Best Light-Weight 3D Game Engine?

I recently played Crossy Road I really loved the art style. It got me inspired to start working on the iOS game I've been sort of half making over the past year and a bit. I'd previously intended to use 2D graphics and just use Cocos2D, but I'm inspired to make it using a similar voxel style.

I've found out Crossy Road uses Unity, which I have used a little in the past but seems a bit bloated and is a little pricy for me. I also took a look an Minko, but I never managed to get it working. I then thought it'd be cool to try out Three.JS (I know it's not a game engine by the way) and started to build something that worked for me. It's working fairly well, but I'm not sure if there's something better and it does mean I basically have to run it through a browser (although I can embed that in to an app).

I'd imagine that many people have at least attempted 3D games before, so I'd be interested to know what you've used and what you think runs best. My biggest requirements are that it runs on iOS and doesn't take hundreds of hours to setup and learn.

I would recommend the Unreal Engine 4. It is a fantastic 3d and 2d engine (supports paper 2D). Still indev but supports building to IOS, Android, Linux, Windows, maybe Mac and Sort of supports HTML5 and Xbox one/360 and ps4/3. The engine has huge amounts of customizability, and you can code in C++ or use their blueprint scripting system. This of which is extremely easy to use, and has quite a few tutorials on their youtube channel. The engine is relatively cheap at $19 a month plus 5% of what you make of the game. Or if you are a student it is bundled in within the github student developer program. I was able to get a fully working 3D multiplayer FPS running on Win64 and Android within a days work. And can utilize apples new "metal API" to get higher res textures. Everything can be scaled down to run on different platforms and compiling the game is generally relatively quick usually takes within 20 mins.

TR1T0N_, on 26 November 2014 - 12:07 AM said:

I would recommend the Unreal Engine 4. It is a fantastic 3d and 2d engine (supports paper 2D). Still indev but supports building to IOS, Android, Linux, Windows, maybe Mac and Sort of supports HTML5 and Xbox one/360 and ps4/3. The engine has huge amounts of customizability, and you can code in C++ or use their blueprint scripting system. This of which is extremely easy to use, and has quite a few tutorials on their youtube channel. The engine is relatively cheap at $19 a month plus 5% of what you make of the game. Or if you are a student it is bundled in within the github student developer program. I was able to get a fully working 3D multiplayer FPS running on Win64 and Android within a days work. And can utilize apples new "metal API" to get higher res textures. Everything can be scaled down to run on different platforms and compiling the game is generally relatively quick usually takes within 20 mins.

I had a short look at Unreal Engine, it's a bit overkill really. The game I'm making is somewhat like an upside down Doodle Jump. Also if you take a look at the style I'm going for I really don't need high res textures. I'd like to have some shaders, but it might be a bit more than I need really.

Apple's new SceneKit is pretty nice. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but it's baked in, it has Xcode integration, and generally is fairly nice.

You could just use gamemaker. You could also use love2d and port it to android. Although love2d is 2d there are many 3d engines out there for it.

ElvishJerricco, on 26 November 2014 - 01:52 AM said:

Apple's new SceneKit is pretty nice. It's not the greatest thing in the world, but it's baked in, it has Xcode integration, and generally is fairly nice.

Actually I might take a look at that, haven't really ever touched it before.

AssossaGPB, on 26 November 2014 - 02:27 AM said:

You could just use gamemaker. You could also use love2d and port it to android. Although love2d is 2d there are many 3d engines out there for it.

Definitely not using GameMaker. Love2d crossed my mind but, I mean, it is 2d. I know there are tack on bit, but if I was going to do that I'd probably just uses Cocos3D.


I've been trying to get basic SSAO with Three.JS and it's not going great. On my Mac and iPhone the shadows look absolutely hideous as they're not using dedicated graphics, so I'll take a look at SceneKit. Doing it through HTML5 seems a bit hack too.

If you want a simple GameEngine which works out of the box and supports a lot of platforms for free - Unity 3D is probably best suited for it. With the free version you can make almost any simple phone game. There are a buch of tutorials everywhere and it even has it's own "Stack Overflow" - Unity Answers. It allows for custom plugins (android - .jar, windows - .dll, that sort of plugins).

If you're just making a simple game, I suggest you make your own engine. I'm currently working on a 3D game using C# and OpenTK and it's going great.

I have to advise against unity if you ever plan on doing anything even remotely larger scale. Unity games (notably KSP) don't tend to scale well.

With Unity it really depends on how you make your game. Unity is quite a good engine if you use it correctly. I have seen some examples of things made with it that amazed me and I can tell that it is not as bad as everyone might think. But if it is going to be a quite simple game and is only going to be meant for one platform then I would suggest you to write your own game engine.

if you still want a few Game Engines that work with IOS: Marmalade, ShiVa.

More about Unity

The problem with Unity is how easy it is to make games with it. Because of that there are a bunch of 'games' made in one hour and put up on Google Play. I agree that it is not the engine with which you can easily achieve very good graphics (unlike CryEngine or Unreal) and which is not best suited for large scale games, but if you do everything correctly then you might notice that it is not as bad as you thought.

If you are looking for a less overkill engine i would recommend Corona SDK. Which is an extremly lightweight 2D/2.5D LUA engine. However you could use a technique like parallaxing to get the 3D effect should require it. I have personally used this engine to create a simple game of which has been uploaded to the google play store. however this engine is restricted to IOS, Android and Windows phone 8, and has no support for desktop operating systems.It has quite a good physics engine and a quite a few API's for perfoming specific tasks and costs nothing for use of their basic engine and has a student program for discounts. And for an application like doodle jump it could be developed relatively quickly with their physics engine and API's.

edit: the engine can be found here (download is at the bottom) and it supports building to the Amazon Kindle and Nook platform

I strongly suggest love2d, powerful examples can easily be created. If you want to seen an example, feel free to download one from here.

I've taken a look at all the suggestions. I've decided against Scene Kit, mainly because it's iOS only (I'd like to support Android too really) and also because there's absolute zip in terms of tutorials. I couldn't find anything about SSAO and only one or two basic getting started tutorials.

Love2D is still a bit iffy on iOS, and it's designed to be 2D so I've given it miss. Same with Corona.

Unity, Unreal, etc. are just too bloated for what I'm doing.

So, yea, sorry for not taking many suggestions on board.

For now I'm just going with Three.js and making my own engine. I've made it just voxel based which makes something a bit easier.

There's not much to see, but you can take a look here at a bare bones demo.

I've used Marmalade in the past. It's a bit fugly and doesn't always support the latest OpenGLES but you cannot beat it for performant cross-platform tablet development. You get to write C++ code that is compiled straight to ARM object binaries which run as native code on the resulting platform. If you wanted raw speed (important for a 3D game) that worked fairly consistently across a lot of platforms, I think it's worth a shot.

But then again, it boils down to what you desire to do. It might not be worth investing all that time in creating a very advanced 3d engine if you're just creating a match-3 sort of game.

Try the Darkplaces engine, or the Quake engine. It should be lightweight and flexible enough to do something, as well as be free and open-source.