The best Unreal and Unity assets

Which has more free assets, Unreal or Unity?

Unreal has the most free assets, because they’re baked into the engine, Unity has more free downloadable assets through the asset store, and more assets in general, while Unreal needs them less, but still has a lot to choose from.

But forget free assets, two engines enter, only one survives. Who will it be Unreal.

Can Unity Assets be used in Unreal?

Generally, yes, as long as they are non-restricted.

Which is better Unity or Unreal?

While Unity has the edge in 2d games, Unreal is better for modern 3d style games, and both can do either. Unity has a better asset store, but Unreal needs fewer assets. Unreal has blueprint, but Unity is easier to code in for beginners.

Let’s look at a few of them.

There are a wide variety of assets on both the Unity and Unreal stores, I can only offer up my views on a small cross section of them, however, I feel I have acquired most of the best assets from Unity, and a good sampling from Unreal.

What is the best Unity Asset, hands down?

There are so many to choose from and we’ll get into most of them over the course of this article, but I’d have to say, my favorite asset is….

Let’s give you a top 3? hmm?

1: NEOFPS

It is easily my favorite FPS controller. It plays like, if Call of Duty had a baby with Half Life 2. It controls really smooth and tight, very customizable. Your character can do parkour, wall jumps, sliding under gaps, climbing and grappling, and you can customize all of this, so if you want him, running through the level at 200 mph, and jumping over tall buildings, you can do this.

The developer, is so nice, it’s just Unreal, in Unity. I would encourage anyone who has any issues getting NEOFPS running to ask for his expert advice on his discord. His name is Yondernauts Chris. He didn’t just get my controller working, he helped me integrate other assets like dialogue system, into his framework.

2: Dialogue System

Dialogue System is a very close second. Some really nice games have been designed in this and I can see why, Disco Elysium was designed in this. If you don’t know what that means, you are missing out son. Disco Elysium is the spiritual successor to PLANESCAPE TORMENT, it is as maleable, if not waaaaay more maleable, than Torment ever was.

Dialogue System offers up a wealth of options, from the most basic to the most deviously complicated. You can use it to tell a simple story, or you can make Disco Elysium, a game so complex in it’s story machinations, that, it would require it’s own article I will request to write just to break down all the amazing game design elements inherent in that game.

Quest Machine

This one great, I wound up using this even more than Dialogue System, because it’s faster and easier, and you can setup quest systems without an excess of effort required.

You can do standard static quests, you can do procedurally generated quests, you can come up with all manner of conditions to complete your quests, as well as branch them, make them conditional on start, keyed to items, characters interacted with, quests completed, all manner of things. From the most simple to the most deviously complex.

Ok, what about the three best Unreal Assets?

Procedural City Generator (PCG)

This asset is too good to believe, it’s just amazing. You can build an entire complex city, out of whatever pieces you have lying around, or the default resources that are VERY NICE, with virtually ZERO effort.

The developer Coqui Games is also very friendly and he worked out the problem I was having in like 15 minutes at most. His City Generator is top notch, like a REALLY fine piece of software. Don’t even know what to say about it, you have a whole city to run around in, with complex roads, districts including business district, industrial, commercial, residential and rural, as well as highrises. You can also easily make your own districts with whatever buildings you want in them.

It is really nice….

Like amazing.

NPC Manager

By the same author, Coqui games, this asset is truly astounding. It’s the perfect adjunct to PCG, in that with a little integration, you can convert your whole city into a populated city similar to GTA. I myself can use my vast trove of character models to make, well if I wished to, I could make a variety of characters um (female) to rival GTA 5. I actually have enough variety, I could.

These NPC’s are great, they have places of interest, work stations, random wandering, responding to their surroundings, interacting with each other, they can be spawned with complex behavior, or you can spawn them from spline in crowds, and make a Persona 5 style crowd system.

Down the road, these two assets will be expanded to include everything you need to make a GTA Clone, that is his end game, from what he has told me. And he’s already half way there. The assets are still heavy in development, and he’s always adding new features.

Ultimate Environment Pack

If you need some high quality environments, the Ultimate Environment Pack from Sidearm Studios is really nice. I am particularly fond of the chapel, but everything included in this is good.

There’s an ancient temple which will be a hallmark of one of my games one day, it has a big beautiful statue in the center of it, with fountains of water, and beautiful plants growing out of everywhere, the level is stone.

Other cool ones include the Diner Cafe, which is very neat, as well as Crime Scenes, A Space Prison, an Ancient Temple Ruins, a Hookah Club, lots of cool stuff. If you need high quality environments, try this out, it’s not likely to disappoint and I can see making lots of cool games with this stuff.

Environmental Generation in Unity

Gaia Pro and Gena Pro

This is Gaia Pro. I cannot overstate how beautiful these environments are. This will allow you to easy create huge open world environments, vast and sweeping. Filled with trees, and plants and a variety of included natural resources.

You can also take your own assets, and build them into Gaia Pro, for instance, at one point I made a cherry blossom tree forest island with this. There were cherry blossom tree’s everywhere, it was so beautiful. And easy to make.

I should complete the work.

This is the correct mindset to enjoy the cherry blossom forest.

MAP MAGIC 2

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/terrain/mapmagic-2-bundle-178682

Map Magic 2 is less expensive and less fancy than Gaia Pro, I also found it more stable
and less stable, depending on how you look at things.

On the one hand, my computer is awful, Gaia Pro crashes on play.
So Map Magic at least compiles and runs and soforth,
It’s also so buggy…. Ridiculously buggy.

Your maps will break again and again and again and again and again and again
and again and again and again.

You will build maps too big to run, they break the editor, you make the map smaller,
somehow the editor is even more broken, you attempt to close the program for a fresh restart and what do we see???

The program hangs. You can’t even click anything, I can’t exit out,
It’s madness.

But it costs almost 150 dollars less than Gaia Pro,
Which works beautifully easily with great results,
and breaks when I run it.

Map Magic 2 Wins this contest.

It also has cool heightmaps, if you want to photoshop a mountain
made up of a giant skull, you can do that.

If you want to make a mountain in the shape of an eye,
You can do that. It’s easy.

And stability is overstated. If you build your maps well you won’t encounter
too many problems.

MUSIC

1: HUMBLE BUNDLE

https://www.humblebundle.com/bundles?hmb_source=navbar

You can very easily acquire game music royalty free from Humble Bundle.
They have all the best stuff, once every few months.

You can usually find something good, if you wait a bit.
I got this ridiculous music bundle with about 400 songs for maybe 30 bucks.

It’s enough, coupled with these below, to make games indefinitely.
So check it out if you need to.

2: SIDEARM STUDIOS – ULTIMATE MUSIC BUNDLE

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/audio/music/ultimate-music-bundle-191497

Here is a really decent music bundle from Sidearm Studios for Unity.

It comes with 11 music packs.

For that price it’s pretty good, the individual bundles might be too much to afford
but if you got this on sale, you’d be sitting pretty, it has all kinds of cool stuff,

You’d be pretty much set if you had this.

Combine with others to have way too much is always good.

Baby, I’m in love with this music.

I need to walk away with this music, and make a home for myself with it,
buy it a diamond necklace, and make sure it does not cheat.

Colossal Game Music Pack

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/audio/music/orchestral/colossal-game-music-collection-88190

This thing is unreal. It has such nice music, at such a good price.
right now it’s on sale for about 20 bucks, but it is still a good deal at 45. haha.

It has this haunting, beautiful space track, I can’t quite recall the name,
but it is so nice…. It’s like drifting away into a psychedelic high as you shoot enemies
and wander my open world. I made it the hub world music.

You’ll have to do the calculations for yourself.

So if you have to kill some time, what’s cool?

Here’s something you might not have thought of – CURVED WORLD:

Curved world is godlike. Turn your game into Alice Madness Returns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice:_Madness_Returns

This thing is amazing, because it doesn’t actually change your world, it just distorts it so it looks like the world is curved. You can wrap the level around itself like a big sphere, and a square surface becomes running around inside an orb. Or you can twist and distort your hallways like this. Amazing.

MegaFiers-2

I could never afford this but I want this so much:

This thing is incredible, just for the daz clothes rewrapping around any character’s form, this alone is worth 150 dollars, it’s currently 75 on sale.

But it does all this weird cool stuff…. It takes these rockets, and bends them like they’re on drugs. Like…. Don’t even bother asking me to explain why. Just watch the video, and sit in awe that this is done at RUNTIME.

I want to make my character do that.

I want my character bouncing with distortion all over the place as she walks around…..
Strutting….. It’d be like the daz character took acid and went into an old disney movie,
Like Cuphead old.

LOVE/HATE

This allows for mating and relationship and breeding simulations for your characters

It’s actually a cool little program. I am happy to be a part of showing you this thing.
If you want to take your AI’s to the next level, like, that AI simulation game, where you
crashland with a bunch of items and your people struggle to survive as they build their cavernous home….

Whatever that was……

If you want to make a pokemon breeding game this AI tool is also for you.
And it works with Emerald AI, I think.

On that note:

AI: The Best of the Worst

Unity:

Let’s get this on the table right now, there is no good AI solution for Unity.
I have tried many of them, and most of them are pretty terrible.
You are actually better off hardcoding your own personally designed AI than
try to buy a pack from Unity.

That said…..

EMERALD AI 2.0

This really is the best AI solution you have available….. It works with lots of different packs, NEOFPS for instance has an integration. These guys are great, just plug a humanoid or nonhumanoid into the wizard, set it to have whatever animations you need for whatever attacks you need, you can have faction fighting, you can have allegiance/alignment, it’s great. You can have passive animal character behavior, you can have aggressive animal behavior, you can have ranged or melee characters, you can have brave but not stupid characters. You can key in what happens at every stage of the iteration, from awake, to die(). You can have them drop items, all kinds of stuff.

It’s a very versitile thing…..

A big buggy, and try putting 200 of these guys in a room and see how choppy it gets.
But still, a good solution. I made kimono ninjas who hate dogs and they fight each other. And either one will attack the MC but not too much.

It also integrates with lots of stuff.

UNREAL:

While I’m sure there are lots of AI solutions out there for Unreal.

Unreal has built in behavior trees and characters designed to have AI baked into them out of the box. You don’t need it as much, you can make a shooter easily on your own. It’s easy to make a behavior tree and have your character, move, go to, follow, attack, shoot, etc.

You don’t need it, but if you want a good Unreal AI, then go for NPC Manager.

I also enjoyed:

AI DAILY LIFE

So we’re running out of time. But I hope you learned something, just wait for round two of the asset pack recommendations, because I think I only covered at best a third of them. And then only shallowly.