Note: I am not saying you can't make a good game or even a great game.
id Tech 3 is a good place for a beginner to get a look at the C++ source code of a AAA quality game by the standards of several years ago but again, unless you want to go out and use someone else's tools written several years ago you will be spending a lot of your time constructing tools for the rest of your team before you can even start producing a "AAA" quality game. But for the purposes of AAA game development involving large teams with multi-million dollar budgets the currently available (to beginners) version of Unity is not as robust as Unreal Engine 3.5. I could set the far viewing plane to a maximum 1e+15 units at 60 degrees viewing angle before the camera started to go wonky.ĭon't get me wrong, I like the engine and am a big fan.
Only to run into 32-bit signed floating point precision errors that caused the camera to jitter, stutter, and gyrate like a crack addict despite the values being several orders of magnitude below the 32-bit limit. Being a space concept, I used accurate astronomical scale distances in a test using 1 Astronomical Unit between a planet and its star. Granted that's an extreme example and it's fairly easy to use lower detail models but that's not the only issue. I don't want to say it is impossible to make a AAA title with it but at the very least it is very unlikely.įor a prototype, all I did was import a moderately detailed model of a large space cruiser and Unity choked on it (meshes must not exceed 65,000 vertices). You will put out a finished game more quickly and I think that is your ultimate goal, to make - I am currently using Unity 3D v2.6 to learn the engine for a personal project. Unreal is okay as well but I find the learning curve with Unity to be much shallower. Unity works with Javascript, C#, or Boo scripts attached to game objects and components so you can do as little or as much code as you feel comfortable with. You don't want to dive heavily into C/C++ so that rules out id Tech 3 (it's also a bit dated).
With the ultimate goal of educating yourself without having to dive into C++, I'd highly recommend - Short answer for your question, of the 3 pieces of software you mentioned, you will do best with Unity 3D. That being said, you're not going to be using it for that. Additionally, it's more flexible.Ĭan you release a triple-A title on it? No. Check out this list: ).Īs for Unity? It's a great place for a beginner/someone that doesn't want to have to delve into the complex details of an engine. Personally, I've never used it but, it's not something you're going to build a commercial product with (unless you're looking for something scaled back. That being said, it's much older technology, the tools aren't as robust, etc.
Overall, it's not very well crafted for anything that drastically doesn't match Epic's product line. Additionally, UnrealScript is extremely slow as such, it's difficult to optimize any product you do end up creating. As such, you are somewhat limited in the modifications you can perform. With UDK, you have script-level access, not native. UDK, id Tech 3, and Unity are all vastly different tools.