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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Honest question from an outsider: it looks like Epic and Crytek have finally gotten around to moving in to the "low-end" of the game engine market. What's still unique about unity?

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1. A much better language - C# with some integration with the best IDE (Visual Studio).

2. Being first to indie market: community and asset store.

Laziness. And your graphic designer can use it. As a lot of engine, it's nice when you want something simple very quick. But when you want to tweak it or make it things more specific it's a lot of time a pain in the *.

It can save time in the beginning and you will prototype early.

Easy to use and easy to access.

I work on a team with a graphic designer who cannot code at all, and is doing amazing things with Unreal Engine. This includes coding shaders (yes, shaders!) using only the blueprint drag and drop system. You just set up how you want it to look, and the system compiles it to shaders under the covers. The technology is super amazing.

The revolution in competition for indie game development platforms is here. I don't know why Crytek is doing, but Unreal Engine is very usable and amazing technology.

To be fair visual programming is a known territory for designers:

http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarm...

Also Unreal Engine will be fixed soon ;) - Xamarin is working on C# scripting for it.

1. Not having to use C++, which should result in code that is harder to optimize but at the same time less work on memory leaks and other bizarre bugs.

2. Effortless porting. See 1.

2. Stock assets delivered with the engine - that's pretty valuable if you're indie.

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