Reconsidering UDK

This week we are going to Game Developer's conference which is held in San Francisco every year. As our team Hack n Hide won't be working on The co-signers for a week we are re-considering UDK for our game.

         This discussion on switching to UDK started when our professors told us that the dates of the Alpha and Beta version of the game are flexible. We programmers had a meeting with Bob in which we talked about the challenges we will face if we try to switch engine at this point of time. We have always been wanting to use some other engine for the game but because Unity3D suited our needs the best we settled for Unity for our final game. But I personally think that the game will suffer graphically if we continue to go with Unity. Unity doesn't provide good graphics capability and the way this Engine works might give us hard time with maintaining the FPS to 60 at later phases. 

Pros of using Unity:

• Unified asset pipeline. No need to spend time on resource subsystem at all, no buggy import routines to write and fix: just drop a file into folder, and it works.
• Integrated level editor. No need to spend time on level tools: just get straight to business.
• Great tweaking and debugging support: all your gameplay variables are shown right as you play, and can be changed on the fly too - and all this without writing a single line of code. Pause the game anytime, or step through code one statement at a time.
• Quite comprehesive library of ready-made components. Rendering, sound, physics, controls - a lot of "boilerplate" code is already written.
• Mono as a script host. While one can argue about merits of C# as a language, Mono's base class library offers a wealth of functions. Collections, I/O, multithreading, and insanely expressive LINQ all speed up development considerably.

Cons of using Unity:

• Doesn't give you a feeling of making the game from scratch.
• A bad mark on all the Engineers (Industry looks for candidates having UDK or Cry experience)
• Graphically poor if Shaders are not written.

 So, now is the right time to research and meet the industry people at GDC and talk to them about the impacts of using Unity for your thesis game.