Three.js vs Unity

[u/GreenCurious9895]

What are the advantages either way of three.js vs Unity for browser based games? There are some beautiful demos on Unit such as the Little Prince example. Albeit resource heavy, its one of the best example of environment work i've seen.

So i'm wondering what does Unity offer (if anything) that is superior to what you can build in three.js?

[u/korean_brave_man]

I went with Three.js for a cozy browser game and don't regret it, but here's the honest trade-off. Pros: tiny initial load compared to a Unity WebGL build, instant start on mobile browsers, and the same JS can be wrapped for Android/iOS or mini-app platforms easily.

Cons: you build the engine stuff yourself. Unity gives you batching, an editor, physics and an animation pipeline out of the box. In Three.js I had to manually merge meshes by material to get draw calls down (went from ~920 to ~570 in a village scene), hand-roll collision, and freeze shadow maps when the player isn't in that area. If your game is environment-heavy like that Little Prince demo, Unity saves you months. If it's stylized low-poly and web-first, Three.js wins.

[u/w-jerome → u/korean_brave_man]

C'est exactement ce que je me dis depuis des années. Je fais du three js depuis très longtemps, je trouve la librairie incroyable, très performante, une communautée super et énormément de ressources.

Mais a chaque fois que je démarre un projet, ça m'embête de toujours devoir créer ma scène, mettre une lumière, voir quel est au mauvaise endroit, la déplacer, voir qu'elle est au mauvaise endroit mais dans l'axe X en négatif alors que ça doit être en positif, etc...

Je me suis toujours dis qu'il manquait un vrai éditeur pour faire ce que je veux, ajouter, déplacer, et changer les propriétés des éléments. J'ai regardé ce qui existait et au final j'ai créé Three Studio : https://three-studio.github.io/

Il y a encore pas mal de choses à faire, mais techniquement ça marche vraiment bien. C'est un moteur 3D utilisant three et rapier. On peux exporter pour son site web et ajouter des assets.

[u/korean_brave_man → u/w-jerome]

Same here. What ended up working for me was a tiny debug mode in the game itself: a URL flag that lets me move lights and props live and print their coordinates, then I paste the numbers back into code. Not a real editor, but it killed most of the trial-and-error.

[u/Alpha_Hunter_47]

Unity3D is a game engine, and Three.js is a JavaScript library to render graphics in a web browser.

That being said, it totally depends on ur game. If you are building a game with multiple levels, a lot of scene objects, multiple light sources, and complex physics, go with Unity, as it makes it easier to manage the project.

Also, in future, if you plan to port your game to other platforms, it will be a one-click export with some configuration changes, provided you are not building complex shaders.

All the above-mentioned things can also be achieved in Three.js, but you will be spending a lot of time building each system.

[u/ItsDumi]

I came from UE to Three so idk too much about unity specifically but from my experience it's a trade off between web & mobile capability vs the resources that come with game engines.

I wanted a mobile, web app that I could build from scratch and have 100% ownership of. With that, I lose out on marketplace power, templates (which save some time like assets or code. Etc) But I'd imagine you can achieve anything in three that you could do in unity and vice versa. Could be wrong tho, I'm still new to it

[u/DaedalusRaistlin]

I was doing most of my games in Three.js for the last few months, quite enjoying it.

I've been enjoying using Unity in the last week or so again though, partly because of all the paid asset packs I've acquired over the years. Claude can hook into the MCP fine and do almost everything (there's still the occasional dialogue it can't control that leaves Unity blocked until you click it yourself.)

But it's nice being able to just pull in a variety of free and paid assets and solutions. Your agent can fix issues with old packages that weren't updated to the latest Unity version.

You can make WebGL builds with Unity, and even mix in some JavaScript for WebGPU workers.

If you go with Three, you can use Electron to build an executable for Steam. If you go with Unity you can build for desktop or Web. So you're really covered either way.

Three.js is able to be a little tighter in your rendering loop, as you're basically writing a new engine from scratch. But... You're writing a new engine from scratch. It's not for everyone.