Comparison of commonly used Game Eninges (Ogre3D, C4, Unreal Engine, Unity3D)

Ogre3D

• Simple installation

• Little official documentation concerning the usage of the game engine, but plenty of user experiences contributed in specific forums

• Moderate performance while starting the created application

• The integration of the Kinect via OpenNI requires just a little effort

• C++ is used as programming language

• No world editor is available, thus the scene has to be created by code

• It is possible to write your own main loop

• OpenNI can be easily integrated

C4 Engine

• Simple installation with detailed installation instructions by C4 Engine

• Much official documentation concerning several use cases but very few user experiences

• An application is quickly build and executed, although the application name has to be defined in an extra file

• Great effort for integrating the Kinect with OpenNI because of redefinition errors

  • Solution:

  • Set C4FASTBUILD on 0 in C4PrefWindow

  • And replace #define WIN32_WINNT 0x0502 with #define _WIN32WINNT _WIN32_WINNT_WIN8

• C++ is used as programming language

• There is a world editor which have to be used to create a scene and if you want to render objects without such a scene and without walls, there will be graphical errors while displaying these objects

• There is no direct access on the main loop just a hook via the render method which is called each frame

Unreal Engine 4

• Simple installation via additional client, every version needs to be installed separately

• Much documentation and user experiences, forum and support-service for additional help

• Bad performance when working with the editor because it needs a lot of RAM for working smoothly

• Great effort integrating the Kinect

  • You have to create an extra plug-in, but for the Kinect V2 already exists an plug-in

• C++ is used as programming language and you can choose between creating with blueprint-mode or programming-mode

• There is a world editor where you can simply create scenes or levels without programming skills, but you can also switch to the C++ code of it

• There is no direct access on the main loop but it is possible to create a subclass of GameEngine and reference it in the DefaultEngine

Unity3D

• Simple installation

• Much documentation and user experiences

• Good performance, doesn't need to much resources for working smoothly even in preview-mode

• The Kinect can be easily integrated with the Kinect SDK and some help of instructions which can be found through the internet, also various plug-ins are available through the Unity Asset Store

• The programming language is C# but with the implementation of wrapper-classes it is possible to use C++ and Javascript, different wrapper-classes can be found on forums for Unity3D

• There is a world editor for easily creating scenes and it is possible to switch to the program code but needs the additional software MonoDevelop

• But there is no direct access on the main loop