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[Krux]

There are good reasons not to use Unity. My personal reasons number one reason next to a lot more is this one: With unity I can't use Linux as my development platform. With that limitation you can't have any developer in your team who got comfortable developing on Linux (like me).

And then I also think it is very valuable to go the process, and develop an engine on your own to actually get the knowledge how an engine works and which parts are the hard parts.

Personally I build my own rendering framework on SDL and OpenGL to do my rendering. But There is a lot of work involved to get OpenGL into something that can be used productively. But I also think that there is a lot of value when you learn how to develop your own tools, that do what you want to do and better than any of the shelf solution.

[rozza]

I do really wish I could use Linux as my development platform too, although Unity are working on Linux support for the editor and they have unofficial preview builds you can download already so hopefully that will become an officially supported feature in a future version. From what I've seen it looks like they're getting closer but it isn't planned for for 5.5 (the next upcoming release), meaning it won't leave the stage of "unofficial testing builds" until at least some time next year. At the moment I am happy with the fact that at least their player has really good Linux support though so anyone can play my game on Linux without me needing to really do any work porting the game over.

In terms of creating your own engine, I do think that's a cool thing to do but it can also be easy to get caught up in the tech instead of actually making a game, so a lot of time I do just want an off the shelf solution that makes it easy to prototype an idea.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

Funny they dont have linux support. Isn't Unity editor written in GTK sharp?

[TomHunt]

Have

There are good reasons not to use Unity. My personal reasons number one reason next to a lot more is this one: With unity I can't use Linux as my development platform. With that limitation you can't have any developer in your team who got comfortable developing on Linux (like me).\

Have you checked out https://forum.unity3d.com/forums/linux-editor.93/?

[rozza]

Funny they dont have linux support. Isn't Unity editor written in GTK sharp?

Pretty sure that's just MonoDevelop, which does have an official Linux build. The Unity Editor uses mostly their own custom UI framework for the main editor window, platform specific UI for the menu bars, and some bits use Chrome Embedded Framework like the launcher and the asset store window.

[rozza]

Have

There are good reasons not to use Unity. My personal reasons number one reason next to a lot more is this one: With unity I can't use Linux as my development platform. With that limitation you can't have any developer in your team who got comfortable developing on Linux (like me).\

Have you checked out https://forum.unity3d.com/forums/linux-editor.93/?

Yeah, that's what I was talking about before but I don't know how stable it is yet or whether you'd want to use it in production, since it's not an officially supported platform.

[Kakapio]

Ovicior already covered this but one thing is Unity is sometimes regarded as an engine that forces bad habits. I've heard Duality praised a fair amount for being built in a way where you use C# idiomatically. The .NetRocks podcast had a guest who's name I can't recall come on and speak about the differences in Unity. I remember she had a lot of issues with things like fields needing to be public to be exposed to the editor.

Anecdotally I've seen people discriminate between c# programmers and c# programmers who are primarily only experienced with Unity.

Ovicior, please post back in the future about your experiences with Duality! I've heard a lot of good things but have never had the time to try something new.


EDIT: Was bored and went to the website and downloaded the package. Wow! This is really polished for a FOSS game engine. He's got his own dependency manager and central repository. It worked better than a lot of commercial solutions I've seen!

The help advisor panel is also amazing! I was trying to use the play button to check out the tilemap sample but couldnt control my character. I hovered over the panel and the advisor had a long description of what it does and pointed out that I probably was wondering why I couldnt control input and explained why that was as well as how to recitify the problem. Granted that's more of a tool design thing but still very impressive.

Looking forward to spending some time with this in 2019!

This engine is definitely better than Unity for 2D as long as you're not too dependent on tutorials. Even then, the chatrooms and Adam (The developer) are super helpful.

I highly recommend anyone using Unity for 2D games to check out Duality :D

[Eendhoorn]

I'm switching from unity to monogame + nez framework. It's delightful!

[Richard Kain]

I highly recommend anyone using Unity for 2D games to check out Duality :D

What's the platform reach like on Duality? I didn't find those details on the Duality home page. I noticed that it uses Visual Studio as it's primary development IDE. Is it compatible with Universal Windows Apps for deployment on multiple different platforms?

I always like to hear other peoples accounts of less well-known engines. I occasionally dapple with Godot. (I can't really recommend it to you, as it does not use C#) Please continue sharing your impressions and experiences with Duality, I'd love to hear more.

[cynicalsandel]

I highly recommend anyone using Unity for 2D games to check out Duality :D

What's the platform reach like on Duality? I didn't find those details on the Duality home page. I noticed that it uses Visual Studio as it's primary development IDE. Is it compatible with Universal Windows Apps for deployment on multiple different platforms?

I always like to hear other peoples accounts of less well-known engines. I occasionally dapple with Godot. (I can't really recommend it to you, as it does not use C#) Please continue sharing your impressions and experiences with Duality, I'd love to hear more.

If they're patient, it looks like Godot plans to add C# in 2.2.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-getting-more-languages

[Kyuugatsu]

I highly recommend anyone using Unity for 2D games to check out Duality :D

That has a lot of qualifiers you've left off. Such as which platform you're supporting - I certainly would consider Duality if I wasn't looking to program mobile games or console games, but as such it hardly covers "anyone using Unity for 2D".

You clearly like Duality a lot, so by all means, keep using it.  

[Kyuugatsu]

There are good reasons not to use Unity. My personal reasons number one reason next to a lot more is this one: With unity I can't use Linux as my development platform.

Unity has a linux build.

[Kakapio]

I highly recommend anyone using Unity for 2D games to check out Duality :D

What's the platform reach like on Duality? I didn't find those details on the Duality home page. I noticed that it uses Visual Studio as it's primary development IDE. Is it compatible with Universal Windows Apps for deployment on multiple different platforms?

I always like to hear other peoples accounts of less well-known engines. I occasionally dapple with Godot. (I can't really recommend it to you, as it does not use C#) Please continue sharing your impressions and experiences with Duality, I'd love to hear more.

Sorry for the late reply. As of now, Windows is completely supported. All the code could function with Mac and Linux, it's just that they need to get some work done to make it happen.

[darkhog]

I highly recommend anyone using Unity for 2D games to check out Duality :D

What's the platform reach like on Duality? I didn't find those details on the Duality home page. I noticed that it uses Visual Studio as it's primary development IDE. Is it compatible with Universal Windows Apps for deployment on multiple different platforms?

I always like to hear other peoples accounts of less well-known engines. I occasionally dapple with Godot. (I can't really recommend it to you, as it does not use C#) Please continue sharing your impressions and experiences with Duality, I'd love to hear more.

If they're patient, it looks like Godot plans to add C# in 2.2.

https://godotengine.org/article/godot-getting-more-languages

Really? Awesome! GDScript is the only reason I don't use Godot at the moment (too python-like, including lack of proper, clear scope separation with braces, and I hate python).

[diegzumillo]

Curious that no one mentioned Game Maker yet. I have very little experience with it but I like what I saw. It's not the kind of engine that brags about its huge library of features, but it is flexible. Flexibility is my favorite thing on any engine. And it's pixel perfect out of the box.

Edit:

Curious that no one mentioned Game Maker yet.

Because the title says "C# engines", you dummy.

[Kakapio]

Curious that no one mentioned Game Maker yet. I have very little experience with it but I like what I saw. It's not the kind of engine that brags about its huge library of features, but it is flexible. Flexibility is my favorite thing on any engine. And it's pixel perfect out of the box.

Edit:

Curious that no one mentioned Game Maker yet.

Because the title says "C# engines", you dummy.

Haha.

Gamemaker is alright, but it does have a lot of limitations compared to something like Unity.