, and a lot of frustration.

So I took a quick look at Unity, and almost immediately I was hooked. The component model is a really powerful way of doing things. It is simple enough to make something really quickly and setting up a new blank project was an absolute breeze. However, I would never want to do anything bigger than a three or four man project in Unity, it would become chaos.

So - for big projects you really cant beat unreal, but if you're doing something small then I really recommend using Unity.