Technical Evaluation Matrix

Use the following matrix to evaluate engines for suitability. Edit the Wiki source and fill-in the appropriate cell with notes about each.

	Unreal Engine	Godot	Minetest	UNIGINE
Voxel Engine	Very, very rich support, supports blocky and smooth. Professional version is going to be required, which costs $299 USD. Possibly more advanced than Transvoxel	Built-in, unsure what version it's using but it appears to be in active development (based on Transvoxel by Eric Lengyel)
Dev Performance	Extremely slow, feels like a Rube Goldberg machine	Superb, almost instantaneous
Component Extensibility
Help and Support
Community	Huge, tons of people in the Discord, very active
Documentation
Tutorials & Examples				​Company provided tutorials
Terrain Paging		Not much is listed for this: ​Official write up on large worlds ​Forum post about this. Looks like it does not have key features built into it. That said, it looks like Zylann's Voxel engine supports LOD-based terrain, which is promising		​Paid version supports unlimited size and real time terrain deformation along with high detail
Dynamic Lighting	Plenty of options and flexibility	Claims there are only a max of 8 light sources an object can receive at a time, but this might be ok after the new Godot 4.0 lightmapper, it claims to do well and bake more than that
Network Synchronisation	Built-in both Unreal Engine and Voxel Plugin has its own built-in support	Nothing Voxel-specific, but everything Godot is node-based, and Godot allows you to add networking logic at the node level, both UDP and TCP
GPU Technology Used	Most advanced, including Vulkan, ​Only game engine co-developed by nVidia does not work well with AMD cards	OpenGL 2.1, Vulkan is coming
Materials / Texture Support
Fluid Dynamics
HLSI		GD-Script, Lua-like	Lua (for modding)	​UnigineScript (scripting)
C++ Support	Built-in	Requires use of GD-Native		Support for C++
Platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows)				​Windows and Linux
Cost / Licensing	Royalty-free until first $1M, then 5% on all gross revenues	Free	LGPL	​Games under $100K free, but does not support large worlds after that it cost $150 a month

Description

Component Extensibility

How easy is it to tweak / modify behaviour of existing components in-case we need them to do more?

Help and Support

What's the official product and technical support like? response time, cost, etc.

Community

What's the user community of the product like? forums, response-time, skill-level, enthusiasm, activity, etc.

HLSI

High Level Scripting Interface, does the engine provide a way to write scripts for game logic? and in particular, does this interact well with their WYSIWYG editor?

Fluid Dynamics

Does the engine provide any fluid dynamics out of the box? this includes everything necessary to model water flow and propagation in an open-world environment. Minecraft totally side-steps this and employs a completely borked version of fluid dynamics (total cop-out). Dwarf Fortress does not cop-out, but fluid dynamics in that game can bring the CPU to its knees. Ideally we want to farm these computations out to the GPU.

Notable Games

• ​Dual Universe