Links gamefromscratch.com/flax-engine-for-unity-game-developers/ The Synty Humble Bundle (Assets Used in this video): www.humblebundle.com/software/best-synty-game-dev-assets-remix-software?partner=gamefromscratch Other Game Engine for Unity Developer Videos: -------------------------- Godot - gamefromscratch.com/introduction-to-godot-for-unity-developers/ Defold - gamefromscratch.com/introduction-to-defold-for-unity-developers/ Stride - gamefromscratch.com/stride-for-unity-developers/
Can you teach us how to install the editor I tried but when I tap download after selecting version 1.6 and supported platform it doesn't show anything I need help sir
Contributor here. About 15:37, i actually implemented context sensitive node search a couple weeks ago, which shows all the nodes that are compatible with the port you dragged out from. It should be added in the 1.7 release iirc 😀It is not as smart as unreals solution yet, but we are getting there and improve it over time. 😅
Genuinely curious: given the current state of the engine (very new, smaller community, less tutorials, smaller team with apparently one main engineer, and no asset store), what metrics are being used to say that Flax is worth 1% less royalty than Unreal, and 1.5% more than Unity?
@@tPlayerioT i used stride and it crush so hard in empty projects, and other users included me have problem where you have crash window apper when existing app
Only issue with Stride is that it can only deploy to Microsoft platforms, so Windows, UWP, Xbox, etc. I think it recently got the ability to deploy to Android and iOS, so you could maybe use it for mobile games, but I'm not sure if those targets are production-ready, and if you wanna make games for Mac, Linux, PlayStation or Switch, then it's just not possible.
Flax is arguably more like a lightweight Unreal Engine which is why i like it so much, there's a clear intended wrokflow that makes development very straightforward. It's crazy that mostly one guy made such a great engine that pretty much unreal without the bloat.
@@TercumeyleSabitThat’s 4% after 250,000 per quarter. So, if you make 250,100 in a quarter, you pay 4 dollars. If you make 249,999 one quarter and 249,999 the next, you pay 0 (extreme example, I know). The quarterly 250k vs annual 1m means that the licensing is better if your revenue is spread out over the year. Either way, it’s significantly cheaper than Unreal. I personally think they should move down to 3% or 2.5%, and there is a card on the roadmap to make the revenue share more favorable for developers, so we’ll see what happens.
@@LordBeef Yeah, it's 20% cheaper than Unreal. If you earn $1M + $400 within a year (spread out) with Flax you pay $16 and with Unreal you would have to pay $20. I don't think any Unreal Engine feature is worth that $4. I am making $1M games regularly but still do not have custom licence, needs or employees. /s
Heads up, the flax engine creator has come out after the unity controversy to say he will be changing the TOS to be per version (same as unreal) and limited to once a year. So far he has said this publicly and added it to the flax engine road map, but the current TOS is still very similar to the current unity version. Meaning he has the legal right to change anytime at anytime with short notice, but if you don't like the change you must stop using the software. Again, this is going to be changing. Anywho thanks for your videos, been subscribed for a while. I'm a professional software developer but a hobbist game developer, your videos have keep me informed over the years. Thanks!
Glad to be of help. Honestly I can kinda get how existing engines could have a Unity like EULA and have no idea it was a problem. Hell, 99% of us had no idea the EULA in Unity was a problem until they very much made it a problem. Good to here he is moving to a Unreal style perpetual EULA approach, this is the only accetpable option going forward IMHO.
Man, I was just looking at your stride video yesterday and was hoping you had an flax engine for unity devs one as I've been trying to research the two engines. Now I grab my morning coffee and check my youtube feed and sure enough, a flax engine video. Perfect timing, thanks again!
Thank you for shedding light on all of the other lesser known engines. The more competition we have, the better off all of us are. Keep up the great work.
At first glance Flax does look really awesome and familiar as a Unity Dev. I explored Godot first and really like the FOSS aspect of it, but must admit I've run into a number of pain points trying to port my game to it. In particular, the fact that as of now Godot does not Export serialized classes and structs in the way Unity does. It's a workflow that I've become so comfortable with in Unity with my custom tools and inspectors, etc. that it's been a real stumbling block so far on Godot. I have no idea how Flax works with exposing script fields or extending their inspector though and would have to research it more.
Flax works pretty similar to unity with exposing fields, and you can serialize all editor fields in the current script just by calling `JsonSerializer.Serialize(this);`
The serialization API of Flax is based on Newtonsoft JSON and it's fantastic. Exposing script fields works roughly the same as Unity, and you can make their equivalent of a ScriptableObject from any C# class (as long as Newtonsoft can handle it). Being JSON that also means all of it's human readable, and less prone to errors than Unity's YAML. So unlike basically every other engine on the market: you will be able to merge your data changes.
@@Wolfos530Yaml is more readable than Json. That is the purpose of Yaml. Just because unity generates bad yaml doesn't mean Flax's json is gonna be readable. Furthermore, Yaml works better with git rather than json because you can't have trailing comma in json.
I popped into Flax after giving up on Stride and Godot and it really is surprising just how close to Unity it seems to be. I haven't really built anything in it yet but it's much more welcoming. In the end I'll probably just stick with Unity but for my sanity I had to go try other tools to see what was out there.
@@edward3190 Stride crashes a lot and doesn't feel very stable as an editor. Godot is fine, but I use Unity for my living income (contract work and app development) and Godot does not feel like it's ready to go in that world yet. Basically.. I would not trust these engines with my career the way I do with Unity.
Would be nice if at 15:08 it gave you not only a freeform name field but also a linked list of available parameters. Then if you ever rename the isWalking variable it doesn't break the visual script.
Long time subscriber of the channel Mike, thanks for all the coverage you do on all dev related matters. 🙂And thanks to your work covering so many game engines I came across Cocos Creator. I wanted a support engine to have alongside UE, in a way covering the platforms UE doesn't tackle. I was surprised to find Cocos is quite capable, even more so than what some official demos show. The recent update added various post process effects and as a whole it is improving quite fast. With the Unity debacle many engines are getting some time in the spotlight, and perhaps, you could as well do a Unity to Cocos type of vid. Being Cocos so closely modelled after Unity it would be a breeze. 🙂 Thanks again Mike for all the work you do. Keep it up! 🔥
This was the engine in my 'exploration phase' during the Unity HellWeek ™ that I geniunely liked the most. You know what the top selling feature is? Look at HOW FAST you enter Playmode! Even with a bunch of scripts in a test project, its just instant. It has a JobSystem similar to Unity's as well. The only thing its missing is VR support, which doesnt seem to high up on their priority list according to the roadmap. Which is sad, really. I would switch in a heartbeat, because this engine is nimble, lightweight and VERY powerful.
@@deathtidegame seems like you never had project bigger in Unity. It's normal that we wait 2+ minutes after pressing play and project compilation takes 2 hours and beyond.
@@rytif yes, it requires me to clean up a couple of static variables with an extra line of code and makes my enter playmode instant. What's your point?
@@LotnyLotnik use assembly definitions and disable the domain reload, my compilations went from 1+ mins to 10 seconds and my enter playmode from 15-20 seconds to 1 second
I like how you wanted to put it in the c:\temp but naming it overwrote it and put it in c:\. Maybe another backslash? I'll probably still use Unity for most things. But I've always looked for good alternatives anyway. The whole Unity drama has put more of a spotlight onto other engines. I also think a lot of Engines are now also looking into adding features that Unity has or similar features to get more of the Unity devs in, which is a good thing.
We're kind of in a funny interim period for visual scripting in Godot. Everybody agrees that it's a good thing to have, but the old style had some inherent limitations. So, the team, to my understanding, is building a new visual language from scratch, which is good, but isn't an overnight thing and just isn't done yet. Me, I prefer text-based anyway for anything other than shaders, but we've all got to be flexible with this stuff, everybody's different. I mean visual languages aren't new, they at least go back to "Lisp for the Connection Machine" in the early 80s, or HyperCard in '87.
A lot of people (like myself) would be 100% happy/ok with Godot never having visual scripting. Why try to shoehorn that in, when existing (often free or open source) solutions already exist?
@@hipflipped Well, I don't need it either, but there are a lot of people I work with who are artists or musicians, who are much more productive when they need to write something in that. Text code can be scarier than most experienced programmers realize. So for that, I'm fine with it existing, as long as it doesn't cause bloat (which it shouldn't). I guess it's more of a team thing. That said, I do think that it is very important that it is editable as text (or even better, translatable to GDScript at minimum with portability to other languages), and would like it very much if someone implemented a way to go from text to visual, too. I'm not sure I follow the "existing solutions" part, though. Is there a plugin that offers visual scripting in Godot that I'm unaware of?
I honestly really love the visual scripting and it’s the one of the main reasons I’m switching over from Godot to flax since it’s just more intuitive for me. I do enjoy coding and I wish I could explain it more but it just clicks better for me.
I've been waiting for this one. I'm mainly a Godot user but I've been playing around with Flax for the past week and I've been very impressed. The documentation is pretty solid and it has a growing community that's eager to help. Tutorials are sparse but they're growing as more and more people look to it as they look for a Unity alternative. Also note that it is a 3D focused engine. So if you're looking to make a 2D game, Godot or Defold is what you want to look at. Keep in mind that the engine is relatively new and it's one lead developer. Check out the road map before requesting major features. Yes I'm talking you who's asking for 2D tilemaps lol
@@DoomCatcher I didn't recommend Defold over them. Maybe it's how I worded it but I just gave Godot and Defold as two examples. Couldn't go listing all the 2D game engines I know. Truth be told I have only recently tried Defold and it felt pretty solid to me. If someone is a beginner I can't see them going wrong picking any of these 2D engines. In fact I'd say try em all and see which one suits you best.
I'm just wondering how well the gpu batching is for this engine, can we expect large scenes of many models at a low frame rate similar to Unity (unlike godot)?
What are the advantadges you like? Flax lets you contribute features, but the dev wants it to be a commercial product, as in he wants it to make him money when other people succeed with it. He's worked on it for 11 years so far, so I think he has good reason to want to make money from it.
@@user-mc4rr9fe6yThat's the point. Flax is a one man project and most likely will always will be. It's basically impossible to build a community project with a license like that.
Correct, being a "one man project" (no matter how great a dev that one man might be" is not a selling point. I tend to avoid software that has one point of failure like that. @@novh4ck
I like the modular approach of O3DE and the entity component system. I hope O3DE becomes a stable OpenSource AAA engine in some time. 5 or 4% royalty is very much in unreal or flax.
I doubt that. O3DE originates from CryEngine which has stability problems from the beginning. Dev teams usually tend to introduce fancy new features rather than fix instabilities. Stability usually only degrades with time, but rarely improves.
@@Alex-kr1egwell, Crytek games are pretty stable, sharing my personal experience, of course. I can't say these are bug-free, but you can't say these are unstable. What I dislike in O3DE is system requirements. Anything other is pretty good.
@@Alex-kr1egO3DE has a huge amount of the code rewritten. The entire renderer was rewritten when they moved from "Lumberyard" to O3DE. The project is very far from Cryengine 3.5 today. But it thinks it's a question of commitment if the engine reaches a state where it's a real option.
Edit on below: Documentation has an entire section about UI. Unfortunately their website doesn't say anything about UI tools or 2D sprite support. From the first look it doesn't seem to be made with 2D in mind and focuses on the 3D only. Also will need to implement our own tilemaps or grid systems if we need those.
This thing is more Unreal than Unity, for people who likes Unreal but can't stand its bloat, will be amazed by how fast Flax performs. It still lacks some features (most notably DLC support and Audio Graphs), but what they have are pretty solid. It even contains a real-time global illumination system that does not require hardware raytracing, and it looks way better than Unity Enlighten! This thing can write C++ and C# side by side and call methods from each other. Yes, SIDE BY SIDE!! Engine will create interop code for you automatically. It's nuts!
Honestly, both are good options and both have their strengths and weaknesses. Godot is certainly the safer bet, bigger community, shipped titles, more diversified/stable dev team, etc. But Flax is pretty exciting and a lot of fun to work, so if it looks appealing to you, it might be worth giving it a shot.
Someone in game dev mentioned to me that the distinction of Flax using gross revenue is actually a major difference which in some cases makes it cost more relative to other options. What are your thoughts?
I believe all royalty based engines are based off revenue over profits. Tracking profits is just too tricky and frankly, to easy to cheat. A good example is FOX screwed the authors of Alien out of royalties by using math to say that movie lost money. Yeah, Alien, that Alien. Lost money....
@@gamefromscratchyou think it's bad that Alien lost money? David Prowse, the on screen actor for Darth Vader never got any residuals for Return of The Jedi, because it never made money. Yeah. The movie that had a nearly $500M box office (in 1983 money!) on a production budget of $32M lost money.
flax is a very good engine, like they say, if unreal and unity had a baby, it wuld be flax. BUT, it is not ready for serious projects, you just dont delve deep enough in it to reveal the issues the editor has and some features straight up dont work properly. BUT everyone shuld have it on theyr radar and keep up to date with its progress, its developed by 1 guy mainly so progress seems slow. flax is like unreal engine for indie projects. it also uses nvidia PhysX which they say its even better then what unreal is using.
The 2D support is a lot like what Unity has before 2D mode. You can make "fake" 2D use orthographic cameras (and Sprites), just like what Unity 2D game devs used to do. Proper "flat" 2D support is far far away. It's not even on the roadmap.
If you want 2d there's plenty of options really. Only devs struggling to find unity alternatives aside from unreal would be 3d honestly and godot is really not that great at it.
any idea why when oppening a script in visual studio code i get everything with a red underline and an error saying some object is not defined in the assembly? Or some object is defined on an anssembly not referenced?
I did a pretty serious evaluation of this engine. They've got a great base here, and I can't wait to see where it'll be in 5 years or so when hopefully the engine has shipped a few commercial games (accompanied by the fixes those games require). But I also ran into lots of little issues and pain points. Nothing that isn't fixable, but while your experience may vary depending on your project - I'd say that it's not yet production ready. If you use this engine for a serious project at scale, be prepared to have to spend time fixing the engine. And the game may not come out as well as it would with a more battle-tested engine.
There is only partialy true. While it might have some pain points, bug reports are fixed within days/weeks, while with Unity PAID support often had to wait for months before fix was released.
@@Wolfos530 What issue number is it? I could ask it be fixed in their discord. They are very good with fixing issues quickly if the issues are brought to attention.
Oooo i will say this tho, Stride has a lot more similarities to Unity. Since programmatic naming is almost identical to unity. [ Start(), Update(), FixedUpdate(), Instantiate() , addChild(), prefabs, ridgedbodies, box collider's etc ] The sample scripts are awesome as well. UI was actually super easy to go to from unity. I do enjoy flax engines node editor & better 2d support but.
I will definitely look into Flax. I really love Godot but right now it has bugs all over the place and importing assets is a truly horrendous experience. GDScript does not support interfaces and the editor does not play well with C# all the time. So yeah, Godot can certainly do many things but I'm tired of fighting the engine all the time to do what should be mundane tasks. Unreal Engine looks pretty but it has way too much bloat that you just don't need and does not support C# natively. So yeah, I hope Flax lives up to the expectations.
Flax doesn't do sprites and 2d out of the box, correct? Other than that it's great. Stride, Bevy, and Flax all the way for me ;) Edit: the only issue I had relly other than that with Flax is the world-based UI, as in every UI is a game object. I'd rather design UI like Stride does, or how Unity's UI Toolkit works.
Considering Unity started out as a Mac focused game engine - Flax needs to do more for potential Mac developers than just a Github repository compared to Windows users getting a downloadable .exe file
Hey Mike, on the making over $250k a side note, I noticed that the license says you will be charged a 4% royalty fee per quarter as not per year. Does this mean that if I make $170K at launch and then only make $75K at the end of the year I do not have to pay a royalty?
Tried Flax Engine for 2 weeks, since my project require 3D and quite heavy UI I found Flux Engine is lacking in Game UI building tools which sadly was a deal breaker. There is free source plugin for C++ wrapper of CSS transpilation but I did not manage to setup it.
This is a nice engine. After Unity debacle I was looking for a good engine. Godot still got my preference because it is really open source and has a lot of people working on it. Flax rely only on one dev and is not as open as Godot so I will pass for now but good luck to people using it. Also the UI really need polish. I know some people might not care, but some does.
Honestly if web was my only target, and making a 3D game, i'd probably go Babylon, PlayCanvas or CocosCreator. All other web targets always feel a bit... hacky.
Thanks it was very helpful! I think they need to add 2D features as well! since it wants to be like Unity and Unreal so it needs support for 2D games too! I like it! very clean and straight forward game engine!
at least for mobiles is not ready, i tried some days ago and it was a painful mess just trying to build an apk, it doesn't work and the performance is really bad, like truly bad, a plane with a cube runs at 3 - 5 fps
It's my #1 choice for backup if not using Unity. Development has been very rapid, it runs extremely fast to the point of being instant, rather than Unity's crazy loading bars. I think the main issues I see are: 1) Some things here or there might not work immediately, but often it's already fixed if you compile yourself (which is apparently also very very fast) or coming in next version or is often fixed very quickly, and with access to the source code you could even contribute a fix too if you wanted (but unlike some fully open source software, nobody is using this to say "go fix it yourself, we don't care", which was the feeling I got from Stride). 2) There are some things that are actually fine, but look bad on paper for people who haven't had things personally explained to them, which isn't really a good way of handling it, so there are some people going around being excessively negative about certain things that have been covered but the PR/marketing just is not there and is not a focus or priority. A few major things hurting the engine's look, and it's not being addressed as quickly as actual development. So I keep seeing some frustrating comments calling out issues that aren't actually issues if you look into it (on the Discord), but I can't blame them for not looking deeper, they shouldn't have to just to not be getting a wrong idea on these things, which have been brought up but still haven't been clarified on outside of Discord. 3) It has yet to have a commercial game made in it, to really put it on the map. It's also not the best for 2d (at least currently). I was surprised how many features were present that I'd expect to have to get from the asset store on Unity, but they're just available out of the box in Flax. I think UI stuff is still coming in 1.7 or 1.8, so there may be some holes here or there for what you're trying to do. The roadmap is useful to look at, it shows how much and how quickly things have been added, and it's very down to earth and less vague about what's on the list for next. Also, code contributions are accepted, regardless of where it's at on the roadmap.
UnrealCRL was abandoned by it's developers. The contributions now are slow, and only from community. Wanted to give it a try but couldn't because of lack support for 5.0.
My reasoning is "Think of the money We can save with stride" And I went in and saw that flax and stride has a lot in common But flax is source available and will be like unreal engine in the near future (memory hog) and with their store it will be unity 🤔 the perfect balance
Unigine is a good choice, a very capable engine. It's a bummer they focused so heavily on engineering and industrial use (and benchmark creation) and didn't try to enter the game engine market earlier, they could have been a much bigger player.
If you want to make a good 3d game I recommend gdevelop it is extremely easy and also has a no code feature and a JavaScript feature and I would say best for 2d it’s also free and open source
why are you comparing this to unity. this is nothing like unity, this is basically a ue clone (not to understate the work of the engine dev, but it's clearly heavily inspired by unreal, not unity)
Smaller engines will almost never show up in job listings, even if they are using it at a given game studio, simply because they know the possibility of recruiting someone with experience in the engine is nearly zero. They will instead advertise as a C# or C++ or whatever job listing. Ive encountered this a few times with studios in the past, even with pretty well established frameworks
Unfortunately I doubt any companies are using flax in its current state, so there isn't really anywhere to work. If you mean working for flax, the developer has no money at all from the engine, so he can't afford to hire people.
Don't like the non-component model and got buggy feeling from trying it out. But like having playmode which Stride doesn't. Still wish for a tit-for-tat competitor for Unity !
unity is 2.5% instead of 4%, not sure if would be a good pick, but talking on long term aspect, this is 100x better than unity because unity is now on investors hands, so they want to milk all the money they can to make the investors happy, my opinion on this engine is just knowledge it, and maybe look into it on the future
Love Flax, but it should be noted that its 2D support is basically non-existent. It's great for 3D, especially low-poly 3D, but if you're an indie dev, there's a good chance you'll be doing 2D pixel art kinda stuff, and Flax just can't handle that.
Links
gamefromscratch.com/flax-engine-for-unity-game-developers/
The Synty Humble Bundle (Assets Used in this video):
www.humblebundle.com/software/best-synty-game-dev-assets-remix-software?partner=gamefromscratch
Other Game Engine for Unity Developer Videos:
--------------------------
Godot - gamefromscratch.com/introduction-to-godot-for-unity-developers/
Defold - gamefromscratch.com/introduction-to-defold-for-unity-developers/
Stride - gamefromscratch.com/stride-for-unity-developers/
tysm.👌
Source available in the same way Red Hat is? ;-) Also today is supposedly the final day (we'll see) on the Synty bundle.
Thanks for the vid!
Can you teach us how to install the editor I tried but when I tap download after selecting version 1.6 and supported platform it doesn't show anything I need help sir
Contributor here. About 15:37, i actually implemented context sensitive node search a couple weeks ago, which shows all the nodes that are compatible with the port you dragged out from. It should be added in the 1.7 release iirc 😀It is not as smart as unreals solution yet, but we are getting there and improve it over time. 😅
Oh nice, that's good to hear.
Genuinely curious: given the current state of the engine (very new, smaller community, less tutorials, smaller team with apparently one main engineer, and no asset store), what metrics are being used to say that Flax is worth 1% less royalty than Unreal, and 1.5% more than Unity?
@@bitmasked It's in their TOS
@@zeon137 I’m aware of that. I’m asking why they think it’s worth the amount they are asking for.
@@gamefromscratch Pin that comment already!
I’m always blown away by the speed of development on this engine. Just one main developer and he’s outpacing teams
have you tried stride? whats the difference between them?
@@tPlayerioT i used stride and it crush so hard in empty projects, and other users included me have problem where you have crash window apper when existing app
Only issue with Stride is that it can only deploy to Microsoft platforms, so Windows, UWP, Xbox, etc. I think it recently got the ability to deploy to Android and iOS, so you could maybe use it for mobile games, but I'm not sure if those targets are production-ready, and if you wanna make games for Mac, Linux, PlayStation or Switch, then it's just not possible.
@@DisturbedNeo Linux exports work fine, mobile is there but seems broken atm and console is deprecated so Xbox only works for 4.0 and before with UWP.
Having only one main dev is not a great selling point, no matter how good that one person might be.
Flax is arguably more like a lightweight Unreal Engine which is why i like it so much, there's a clear intended wrokflow that makes development very straightforward. It's crazy that mostly one guy made such a great engine that pretty much unreal without the bloat.
@@TercumeyleSabit I'll happily let my accountant handle that when I get that sum.
@@TercumeyleSabit if you reach that level, you should give some credit to the developer, no? It's worth it!
@@TercumeyleSabitThat’s 4% after 250,000 per quarter. So, if you make 250,100 in a quarter, you pay 4 dollars. If you make 249,999 one quarter and 249,999 the next, you pay 0 (extreme example, I know). The quarterly 250k vs annual 1m means that the licensing is better if your revenue is spread out over the year. Either way, it’s significantly cheaper than Unreal. I personally think they should move down to 3% or 2.5%, and there is a card on the roadmap to make the revenue share more favorable for developers, so we’ll see what happens.
@@LordBeef Yeah, it's 20% cheaper than Unreal. If you earn $1M + $400 within a year (spread out) with Flax you pay $16 and with Unreal you would have to pay $20. I don't think any Unreal Engine feature is worth that $4. I am making $1M games regularly but still do not have custom licence, needs or employees. /s
@@LordBeef "So, if you make 250,100 in a quarter, you pay 4 dollars." ... 250k * 4% = 10k, not 4 dollars...?!
Already working on a project in flax since the Unity Desaster. The engine has huge potential and I enjoy the fast compilation times.
Heads up, the flax engine creator has come out after the unity controversy to say he will be changing the TOS to be per version (same as unreal) and limited to once a year.
So far he has said this publicly and added it to the flax engine road map, but the current TOS is still very similar to the current unity version. Meaning he has the legal right to change anytime at anytime with short notice, but if you don't like the change you must stop using the software.
Again, this is going to be changing.
Anywho thanks for your videos, been subscribed for a while. I'm a professional software developer but a hobbist game developer, your videos have keep me informed over the years. Thanks!
Glad to be of help.
Honestly I can kinda get how existing engines could have a Unity like EULA and have no idea it was a problem. Hell, 99% of us had no idea the EULA in Unity was a problem until they very much made it a problem.
Good to here he is moving to a Unreal style perpetual EULA approach, this is the only accetpable option going forward IMHO.
Man, I was just looking at your stride video yesterday and was hoping you had an flax engine for unity devs one as I've been trying to research the two engines. Now I grab my morning coffee and check my youtube feed and sure enough, a flax engine video. Perfect timing, thanks again!
... this is because I'm spying on your thoughts. It's how I stay one step ahead.... ;)
Just kidding, glad to help.
Thank you for shedding light on all of the other lesser known engines. The more competition we have, the better off all of us are. Keep up the great work.
At first glance Flax does look really awesome and familiar as a Unity Dev.
I explored Godot first and really like the FOSS aspect of it, but must admit I've run into a number of pain points trying to port my game to it. In particular, the fact that as of now Godot does not Export serialized classes and structs in the way Unity does. It's a workflow that I've become so comfortable with in Unity with my custom tools and inspectors, etc. that it's been a real stumbling block so far on Godot.
I have no idea how Flax works with exposing script fields or extending their inspector though and would have to research it more.
Flax works pretty similar to unity with exposing fields, and you can serialize all editor fields in the current script just by calling `JsonSerializer.Serialize(this);`
The serialization API of Flax is based on Newtonsoft JSON and it's fantastic. Exposing script fields works roughly the same as Unity, and you can make their equivalent of a ScriptableObject from any C# class (as long as Newtonsoft can handle it).
Being JSON that also means all of it's human readable, and less prone to errors than Unity's YAML. So unlike basically every other engine on the market: you will be able to merge your data changes.
It's a shame that Stride doesnt have nearly as much coverage that Godot has
have you tried Custom Resources? they are like ScriptableObjects, Human readable, and git friendly
@@Wolfos530Yaml is more readable than Json. That is the purpose of Yaml.
Just because unity generates bad yaml doesn't mean Flax's json is gonna be readable.
Furthermore, Yaml works better with git rather than json because you can't have trailing comma in json.
C++ and C#, interesting 🤔
Would you consider doing some more tutorials on this engine?
I am thinking about doing 1 long introduction tutorial, yes. Is there enough interest?
@@gamefromscratch I'm interested!
@@gamefromscratchI'm interested too
Count me in!
@@gamefromscratchlet’s do it
The launcher did not agree with your temp folder choice and reset it to your test project name :)
What a b#@stard! Temp or die people, temp or die!
I popped into Flax after giving up on Stride and Godot and it really is surprising just how close to Unity it seems to be. I haven't really built anything in it yet but it's much more welcoming. In the end I'll probably just stick with Unity but for my sanity I had to go try other tools to see what was out there.
what's the problem with Stride?
I give up on godot XD
what's the problem with godot? XD
@@edward3190Stride is somewhat unstable and feels a bit abandoned to be honest. I was trying it some weeks ago and it crashed many times
@@edward3190 Stride crashes a lot and doesn't feel very stable as an editor. Godot is fine, but I use Unity for my living income (contract work and app development) and Godot does not feel like it's ready to go in that world yet. Basically.. I would not trust these engines with my career the way I do with Unity.
@@zeon137 Yes, this
Would be nice if at 15:08 it gave you not only a freeform name field but also a linked list of available parameters. Then if you ever rename the isWalking variable it doesn't break the visual script.
Long time subscriber of the channel Mike, thanks for all the coverage you do on all dev related matters. 🙂And thanks to your work covering so many game engines I came across Cocos Creator. I wanted a support engine to have alongside UE, in a way covering the platforms UE doesn't tackle. I was surprised to find Cocos is quite capable, even more so than what some official demos show. The recent update added various post process effects and as a whole it is improving quite fast. With the Unity debacle many engines are getting some time in the spotlight, and perhaps, you could as well do a Unity to Cocos type of vid. Being Cocos so closely modelled after Unity it would be a breeze. 🙂 Thanks again Mike for all the work you do. Keep it up! 🔥
Glad to be of use.
This was the engine in my 'exploration phase' during the Unity HellWeek ™ that I geniunely liked the most. You know what the top selling feature is? Look at HOW FAST you enter Playmode! Even with a bunch of scripts in a test project, its just instant.
It has a JobSystem similar to Unity's as well. The only thing its missing is VR support, which doesnt seem to high up on their priority list according to the roadmap. Which is sad, really. I would switch in a heartbeat, because this engine is nimble, lightweight and VERY powerful.
@@sothatwemaybefree330 Flax, Stride and Godot
unity has near-instant playmode if you enable it though
@@deathtidegame seems like you never had project bigger in Unity. It's normal that we wait 2+ minutes after pressing play and project compilation takes 2 hours and beyond.
@@rytif yes, it requires me to clean up a couple of static variables with an extra line of code and makes my enter playmode instant. What's your point?
@@LotnyLotnik use assembly definitions and disable the domain reload, my compilations went from 1+ mins to 10 seconds and my enter playmode from 15-20 seconds to 1 second
I'm 100% sure the developers loved the Unreal Engine.
Do a web search for "Unreal problems."
Oh yeah, it looks and works very similarly. It’s also got an extensive API like unreal engine
UE 5.3 for 3D, while the rests (except Unity) for 2D
I don't like Blueprints.
I like how you wanted to put it in the c:\temp but naming it overwrote it and put it in c:\. Maybe another backslash?
I'll probably still use Unity for most things. But I've always looked for good alternatives anyway.
The whole Unity drama has put more of a spotlight onto other engines. I also think a lot of Engines are now also looking into adding features that Unity has or similar features to get more of the Unity devs in, which is a good thing.
We're kind of in a funny interim period for visual scripting in Godot. Everybody agrees that it's a good thing to have, but the old style had some inherent limitations. So, the team, to my understanding, is building a new visual language from scratch, which is good, but isn't an overnight thing and just isn't done yet.
Me, I prefer text-based anyway for anything other than shaders, but we've all got to be flexible with this stuff, everybody's different. I mean visual languages aren't new, they at least go back to "Lisp for the Connection Machine" in the early 80s, or HyperCard in '87.
A lot of people (like myself) would be 100% happy/ok with Godot never having visual scripting. Why try to shoehorn that in, when existing (often free or open source) solutions already exist?
@@hipflipped Well, I don't need it either, but there are a lot of people I work with who are artists or musicians, who are much more productive when they need to write something in that. Text code can be scarier than most experienced programmers realize. So for that, I'm fine with it existing, as long as it doesn't cause bloat (which it shouldn't).
I guess it's more of a team thing.
That said, I do think that it is very important that it is editable as text (or even better, translatable to GDScript at minimum with portability to other languages), and would like it very much if someone implemented a way to go from text to visual, too.
I'm not sure I follow the "existing solutions" part, though. Is there a plugin that offers visual scripting in Godot that I'm unaware of?
Why are they trying to reinvent the wheel. Just do what unreal does and make it gdscript as a node
I honestly really love the visual scripting and it’s the one of the main reasons I’m switching over from Godot to flax since it’s just more intuitive for me. I do enjoy coding and I wish I could explain it more but it just clicks better for me.
All I wanted in my life is Unity with C++ scripting... This engine looks like it's just like that!
This thing is more like Unreal with C# scripting. The more I play with it, the more Unreal it feels :)
@@horeaper truth, even the project launch splash is literally identical to UE project launch splash.
I've been waiting for this one. I'm mainly a Godot user but I've been playing around with Flax for the past week and I've been very impressed.
The documentation is pretty solid and it has a growing community that's eager to help. Tutorials are sparse but they're growing as more and more people look to it as they look for a Unity alternative.
Also note that it is a 3D focused engine. So if you're looking to make a 2D game, Godot or Defold is what you want to look at. Keep in mind that the engine is relatively new and it's one lead developer. Check out the road map before requesting major features. Yes I'm talking you who's asking for 2D tilemaps lol
You forgot GameMaker Studio 2.
What about game maker construct and gdevelop
@@DoomCatcher I just mentioned the 2 as examples. I've made small games in both game maker and construct great as well.
@@Xero_Wolf curious to know why you recommend defold over them if you don't mind sharing
@@DoomCatcher I didn't recommend Defold over them. Maybe it's how I worded it but I just gave Godot and Defold as two examples. Couldn't go listing all the 2D game engines I know. Truth be told I have only recently tried Defold and it felt pretty solid to me. If someone is a beginner I can't see them going wrong picking any of these 2D engines. In fact I'd say try em all and see which one suits you best.
I'm just wondering how well the gpu batching is for this engine, can we expect large scenes of many models at a low frame rate similar to Unity (unlike godot)?
I think people don't quite understand the advantages of an open source software.
mid/long-term perception does not exist for immediatists
What are the advantadges you like? Flax lets you contribute features, but the dev wants it to be a commercial product, as in he wants it to make him money when other people succeed with it. He's worked on it for 11 years so far, so I think he has good reason to want to make money from it.
@@user-mc4rr9fe6y He also doesn't take donations, which is huge when you compare it to Godot. Just rev share
@@user-mc4rr9fe6yThat's the point. Flax is a one man project and most likely will always will be. It's basically impossible to build a community project with a license like that.
Correct, being a "one man project" (no matter how great a dev that one man might be" is not a selling point. I tend to avoid software that has one point of failure like that. @@novh4ck
Been using it for couple of week, love it! Since it API is almost identical to unity, most of the time i just use unity documentation for guidance 😆
I like the modular approach of O3DE and the entity component system. I hope O3DE becomes a stable OpenSource AAA engine in some time. 5 or 4% royalty is very much in unreal or flax.
I doubt that. O3DE originates from CryEngine which has stability problems from the beginning. Dev teams usually tend to introduce fancy new features rather than fix instabilities. Stability usually only degrades with time, but rarely improves.
@@Alex-kr1egwell, Crytek games are pretty stable, sharing my personal experience, of course. I can't say these are bug-free, but you can't say these are unstable.
What I dislike in O3DE is system requirements. Anything other is pretty good.
@@Alex-kr1egO3DE has a huge amount of the code rewritten. The entire renderer was rewritten when they moved from "Lumberyard" to O3DE. The project is very far from Cryengine 3.5 today. But it thinks it's a question of commitment if the engine reaches a state where it's a real option.
I really like flax. Like where it is heading.
15:46 this is already on master branch it will be in 1.8 version
I tried this when it was 1.4 or something, I was blown away, you can just feel that the developers give a damn about what they're making
I see flax, I press like
FINALLY! Godot is good, but this engine is so easy to slide into coming from Unity. Thanks for mirroring my thoughts. Great video.
Edit on below: Documentation has an entire section about UI.
Unfortunately their website doesn't say anything about UI tools or 2D sprite support. From the first look it doesn't seem to be made with 2D in mind and focuses on the 3D only. Also will need to implement our own tilemaps or grid systems if we need those.
Typo in the description. You wrote "develoepr". Awesome vid still! I'll take a look at flax, seems promising at least.
Thanks, will fix.
Wow! Thanks for such a thorough and well explained video!
This thing is more Unreal than Unity, for people who likes Unreal but can't stand its bloat, will be amazed by how fast Flax performs.
It still lacks some features (most notably DLC support and Audio Graphs), but what they have are pretty solid. It even contains a real-time global illumination system that does not require hardware raytracing, and it looks way better than Unity Enlighten!
This thing can write C++ and C# side by side and call methods from each other. Yes, SIDE BY SIDE!! Engine will create interop code for you automatically. It's nuts!
I think flax does have DLC support listed in the docs
@@user-mc4rr9fe6y no it's still on TODO list.
Very good video! This really looks like a good alternative engine
Hello, Im new to all this and just getting started. Can someone explain how to use that source code and what it does?
As of today, would you recommend Flay or Godot for a 3D game project?
Honestly, both are good options and both have their strengths and weaknesses.
Godot is certainly the safer bet, bigger community, shipped titles, more diversified/stable dev team, etc. But Flax is pretty exciting and a lot of fun to work, so if it looks appealing to you, it might be worth giving it a shot.
Someone in game dev mentioned to me that the distinction of Flax using gross revenue is actually a major difference which in some cases makes it cost more relative to other options. What are your thoughts?
I believe all royalty based engines are based off revenue over profits. Tracking profits is just too tricky and frankly, to easy to cheat. A good example is FOX screwed the authors of Alien out of royalties by using math to say that movie lost money.
Yeah, Alien, that Alien. Lost money....
@@gamefromscratchyou think it's bad that Alien lost money? David Prowse, the on screen actor for Darth Vader never got any residuals for Return of The Jedi, because it never made money. Yeah. The movie that had a nearly $500M box office (in 1983 money!) on a production budget of $32M lost money.
flax is a very good engine, like they say, if unreal and unity had a baby, it wuld be flax.
BUT, it is not ready for serious projects, you just dont delve deep enough in it to reveal the issues the editor has and some features straight up dont work properly.
BUT everyone shuld have it on theyr radar and keep up to date with its progress, its developed by 1 guy mainly so progress seems slow.
flax is like unreal engine for indie projects. it also uses nvidia PhysX which they say its even better then what unreal is using.
I am more into Flax than I am into Godot.
Selfishly looking forward to the GDevelop for Unity Developers
you can snap objects in unity using (control + shift + F) to where you are, i think its better than wasd moving things around.
but i think this engine is looking promising !!
2D game making is not well supported in Flax. Also the game UI features are not as good as in Godot, but Flax has terrain editor.
From what I know their focus in on 3D for now, and 2D stuff will come later. But it's 1 guys work so it can take a while
The 2D support is a lot like what Unity has before 2D mode. You can make "fake" 2D use orthographic cameras (and Sprites), just like what Unity 2D game devs used to do.
Proper "flat" 2D support is far far away. It's not even on the roadmap.
If you want 2d there's plenty of options really. Only devs struggling to find unity alternatives aside from unreal would be 3d honestly and godot is really not that great at it.
Really good engines! love your content ! you rock bro God Bless you!
any idea why when oppening a script in visual studio code i get everything with a red underline and an error saying some object is not defined in the assembly? Or some object is defined on an anssembly not referenced?
I did a pretty serious evaluation of this engine. They've got a great base here, and I can't wait to see where it'll be in 5 years or so when hopefully the engine has shipped a few commercial games (accompanied by the fixes those games require).
But I also ran into lots of little issues and pain points. Nothing that isn't fixable, but while your experience may vary depending on your project - I'd say that it's not yet production ready. If you use this engine for a serious project at scale, be prepared to have to spend time fixing the engine. And the game may not come out as well as it would with a more battle-tested engine.
There is only partialy true. While it might have some pain points, bug reports are fixed within days/weeks, while with Unity PAID support often had to wait for months before fix was released.
@@LotnyLotnik One of the bug reports I filed is still open, more than a year later. This bug had a pretty big impact on the game's animation quality.
@@Wolfos530 What issue number is it? I could ask it be fixed in their discord. They are very good with fixing issues quickly if the issues are brought to attention.
@@user-mc4rr9fe6y #739 would be my guess.
I use Flax Engine! So thank you for making this
Oooo i will say this tho, Stride has a lot more similarities to Unity.
Since programmatic naming is almost identical to unity.
[ Start(), Update(), FixedUpdate(), Instantiate() , addChild(), prefabs, ridgedbodies, box collider's etc ]
The sample scripts are awesome as well.
UI was actually super easy to go to from unity.
I do enjoy flax engines node editor & better 2d support but.
having the same name would be really helpful for switching engine or writing code compatible for both engines.
I will definitely look into Flax. I really love Godot but right now it has bugs all over the place and importing assets is a truly horrendous experience. GDScript does not support interfaces and the editor does not play well with C# all the time. So yeah, Godot can certainly do many things but I'm tired of fighting the engine all the time to do what should be mundane tasks. Unreal Engine looks pretty but it has way too much bloat that you just don't need and does not support C# natively. So yeah, I hope Flax lives up to the expectations.
Flax doesn't do sprites and 2d out of the box, correct? Other than that it's great. Stride, Bevy, and Flax all the way for me ;)
Edit: the only issue I had relly other than that with Flax is the world-based UI, as in every UI is a game object. I'd rather design UI like Stride does, or how Unity's UI Toolkit works.
Considering Unity started out as a Mac focused game engine - Flax needs to do more for potential Mac developers than just a Github repository compared to Windows users getting a downloadable .exe file
Flax is like a Dollar Store version of Unreal Engine.
I still like Flax as it still uses Physx unlike Unreal.
Hey Mike, on the making over $250k a side note, I noticed that the license says you will be charged a 4% royalty fee per quarter as not per year. Does this mean that if I make $170K at launch and then only make $75K at the end of the year I do not have to pay a royalty?
Seems like a mix between Unity and Unreal.
Flax is super performant and well made. I move to Flax.
the best way to describe flax is: if unreal and unity made a baby
Does this engine support VR for PC and standalone? How decent are the multiplayer features?
Anyone know what the easiest 3d engine is, that's also free or at least cheap, to just import some assets and move them from one point to another?
Now we are talking! Finally found a replacement for Unity.
Shame there aren't any courses for Flax for complete newbies. I've been able to find decent ones for Godot, but noting in Flax yet :(
I really need a visual scripting tutorial for flax.
Tried Flax Engine for 2 weeks, since my project require 3D and quite heavy UI I found Flux Engine is lacking in Game UI building tools which sadly was a deal breaker. There is free source plugin for C++ wrapper of CSS transpilation but I did not manage to setup it.
Did you ask in the discord? they are very helpful there
This is a nice engine. After Unity debacle I was looking for a good engine. Godot still got my preference because it is really open source and has a lot of people working on it.
Flax rely only on one dev and is not as open as Godot so I will pass for now but good luck to people using it. Also the UI really need polish. I know some people might not care, but some does.
Can it be used for mobile VR dev?
Which one is the best racomanded game engin to build Html5 (Webgl) base 3d game development with cross-platform support
Honestly if web was my only target, and making a 3D game, i'd probably go Babylon, PlayCanvas or CocosCreator. All other web targets always feel a bit... hacky.
thank you very much❤@@gamefromscratch
Thanks it was very helpful! I think they need to add 2D features as well! since it wants to be like Unity and Unreal so it needs support for 2D games too! I like it! very clean and straight forward game engine!
at least for mobiles is not ready, i tried some days ago and it was a painful mess just trying to build an apk, it doesn't work and the performance is really bad, like truly bad, a plane with a cube runs at 3 - 5 fps
Ouch, I shall have to give this a try. Granted, building for mobile is almost always a painful experience, so I'm not sure I'm looking forward to it.
You likely stumbled on the same thing I did the first time around. You need to set your build to Release Mode in the Game Cooker settings
That project escaped, it didn't go in the dreaded temp folder xD 1:30
wow, very impressive! So what's the catch?
Depends on what catch you mean.. you have any concerns in mind? the engine is a bit buggy for some people.. but ive never had really bad issues
It's my #1 choice for backup if not using Unity. Development has been very rapid, it runs extremely fast to the point of being instant, rather than Unity's crazy loading bars. I think the main issues I see are: 1) Some things here or there might not work immediately, but often it's already fixed if you compile yourself (which is apparently also very very fast) or coming in next version or is often fixed very quickly, and with access to the source code you could even contribute a fix too if you wanted (but unlike some fully open source software, nobody is using this to say "go fix it yourself, we don't care", which was the feeling I got from Stride).
2) There are some things that are actually fine, but look bad on paper for people who haven't had things personally explained to them, which isn't really a good way of handling it, so there are some people going around being excessively negative about certain things that have been covered but the PR/marketing just is not there and is not a focus or priority. A few major things hurting the engine's look, and it's not being addressed as quickly as actual development. So I keep seeing some frustrating comments calling out issues that aren't actually issues if you look into it (on the Discord), but I can't blame them for not looking deeper, they shouldn't have to just to not be getting a wrong idea on these things, which have been brought up but still haven't been clarified on outside of Discord.
3) It has yet to have a commercial game made in it, to really put it on the map. It's also not the best for 2d (at least currently). I was surprised how many features were present that I'd expect to have to get from the asset store on Unity, but they're just available out of the box in Flax. I think UI stuff is still coming in 1.7 or 1.8, so there may be some holes here or there for what you're trying to do. The roadmap is useful to look at, it shows how much and how quickly things have been added, and it's very down to earth and less vague about what's on the list for next. Also, code contributions are accepted, regardless of where it's at on the roadmap.
The catch is that it’s fairly new and not much tutorials
How is Flax's XR support these days?
Is unreal plus UnrealCLR worth trying? Like, how different is it from unity
UnrealCRL was abandoned by it's developers. The contributions now are slow, and only from community. Wanted to give it a try but couldn't because of lack support for 5.0.
It come down the doc and video are updated.
2:08 ”than”
Very impressive, having access to cpp is such a boon, the lack of a 2d editor is a bummer though
Very good video.
Sorry that "stride" game engine is less competitive
What about the clause 16 in the Eula? Sounds similar to unity 🤓
Its supposed to be fixed in 1.7, which comes out soon.
thats huge thank u@@user-mc4rr9fe6y
More, more! Please! tHAnK YOU!
Why not stride 3d engine
Why not? ;)
gamefromscratch.com/stride-for-unity-developers/
Because when something isn't working well, the answer is "it's open source, you can go fix it whenever you want".
My reasoning is
"Think of the money
We can save with stride"
And I went in and saw that flax and stride has a lot in common
But flax is source available and will be like unreal engine in the near future (memory hog) and with their store it will be unity 🤔 the perfect balance
No 2D right?
All these engines I’ve never heard of
opinion on gdevelop
bro but it's measure in CM not in M. It's good.
Even if I've use Godot since forever, I like to see other options
This is best engine for anyone easy and very very powerfull..
This engine is extremely under cooked. A lot of work still needs to be done if they want to compete with you Unity. Still though I see the potential!
This is really nice, I might like it better than Godot
What about Unigine?
Unigine is a good choice, a very capable engine.
It's a bummer they focused so heavily on engineering and industrial use (and benchmark creation) and didn't try to enter the game engine market earlier, they could have been a much bigger player.
is it good for 2d?
If you want to make a good 3d game I recommend gdevelop it is extremely easy and also has a no code feature and a JavaScript feature and I would say best for 2d it’s also free and open source
why are you comparing this to unity. this is nothing like unity, this is basically a ue clone (not to understate the work of the engine dev, but it's clearly heavily inspired by unreal, not unity)
Hopefully they will not "Pull a Unity" in the future.
Mike when he realises he created the project in root(C:) and not temp xD
Now... where are the developer job openings?
I would love to work with Flax!
Smaller engines will almost never show up in job listings, even if they are using it at a given game studio, simply because they know the possibility of recruiting someone with experience in the engine is nearly zero. They will instead advertise as a C# or C++ or whatever job listing.
Ive encountered this a few times with studios in the past, even with pretty well established frameworks
Unfortunately I doubt any companies are using flax in its current state, so there isn't really anywhere to work. If you mean working for flax, the developer has no money at all from the engine, so he can't afford to hire people.
Flax isn’t open source but it’s not Unity, which is nice
Don't like the non-component model and got buggy feeling from trying it out. But like having playmode which Stride doesn't. Still wish for a tit-for-tat competitor for Unity !
unity is 2.5% instead of 4%, not sure if would be a good pick, but talking on long term aspect, this is 100x better than unity because unity is now on investors hands, so they want to milk all the money they can to make the investors happy, my opinion on this engine is just knowledge it, and maybe look into it on the future
that seems intresting
The best engine for Unity developers is still ... Unity!
Very cool!
wow this has potental!
The 1.6 editor crashes on my PC. I want to love Flax, but it refuses to love me.
Try the "master branch" version, it has many fixes. You could also wait for 1.7 to release in a week or 2
Love Flax, but it should be noted that its 2D support is basically non-existent. It's great for 3D, especially low-poly 3D, but if you're an indie dev, there's a good chance you'll be doing 2D pixel art kinda stuff, and Flax just can't handle that.