Engine Showdown!: Unity vs. T2Di for the Non-Programmer

#1 A platformer would be fairly straightforward in T2Di, yes. You place some tiles around the level to make backgrounds, another layer with platforms and set collision groups correctly to block the player.

Unity is a 3D engine. I don't know what the procedure would be, but at least it would involve locking the camera. You have the power of 3D (proper 3D models for characters), but probably not an easy way of making plain 2D sprites. It probably depends on the look you need.

I'm personally biased against non-source engines since I like integrating all sorts of strange code :)
(The OpenFeint folks have worked with the Unity folks to integrate the products, though!)

Personally, disregarding source aspects, I find the tile-based editor from TGB to be the smoothest way to design overhead/sideview games.

#2 The Platformer Kit is a great way to get started with platformer style games in TGB:

www.torquepowered.com/products/tgb-platformer-kit

I do support an iPhone build of the Platformer Kit. You are welcome to email me about it if you end up purchasing iTGB and the PSK Pro.

#3 ahh see I read about the platformer kit but couldn't find a link. Thanks! So how does PSK work with iPhone integration? Is the PSK, adventure kit, and kart kit included in the TGBi?

#4

Quote:So how does PSK work with iPhone integration?

The PSK integration process is fairly straight forward. All you really need to do is copy the PSK source files into the iTGB project and build it.

Quote:Is the PSK, adventure kit, and kart kit included in the TGBi?

They are separate purchases and do not come with Torque 2D for iPhone.

#5

Quote:is building a 2d sidescroller straightforward enough?

Regarding Unity, not exactly. You have to implement a rather complex community-made resource into Unity iPhone. It's a sprite manager class. In addition, you will need to be able to create quads and assign UV animations to them. If you are wanting to create a 2D game with dedicated 2D tools from start to finish, then iTorque 2D is the way to go.

#6 awesome you guys have all been really helpful!

#7 I'm a little late, but being that I use Unity solely for 2D iPhone games I'll add my $0.02.

It's pretty easy to make a 2D game by doing it initially in 3D then locking the camera. I made a pinball-like game in literally 2 days that uses pre-rendered tables, bumpers, balls, etc. The thing you have to remember though, is it's really 3D, it just looks 2D. Even if you use the sprite manager tool - which is not built-in, but a community plug-in of sorts - your game is still 3D in that it is rendering animated texture maps on flat poly's as Mike said. That 3D core has overhead in performance and file size.

While I'm on the subject, unless you are using Unity Pro it's almost impossible to build an iPhone game that is under 10meg (the old over-air size limit) after Apple adds the DRM. About how big would a simple game like Pong be in T2Di?

#8 it would be in the < 4mb range likely as T2Di does not have the non-cutable 12-16mb of Mono + precompiled engine library

#9 Isn't the new over the air limit on filesize 20mb now?

Also, I believe the new version of Unity due this year has built in support for sprites etc. (Probably a rewrite of the community one I guess, just a guess mind)

Keep in mind though, T2Di is source source source ;)

#10 I read a post today from their QA guy who implied sprites would be in UT3.0. Though no word yet on whether or not it'll be a Pro only feature.

Thanks for the info on file size. And yes, the over-air cap is now 20M. I just wanted to know if I should kick myself for not having small downloads all this time. ;)

#11 Yes, the new air limit, thanks to the ipad, is 20mb :)


For non programmers, T2Dis benefit of sources is normally a serious reason against it as it has shown itself in the past that "your have sources" often means "if you want to have it fixed / different, why don't you do it yourself, you have the sources" (at least thats my experience and Torque like the other source based technologies I own haven't shown any exception to that "standard" yet)

As for Unity iPhone 3 and Sprites: yeah aside of a sprite engine thats meant to happen, there is nothing known, not even if it is iphone pro only or present in both iphone versions.


Independent of that though I doubt it will be en par for real 2D games with T2Di, cause realisticially seen: cocos2d was in that field since start too and still hasn't gotten around to get it to a level where the editor support is more than worth a mere laugh.
I don't believe we will see a tile editor etc with Unity, I guess it will be more of an opted 2d rendering system with 2d animations and alike (so basically what you find in the t2dSprite inheritance tree without the tilemaps) as well as finally a 2D physics system instead of physx

#12 No, there's no way it could possibly be as 2D as T2Di, simply because it's just a sprite layer on top of a 3D engine. It will always have the overhead of 3D, PhysX, the Mono runtime, etc. The argument you'll get for their side is, "It's an all purpose tool. You can make anything!" The adage that comes to mind is, "Jack of all trades, master of none."

#13 those assumptions though are some that I am pretty sure will not work out.
Stripping has already proofen that it can remove stuff so it can also remove one physics layer and use the other. or the engine just runs in pure 2d and uses a totally different engine.

never forget TGB is also a 3D engine or better a 2D layer on a very dated 3D engine ( TGE) which is why we have the problems we have (the renderer was written for what it does in TGE and is very unflexible nor even modular. its a big mess and a hell to maintain changes to not break stuff thanks to that)
but at the end of the day all is 3d cause opengl has no support for 2d at all.


Also I'm very sorry to say but: independent of how 3d physx might be, even at the worst day its much more performant than what TGB - T2Di offer physics wise and its one of the primary performance bottlenecks on T2Di
That on the other end isn't that uncommon given its an inhouse solution and really only used here, it can impossibly compete to libraries that are used by hundreds to thousands of devs like chipmunk and box2d and I'm looking forward to see them happening and giving a cold cu never again to the current one :)

#14 Is T2D really just a 2D mod on top of TGE? Man, I thought it was a complete rewrite. I'm so far out of the loop these days. :|

Either way, I'm too cheap to drop cash on T2Di, so unless I get masochistic enough to go straight ObjC it looks my future iPhone games will continue to be built in Unity. It does appear, however, that my PC projects may be moving back to Torque. I gotta say, it'll be nice working with proper villains again. ;)

#15 While TGB was derived from TGE, it doesn't make it a 3D engine at all.

#16 Anything that uses OpenGL is a 3D engine. If it renders in 3D or 2D through 3D is a matter of definition :)

And that TGB is still a lot of TGE, especially the inexistant render framework is a direct consequence of it. TGE didn't have any GFX layer (graphics driver), that was and is one of the major reasons to take TGEA instead where you have the GFX layer, so changes to the API handling are in 1 place not in 100 as in TGE - TGB - T2Di - T3Di.

TGB has cut a lot of the 3D part naturally, also it has messed with the standard inheritance and datablock and networking code to a high degree (if that messed is good or bad depends on the project and person I guess. I've experienced the pro and con side)

Just to make it clear: TGB is a very nice engine and I am still happy that I invested in it :)
T2Di is getting better and with 1.3 started to become an option for more than experimentation and prototyping for me. Perhaps at some point there will also be developers with funding using it to develop something where they require contract work.

#17 OpenGL is a vector/texture API, and you can make both a 2D and 3D engine with it ;)
T2Di has no depth, so it's 2D.

(Layers don't count - that's just render order)