[amirrajan]

> Are there enough Ruby devs to sustain this?

So far so good. We’ve been in business for nearly a decade now (with the game engine going onto year 3).

> Unity, Unreal, React Native game engine, or one of the other (thousand) game engines out there?

Well our ability to deploy to console eliminates most engines as competitors/options. Unreal is a fantastic engine for 3D games. Unity is... well... not that great to be honest.

Other differentiators are on the site.

[gfxgirl]

Unity is just fine. 1000s of shipping successful games. The latest hit game made in Unity is Valheim.

I don't choose games based on their engine I choose them based on if they are fun. Same as I don't choose movies based on what camera was used to shoot them or what software was used to render the CGI scenes.

[vidarh]

By that measure, pure hardware-banging from C is just fine too. Heck, thousands of commercial games written in 6502 assembler have been released over the years. Doesn't mean it was an ideal developer experience.

The market for a game engine is not players. Most games could be written with almost anything.

[tomlin]

Wait, you're suggesting Ruby is better than Unity? This has to be a joke.

[amirrajan]

Nope. Not a joke. We’re faster too: https://youtu.be/UuY7CWdvyWM

[jbluepolarbear]

Your logic isn’t equivalent: in your Ruby example you precalulate the speed for each axis and only add the value to x and y each frame. In the Unity example you do the inefficient “Speed * new Vector3(1,1,0) * Time.DeltaTime” every frame. If you moved that calculation to the start and then add in fixed update they would be equivalent logic”. That is probably the difference you notice.

[highowl]

Sorry, but if an engine developer says that Unity is just a bad engine and your engine is faster, you are just harming yourself and your work, since this is silly.

Unity employed Mike Acton a few years ago, who is now lading their transformation to a data oriented backend. They are switching everything out for a pretty well thought out Entity-Component-System (not the old Component stuff you had in unity, but a way of saving your game data in arrays of the same type for performance, instead of as objects with data that should not be together in memory). I have not kept up in the last year, but already a year ago this was showing many promising results, being able to simulate enormous amounts of agents in games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9_7QYaeNjc

Unreal and Godot have their good sides (Unreal being great for non-coders and/or if you want to an FPS, Godot being able to bind to many languages in the backend and being open source). But none of them is doing the same huge transformations in the backend as unity.

[minitech]

Looks like the Ruby code in https://gist.github.com/amirrajan/e26fc9de3c20e7c395f6809a99... does a fixed update, so maybe FixedUpdate with Unity would be a better comparison?

[tomlin]

Agree. The comparison only works if you don't dig, or not ask questions.

[TylerE]

Press F to doubt.

On some tiny synthetic benchmark maybe.

Come back when your engine can handle something even 1% as complex, as say, Dyson Sphere Program.

[phaedryx]

I suspect that DragonRuby is faster as a 2D game engine and doesn't make sense for a complex 3D game.

[TylerE]

I don't believe that either. Unity works just fine for Cuphead, which is a pretty graphically intense game. Plenty of other graphical complicated 2d games too.

[phaedryx]

I think you're moving the goalposts. Of course Unity can work "just fine" for things like Cuphead. However, DragonRuby is an mRuby wrapper around SDL by the guy who wrote SDL vs. a 3D engine that was reworked into a 2D engine?

Surely Unity has more overhead and DragonRuby can make more optimizations.

[MrLeap]

Ehh, I could put together a thing that could display several million dots at 60 fps in unity in a few minutes.

(a recent example of some dots I moved) https://twitter.com/LeapJosh/status/1378056437105049603

Not saying DragonRuby isn't the bees knees, I've never used it but appreciate alternatives existing.

Despite that, sprites are the wrong facility for drawing that many dots in unity.

[amirrajan]

Can you associate a PhysicsBody2D with each one of these?

[MrLeap]

AFAIK there's GPU analogs for everything physicsBody2d's can do, but not directly.

Per particle gravity and forces are batteries included. If you want GPU particles that can collide with other particles there's Fluvio, it's free.

Here's 65k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwzfr9ppvj4

[amirrajan]

From an apples to apples standpoint. What you're seeing in the video is DragonRuby Entities vs Unity GameObjects (with full functionality).

They look like particles yes, but the intent was to show the creation of fully featured constructs (not a demonstration of "fire and forget" particles).

[tomlin]

So this YT video of 3:47 is going to prove that Ruby is faster and better than Unity? This is like comparing BASIC and C, but making sure BASIC is on a quad-core, and C on a 386 to make the point work.

[michaelbrave]

Unitiy's main strengths are it's asset store and ability to export to consoles/phones, also most people like C#. It also had strong momentum of tutorials and community but that is diminishing now as most are so outdated now and for older versions that they are no longer relevant. Unreal is getting easier everyday and they are getting more assets and more community together so it's eating them from the high end while Godot is eating them from the low end. Since DragonRuby is good at exporting to consoles and most Ruby users like Ruby so it's arguable that they could be better in a lot of ways.

[jbluepolarbear]

Have any data to back up these claims? Unity keeps growing, just went IPO last year, and is releasing high quality tutorials regularly.

[bildung]

I'm not the one you asked, but using google trends as an indicator, both unity and unreal lose mindshare: https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo...

[Applejinx]

I daresay the Godot Engine has more to do with that, than Ruby as a game engine.

[jbluepolarbear]

Unity deploys to console. You just need to be licensed to build to different console platforms. And saying Unity is not that great is an ignorant statement. What about it isn’t great? And how is DragonRuby better?

[amirrajan]

This does a good job of summarizing what's wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23271973

[jbluepolarbear]

Been using Unity for a long time and that is a hyperbolic comment. It’s not nearly as bad as that person makes it out to be.

[amirrajan]

I’m not sure how to respond frankly. You claimed my statements were ignorant. So in response, I provided a source that I agree with wholeheartedly. And a HN comment thread that provides even more criticisms.

I mean, I can add to what’s already been stated. But I’m not sure it’ll really help further the conversation. Especially when it’s being dismissed as “not nearly as bad”. So... yea.