Maybe for some, but the one big plus that UE4 has for me still, is the complete access to source code. Cryengine is an engine, don’t get me wrong. But it is still unusable to me for my current project. I originally looked at cryengine to start my project, but no access to source (except the game API) and no access to shader source (This may have changed, haven’t looked in a while) made it completely unusable for me.
Anyone who doesn’t require actual source may see this as a big win for crytek, but unless they do what Epic have done for their engine, I will be remaining for now.
Now they could start working on their tools. Particle editor in CE3 is so lackluster compared to Cascade, and Epic have Niagara just around the corner coming up…
If you consider their excellent outdoor tools and optimized outdoor worlds, the particle editor is just a minor point. If the game ARK would have been made with Cry engine, it could run a lot faster on any hardware.
The cons is you must pay each month to use it and you must continue paying if you are selling a finished game made with the engine.
White CE is faster with vegetation rendering and it’s real time lighting is an advantage it has, it is “not” optimized for “massive” outdoors.
It’s terrain system is terrible. Horrible LODs and the terrain size is just so limited, and greatly affects the performance.
Crytek was so happy to be able to have ~1.5 million grasses in Crysis 3 field level. The engine usually crashes when the amount of placed vegetation goes high. I assume +15 million vegetation for CE is a joke, even if running on a couple Titans, it’s not a hardware issue. UE4 is far more superior in handling vegetation already apart from slower rendering.
So can you finally make maps bigger than 3.5km across?
Ce3 doesn’t have any excellent outdoor/big world tools, that haven’t been updated since ce2, and are very lackluster, like terrain editor, procedural asset placement, automatic lod building for maps.
Oh I forgot to mention the procedural vegetation placement is broken in CE for over a year now (there is no other reason for it not being fixed other than the fact it’s just being ignored). That could be alone a solid reason why ARK used UE4 instead. (Not saying is certainly was). We also have to hand paint the entire terrain in CE. No procedural texturing because of it’s very simple material editor. etc.
You don’t have to continue paying them after shipping a title. You have built the exe and then can not patch it if you don’t want to. Honestly the money is so low I don’t understand why it is pointed out. Yes it is more than UE4 and Unity but you could also direct attention to many other game engines on Steam for more and far less quality.
Maybe MaxDev can lend me some info regarding the UE4 veg. Since I haven’t tested it much lately. Does it handle multiple species the same or is there a significant hit to the veg past even the obvious new drawcalls. I honestly don’t know and am asking because I am busy at the moment.
Honestly it’s grammatically a little hard for me to understand that phrase, (English is my second language). But here are some info regarding the veg.
Painted veg are clustered and called using these clusters. So basically it makes one call for the cluster and a bunch of veg appear by that one call. As you are far away clusters are large and as you get closer clusters get smaller. So we can have millions of vegs (as it is +15 mil in kite level).
You can also watch this twitch when you have time (from minute 56 the technical talk starts, and from 1:40 it’s specifically about terrain and veg) to get a lot of info regarding the improvements.
I felt like asking you to watch it because you mentioned you are busy and not much active lately on UE4. If you have already watched that, then I’m sorry for the wall of text.
Also for the black screen issue when you was loading the kite demo level here is how it should be loaded:
I am also not aware of UE4’s cluster system. So the total number of vegetation you can have on a map 15 mil on a very very powerfull system right ? And even then that doesn’t you can show all of them at the same time. Only the ones that are around 1 km or so ? Isn’t UE4 also culls vegatation that is too far away ?
Am I wrong ?
Let me watch that twitch stream. Learning was virtue wasn’t it ?
Of course you wouldn’t be able to see all of them on screen at once. The point is you CAN have that much of them placed without crashing the engine. That clustering technique makes it possible. So once you have that much vegetation in a level, even though you don’t see all of them from where you stand, you can walk around like miles and miles and the ones near you appear. It’s to see you don’t really need to worry about the number of vegetation you place into your level.
