I’m a new developer and would like to talk to people who use the platform. I’d like to ask questions.
What are the biggest advantages of Flax Engine compared to Unity or Unreal for those who are starting out with 3D?
Which features of the engine are most useful for creating simple 3D games (such as an FPS or platformer)?
How does the physics system work in Flax? Is it comparable to Unity or Unreal in terms of performance?
Is the engine stable for both small and large projects? (I’m referring to indie games where a single person would work on it)
What is the flow of creating animated characters with skeletons and blend trees within Flax? Is it intuitive?
Is the C# language used in Flax fully compatible with external .NET libraries or are there limitations?
Is the community active and receptive to new developers? How do you usually communicate and exchange help (Discord, forum, GitHub)?
observations: I didn’t research all these questions on the forum or anything like that, I asked to engage a little because I haven’t researched much about the platform yet and I’m still learning little by little, I’m Brazilian so English isn’t my strong point, but I’m writing here via Google Translate
Before reading this, keep in mind that I am coming from a 6 year Unity experience, and 1-2 Years Unreal experience. I started with unreal but refuse to use it anymore as it just never worked, was buggy and unreliable in anything it did. But this isn’t a thread about hating on unreal so let’s move on lol.
If you need me to explain anything better just let me know and i’ll try my best to make it google “translatable”.
I think flax engine isn’t exactly “advantageous” for beginners. I can’t say for unreal, but the scene/level hierarchy between flax and unity can be a bit of a learning curve. The one thing however, I will say that in terms of quality of life Flax feels so much better. Every time i tried to do something past “basic” game necessities in unity, it just felt like it gave me a proof of concept prototype, nothing was really finished and ever “just” worked, or even worked as expected in most scenarios when it did.
Unity has a simplified hierarchy where everything (Most of the time) can be attached to the gameobject itself. (I.E. You can have a RigidBody AND collider on the same object without needing a child-parent relationship, at least on the front end).
Moving from Unity to flax, Flax definitely had a harder learning curve than unity. But a lot of things are named similarly enough to where I can look through and understand what i need to do with it. But overall I would choose flax over unity because things just seem to work and they’re not just bare bones prototype stuff.
This one is preferential (to me at least), For me i think it has to be availability of components. In unity where you have to right click, add component/new gameobject, 3d/2d, etc. etc. to make a new gameobject, flax comes with a presorted component window on the right side that just allows me to drag/drop in things that i need, primitive objects, collisions, lights, effects, etc. I don’t really have to go looking “in what right click tab is this in, blah blah blah”, i can just click on the right and oh hey, a button or capsule. cool, nice, and quick.
Outside of preferences, I think everything just being available from the get go is nice. I don’t have to install any extra rendering packages, networking packages, navigation, terrain, etc. It’s just all there. Basic however it is, they do provide great examples of how to use everything in their sample projects. As well as they have provided great explanations and tutorials of different features on their documentation website.
I can’t say for physics, i’ve never felt like pushing it to the limits, but there is this thread.
“Stable”… in a loose sense. I’m a solo dev and I can say I myself make quick development in this engine and feel no issues (or try to figure out why something just isn’t working as expected, outside of my code). Other than current bugs that may be in the engine with crashes and whatnot. Large I’m not so sure on, Since i have been using flax they’ve made a lot of performance upgrades to the engine (Thank you for dynamic shadow resolution and update rates). I know this isn’t a great answer but i think it just depends on how large of a scope your project is.
Can’t exactly answer as I haven’t gotten a lot of experience with that yet. Sorry.
I’m not sure about this one, I haven’t run into a situation where I’ve had to use a library or download some extra plugin to do anything, unlike unity where just to use JSON files I had to find the package name of the newtonsoft library and then install it through unity.
The community seems to be pretty active, however, more on the discord than the forums. There is a “help” channel that gets a lot of action. I prefer and usually use these forums, It’s organized and I can send a wall of text without it disappearing into the ether next week. As well as I think it has search engine visibility so any thread you make may or may not show up on search engines, but don’t take my word for that.
