Wicked Engine in 2023 - This Engine Blows My Mind!

The Wicked Engine is a free and open source game engine that just keeps getting better and better. Recently featured in our Underrated Game Engines video (link below), since that video the Wicked Engine has added two amazing new features... Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 support!
This is a free, mostly single developer game engine, and it supports the two most current and cutting edge game consoles!
The engine is also chock full of features and rendering techniques. It comes with a light weight fully functioning editor as well as C++ and Lua scripting support. In fact this game engine is used as the tech behind the GameGuru Max game engine.
Links
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Under Rated Game Engines video: • Most Underrated Game E...
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Links --------- gamefromscratch.com/wicked-engine-in-2023/ gamefromscratch.com/underrated-game-engines-round-up/ Under Rated Game Engines video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/n6OopKmwnN-WkLc ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Help Support GFS* : www.patreon.com/gamefromscratch *GameDev News* : gamefromscratch.com *GameDev Tutorials* : devga.me *Discord* : discord.com/invite/R7tUVbD *Twitter* : twitter.com/gamefromscratch -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[@DragoniteSpam]

I'm constantly torn between wanting to use an engine I know well to be able to work relatively quickly, and wanting to mess around with cool but obscure projects like this. This looks like fun.

[@igorthelight]

Serious work - known engine Fool around - obscure engine ;-)

[@afbanjagjafdbxcvbrtjwsasdg2825]

Is the decision easier in September 2023?

[@igorthelight]

@@afbanjagjafdbxcvbrtjwsasdg2825 Well, Unity shoot itself in the foot xD But the choice between some known engine and an obscure one is still here ;-)

[@narwhalgamingvariety]

@@afbanjagjafdbxcvbrtjwsasdg2825 No

[@DFX2KX]

@@rytif Godot is getting to the point where (at least for indie games) it qualifies as serious work. There's a few games on Steam selling alright that use it. That said, Unreal at least is in a league of it's own in terms of what it can do. Downside is that it's made for large teams, it's downright unwieldly for a solo dev...

[@leeoiou7295]

I wish we as developers can come together and support the brilliant man behind this engine. Aside Unity and unreal, I would be happy to use this engine just to support the developer. Flax and stride are also in my mind as well.

[@ujugamestudio]

The engine is not standard in industry. Surely it's missing some key things so that's why it's underrated.

[@brodriguez11000]

​@@ujugamestudioWell hopefully Gameguru support should change that.

[@snesmocha]

@@ujugamestudio well obviously, it's maintained by a single bloody guy last i checked. it's an absolutely amazing engine to check out if you're getting into making engines as it's just so simple

[@deadpianist7494]

whats wrong with Unreal?

[@ujugamestudio]

@@deadpianist7494 Unity and UE5 are okay. But indie devs try other engines every time they see a new engine, lol Unity and Unreal Engine are perfect in industry.

[@msec7188]

I would love to see some more done with the wicked engine tutorial series perhaps?

[@onlyeyeno]

It's funny how is sounds like "Terrain" whenever You say "Train" ;) Thanks for another great video Best regards.

[@rmt3589]

This is so encouraging!!! Excited for this proof of concept, and to solo my own game engine!!!

[@owenlloyd2528]

Thank you. A tutorial/walkthrough would be awesome if you can find the time.

[@ArmadaWixxi]

I'm going to be very honest. The big problem with engines like Wicked Engine that are made by a single person is that they are well... made by a single person. As a game dev the last thing you want is to suddenly see the engine your entire game is made in be no longer supported or further updated. If it's made by a single guy, chances for that to happen are very real. If you are working on a budget with investors that is just a massive risk you do not want to take. Some indie devs such as myself take huge risks going all in on game development, collecting funds from investors that want to see results. Not being able to deliver on those results can literally mean losing enitre savings and even a house. No offens but as much as I would love to stimulate the creation of more game engines like this it's simply too risky. And another problem is documentation, tutorials, examples and resources.

[@sub-harmonik]

If you're developing against a specific version of the engine why would it matter if it weren't updated? Just because of the resources it would take to fix bugs or incompatibility issues that arise?

[@DxXNA]

Eh the point in using an engine like this is that you would take over the development yourself. You use Unreal Engine / Unity when you have no interest in that.

[@kiyasuihito]

​@@DxXNAmy thoughts exactly

[@DxXNA]

@@kiyasuihitoYeah not to mention Call of Duty used ID Tech 3 Engine and have turned it into the engine they use today. Which released in 2005.

[@Asinsful]

They won't update. Just look at old AAA games. They remake it with a new engine. They never update decades old game.

[@danielmejia5879]

Please do create some basic tutorial, or walkthrough on creating a small game in Wicked Engine.

[@AstraAnime]

I would like to see more of this engine. Would love to see a playlist of tutorials to follow.

[@carlriemann925]

This is truly a powerful C++ powered game engine. IT'S amazing!!

[@creo_one]

I wish people would support indie engines more, they require a lot of work and knowledge to develop and are mostly unseen. There are also some spectacular ideas that are missed by mainstream

[@DJBSharpMusic]

I would definitely love to see more, possibly tutorials for beginners, if needed. It looks beefy for something that was made by very few people.

[@bucket6988]

I might look into this tommorow 😮

[@deluxe_1337]

The editor needs a UI overhaul and it'll be appealing to more people

[@saicher]

Literally all that is missing for me is a Multiplayer Framework and I'd be set to give it a try

[@DiamantMains]

This looks amazing

[@daemones2272]

After you mentioned terrains, all I can hear is trains. lol

[@davidj3048]

How can someone build all this alone!

[@ArIyan_yt]

Making an engine needs time Making a very powerful engine needs a lot of people

[@Asinsful]

That 's why it's called Wicked! ;)

[@chizyapochiponda1602]

Hey Mike, have you come across the Cave Engine? Would really like you to review on it. I just saw it and it looks pretty interesting. I'm yet to play around with it myself though

[@gamefromscratch]

Odd swore I had covered it, but it seems I may not. Adding to "the list", thanks.

[@chizyapochiponda1602]

@@gamefromscratch no problem 👍🏾👍🏾

[@deadpianist7494]

it only has windows export lol

[@Ultimatefire54]

Thanks for covering this, would definitely appreciate a more in-depth dive into this engine.

[@astrahcat1212]

This is my new engine for next project, stuck in Unity but will switch

[@Bananenbauer123]

How did it go? I switched from Unity to Godot 4, but it feels like Godot is still not cut out for 3D games.

[@santoshgujar5237]

Thank you, Sir, 🙏🌺😇

[@ukrsolid]

Wicked Engine tutorial please

[@HaeriStudios]

Other people want fame and money. All I want is for my engine to get featured on Mikes's channel.

[@SomeRandomPiggo]

So fame

[@LucyLavend]

All these spam comments lmao

[@ukrsolid]

Wicked Engine is Wicked !

[@user-ry5bb8pv2j]

can you tell us what is the system specs for this and what specs your pc have?

[@deadjuice1880]

I'm learning 2D part of Godot, wanna get comfortable fully coding before going to C++ and 3D. It would be cool to use something obscure like this engine, but maybe not for first time 3D.

[@jphwacheski]

More please!

[@erichansen9669]

What do you use to record your desktop? OBS?

[@igorthelight]

Most likely. It's the best program IMHO. Just learn how to use it properly ;-)

[@JIN-TECH]

Render features in this engine amaze and that is really very clean code, unlike Godot's code dump. It is a pity that this developer is not engaged in rendering in Godot.

[@brodriguez11000]

Pity works both ways. Hopefully Godot is helping with this engine.

[@snesmocha]

i just took a look at this engine... it puts godots entire engine to shame lmfao

[@tutortomato]

​@@snesmochayep,I don't know what Godot developer doing anymore...they just doesn't want to touch the rendering side of godot,all the feature just wasn't there

[@snesmocha]

​@@tutortomato yea... im still beyond confused how the rendering side of godot ended up the way it did... it's practically unusable at this point. the node system with its over complicated and downright insane inheritance tree is getting worse and worse by the update. at this point i don't really care what most people think for praising godot, the engine has no real potential to be anything other than just a hobbyists tool. they just need a complete 100% rewrite of their rendering engine and rework the toolchain

[@tutortomato]

@@snesmocha most of it is because Juan want Godot to be just Godot(in what way? I'm not sure),this is probably the worst of it. All Godot potential are being held back because he doesn't want it...this is his engine. The rendering quality are the worst,the feature for world environment(sky,water,foliage) will not be made into the core,and the SSR still broken even after 4 years!!!! Shieet 😅 I give up...salute to the core Dev for keeping up godot as it current state for indefinite,even I cannot compete with that persistency 🤣

[@MuhammadHosny0]

wait so I can add soft body physics in this engine but not in Unity? 😥

[@TorQueMoD]

If I ever actually learn to code, this is definitely the engine I would use. For now, I'm stuck with Unreal :P

[@deadpianist7494]

so u don't code in unreal engine?

[@ivensauro]

​@@deadpianist7494he should use blueprint or Just some packages

[@swiftypopty1102]

​@@deadpianist7494Nope, I use it for render purposes

[@skaruts]

Always a pleasure to see more engines using Lua. It doesn't run on my system, though, because I'm still on windows 7. I'm sad it doesn't use luajit too.

[@igorthelight]

SO many programs are stopped supporting Windows 7. It's really dying now. I would recommend to switch to Windows 10 (EOL 2025 year). Just don't forget to disable all the telemetry using O&O ShutUpWin10++

[@pwhv]

man when you where navigating the first scene the lighting was flickering which means is broken

[@n00bc0de7]

This project is amazing. I really appreciate that he is using Lua for scripting. I am really not a fan of C# personally.

[@mr.mirror1213]

iirc isn't lua slower than c# although I understand the runtime overhead of Lua is non existent

[@gamefromscratch]

Lua is generally slower than C# Yes though, its a language that was designed to be embedded in other languages and has faster interop with C code, so most of the performance is on the C side of the fence anyways. Additionally there exist LuaC and LuaJIT, the first a compiler, the second a Just In Time compiler, like the default for C#, so you can get the performance very similar. Since you're using Lua for mostly game logic and not resource intensive code, the performance is generally more than good enough and can be made much better. I'm not sure if Wicked uses LuaJIT, I wouldn't be shocked if it did.

[@mr.mirror1213]

@@gamefromscratch thanks for the reply

[@skaruts]

@@gamefromscratch it doesn't have luajit. I just checked the source code, the lua version is 5.3 (it's in WickedEngine/LUA/lua.h), So no luajit. That's quite unfortunate, as it does make a ton of difference. I wish someone could port luajit for the latest lua versions, tbh.

[@skaruts]

@@mr.mirror1213 for someone like me, who doesn't like anything about C#, it's pretty much not a choice. Python is way too slow (as a scripting language, unless you can still use numpy, etc, which I doubt). Lua is by far my best pick for scripting languages, including because it's such a pleasurable language to write code in (no headache inducing pitfalls like python has). But, having worked with lua for years, I know very well the difference between LuaJIT and no-LuaJIT, and seeing that this engine has no LuaJIT is a bit of a disappointment. :(

[@phillippi2]

How do you think that this engine would benefit an underwater metroid/vania RPG in 3D?

[@snesmocha]

um... if you don't like working with slow guis??... i guess. it doesn't really matter that much what engine you're using for a game like that, just matters if you make it.

[@MuhammadHosny0]

@@snesmocha the GUI is not slow though, I don't know why GFS uses that software to record but it is terrible for recording and causes a lot of lags even on my high end pc

[@snesmocha]

@@MuhammadHosny0well… somehow my phone autocorrected no gui to… slow gui?? Or I accidentally wrote slow. The best experience though is no gui. Absolute bliss not having to move your mouse. I’ve used the gui, and it’s good, I just like working with text stuff instead anyways

[@MuhammadHosny0]

@@snesmocha i agree, no GUI is best. But them are the old ways, we gotta adapt.

[@mig7287]

👍👍👍

[@cycomkid]

Godot should learn from this

[@everythingcouldbesimplify818]

Insane, it looks already like hdrp from Unity or Unreal, it also utilizes lua which is much faster than javascript or python and really small like C. I tried to create my own engine before but I gave up because it was endless work.

[@TheOnlyGhxst]

Yeah, I was thinking of trying to make a GUI game engine using entirely Julia, since it has the capability to be even faster than C++, so I immediately thought "Hey, that would probably be pretty great for making games with!", but it's definitely a ton of working making a game engine. Huge props to the dev of Wicked Engine, and other indie engines.

[@apollolux]

What? Lua hasn't been faster than JavaScript in years since most JS runtimes and consoles have been updating for performance since ECMAScript the language started getting regular updates since 2016.

[@everythingcouldbesimplify818]

​@@apollolux Well I'm talking about Lua out of the box, but Javascript is faster nowadays for web because running in Node V8, Lua also can be used in web and can also be just as fast as with openresty, and also lua has a jit compiler just like javascript, and is multiplatform. But every language can be fast if they only rely in calling C/C++ functions. I think the most important fact is that Lua in games don't compete with your scene when running the game, but Javascript is memory-hungry if you want it to be fast, also Lua is more reliable since is maintained by an institution and javascript frameworks is quickly deprecated, if you make a game using a library or framework in javascript it could not work in the future, and I don't think that would happen with lua.

[@GameBoyyearsago]

@@everythingcouldbesimplify818 make your engine opensource lets see if community can finisj your half work 😊😊😊😊

[@apollolux]

@@everythingcouldbesimplify818 I agree that JS being memory-hungry as the main trade-off for being fast is an issue. As for frameworks and reliability, nearly every JS framework (especially jQuery, ReactJS, and AngularJS) is a third-party framework, and even shim frameworks to (ideally conditionally) backport newer functionality into older JS engine versions that _should've_ been first-party ECMA or Mozilla or even W3C are also third-party (the most Mozilla offers are backwards-compatibility code snippets on relevant functions in the online MozDocs). The majority of JS frameworks have been written either with the web or with Node in mind, so of course they're not going to be field-tested as reliable one way or the other in a JS-controlled game dev environment like Construct or Sphere, or in a more neutral non-Node environment like Neutralino. I also hate that they're mostly third-party since that means we have to rely on them for updates and maintenance, yes. There are plenty of reasons to choose Lua as the primary scripting language engine of a game engine over JavaScript, yes, but speed isn't one of them, and it more has to with JS's disadvantages than with Lua's advantages.

[@flinfaraday1821]

I liked the old website better ;]

[@SG-js2qn]

Single developers on big, endless projects tend to burn out. We always need community efforts in order to increase security. As for talented developers, usually even in community efforts there will be one or two developers who are doing heroic efforts to push it ahead. But when they stop or move on to other things, the idea is that someone else can pick it up and continue to move it forward. Like ... Linux doesn't depend upon a single code hero.

[@DFX2KX]

It also supports Linux now appearantly, I expected to need to run WINE for it, but nope! Good times!

[@makanansari144]

The amount of amazing features one developer put into this! with the help of contributors really surpass Godot with lots of money and devs! and it's really odd and mind blowing! I liked it! thanks for sharing!

[@bucket6988]

Brain power beats man power usually

[@HunterMayer]

What we're not seeing in the forefront is the 999 other attempts at making a game engine by others. But make the right choices and stay focused. *Chef's kiss* and I've found there is something to said for having less mouths to feed and a fountain of passion to drink from. If I go 3d I'd definitely start here. I love the lowered cost of ownership that open source gives, but there are drawbacks. You get nothing for free ... Usually. But this looks like a clear vision and execution masterpiece.

[@HunterMayer]

I'm not going to judge an independent developer that makes game engines for having crappy website.

[@JanHavel]

Amazing tech, terrible UI :D ... for one guy its very impressive overall.

[@SomeRandomPiggo]

Proves how much of a disappointment Godot is lmao

[@Asinsful]

It's time to question Godot! Why Godot cannot support game consoles without W4 games? Why this guy can do that and Wicked Engine stay as MIT License?

[@gamefromscratch]

It is worth point out though, you do still have to contact him for access, so the implementation still can't be made public due to the licensing around PS5 and XBox development programs.

[@phantomapprentice6749]

Why does this matter? There's Unity , Unreal and maybe Godot , no time for other engines.

[@igorthelight]

Competition is always great, no? ;-)

[@ExumBron]

Godot, maximum for 2D) In 3D, it is very slow, Wicked in this regard is an order of magnitude higher at the level of the main engines. It will be difficult to build a big world in Godot, even a corridor with level streaming.

[@skaruts]

Speak for yourself. It doesn't matter for you. And that's fine. But it matters for other people.

[@hipflipped]

You're right. There are many impessive "OMG one developer has created lots of features!" game engines out there, which will simply never gain traction because a: one dev/single point of failure isn't great and these things seldom/never provide enought differentiation to build a proper community behind them.

[@igorthelight]

@@hipflipped But those developers learn A LOT just by developing their engine ;-) THey could get hired at Epic Games or Unity because of their experience whenever they want to.

[@soran2290]

Godot is better

[@first9279]

why so toxic? This engine is probably thousands of hours of work from the dev. Before you say something like that, accomplish the same things he did yourself. Yes Godot is open source too but it is made by way more devs than this engine, just give it some love.

[@ardahanfatihyuksel364]

@@first9279 Dude chill, he is right. Godot is much better.

[@kaikun2236]

Remember when Godot was new and people were like "Ew Godot sucks, Unity is better!"? Yeah, don't be that guy

[@first9279]

@@kaikun2236 yes you are right.

[@SlayerDUDE1993]

it's not about which is better, it's about having a choice.

[@kiyasuihito]

One developer... 😮🫠🥴 🎉🎉🎉🎉