I apologize if a topic such as is not allowed here, please delete it if need be.
I don’t plan to use it, but am legitimately wondering (partially for UE4’s sake) if the new CryEngine subscription model is able to be cancelled and still used, like UE4?
Thank you.
No it does not. You need a steam account with active subscription for CryEngine. If your sub ended u cant open any Cry Tools… By the way, the new CryEngine is the same useless SDK like the free one… 
You should ask Question on CryEngine forums instead of here.
No you cant. It’s tied to your Steam account, thus if you cancel the service, you cant use the software anymore.
I really expected them to come up with a better option than they did. I see UE4 wiping the floor with CRYENGINE in every way possible !!. Just my 2cents.
Great answers, thank you everybody. That is good news for UE4! I thought of making topic over there, but I honestly don’t even want a Crytek account. Plus, I got quick answers here and it looks good for Unreal 
Hi ,
We do not mind you discussing the various engines on the forums so long as the conversation remains civil. We have re-opened the thread and encourage you to enjoy a healthy discussion on the topic. Have a great day!
I don’t exactly know if I wanted to be my first post on the forums in general, but I will give a go to relaying my thoughts about the latest goings-on in the CryEngine world.
I am currently developing with UE4 as a two man shop, but I have experience with various engines including the CryEngine. I have been watching to see what would happen since their announcement (with bated breath) following Epic’s own UE4 announcement. Before UE4 and the very generous licensing terms accompanying it came down the pike we were ready to pull the trigger on Unity, but we are very glad we did not.
As I have stated I have used CryEngine in the past and I will be very clear in my opinion that I have never seen a company more disconnected and overtly condescending toward what we consider the indie space.
Now that the EaaS is out and it is nothing more than the FreeSDK that can be commercialized - I cannot say I am shocked, but that I am appalled by is what they believe they are going to get away with in their EULA.
There is no separation regarding what you bring to the table as in your code/art assets and retaining IP ownership over them.
It is at the sole discretion of Crytek to deem content racist, overly sexual or the very open ended/subjective word, “objectionable.” Really? I mean honestly is an acceptable clause in an engine you are licensing for commercial use that content can be deemed to be objectionable without clearly defining what would be considered objectionable at the start?
Wwise… where do I even start with one? You must license with Audiokinetic for every game you publish that includes sound related media. You are limited to 200 media assets with a free license, but if you go over that the costs start to add up extremely fast. I am sorry, but is akin to if Autodesk decided to limit the amount of renders you are able to complete with the full version of or Maya - and if you go over them - better cough up the money for a separate license… oh and on top of that it’s a separate company you will be doing business with!
No small team in their right mind and with legal guidance is going to use the new EaaS program for a commercial project.
Before new service and I have said before it was a very arrogant and condescending culture on the CryDev boards. One in which the peasants had the right to ask for absolutely nothing without being either ignored, brutalized or banned. Nothing has changed in my opinion and one big glorified PR stunt.
The whole culture of Crytek needs to change before they can be trusted with what a good many of the people here consider to be either our current or potential future livelihood. It’s a crying shame too because they do have an excellent engine (minus the the horrendous art asset pipeline) that should be able to go toe to toe with UE4 and with reasonable terms.
I am very happy that Epic has given the for the smaller outfits like myself and my partner to even have a utilizing what is undoubtedly one of the best engines in the business. I am also very thankful they are giving us access to intellectual property (source code) that at one time a small team might have had to sell their souls for and that they trust the community to help them in making the engine the best it can be.
Epic along with UE4 will continue to succeed on their own merits as long as the culture they fostered at the beginning of the release of UE4 continues throughout its life cycle.
As for Crytek - yeah I think I will pass!
I’ve bounced around some engines in the past, giving them all a worthwhile shot to see which one I found to be the most documented and user-friendly in every regard. I won’t go into personal experiences on with other engines since one is specifically for CE3.
On that note, while some of the tech in the CE3 really impressed me I felt that it was severely locked down in many aspects. I am unsure of now, but previously (IIRC) you had to submit your game to Crytek to have them approve the game to be released commercially meaning you would have to build the game to a showable state which takes up a lot of precious time, for a for it to be turned down. Thats a huge no go in my book.
While I did find the project pages, somewhat intriguing I was not happy with the fact that to even have others test my project they had to have accounts and be given access to the “projects” on the site. Thats one extra hurdle I couldn’t be arsed with setting up. (might have changed by now)
Lastly. The lack of documentation and helping hand community. Sure one cannot assume to have others build a project for them. Thats a big no no. But from what I experienced over there the community was not as helpful and often redirected you to the completely subpar documentation. Which always brought me back to the unreal engine.
Sure, the UDK/UE4 forums have their own dingbats that just want people to do all the work for them, but the amount of assistance and helpful developers entirely out weighs.
For price+out of the box features - UE4 hits the nail on the head. You don’t even get that with unity.
Just my 2 cents on the subject.
Ok. I will put mew few cents as well, as I used CryEngine for quite a while in the past, and now just bought one month of EaaS to see what is new.
If you want version then: I really regret my 7 euroes I paid for it. It’s not much, so I won’t brag about it, the point is that I didn’t got anything more than there was in FreeSDK before.
To the point, things I noticed:
PBR shaders in CE still use arbitrary values from 0-255 space. So when you set Gloss or Diffuse (which is multiply) 230* 255 (Image) what it means exactly ?
You still don’t have access to shader source. There is also no shader editor of any kind. is particularly odd, because licensee who have access to full source, don’t have any problem with released source of shaders. So the only way you can do stylized, is by using stylized assets, but it still will have realistic feel of it because of how shading is setup.
You don’t get access to full source code.
You get Sample shooter game. It have a lot lines of code, but very few comments and explanation of what code does. I honestly never could get around it. Bear in mind I’m not 100% programmer, but that being said in UE4 with reading some docsm asking some questions on IRC and by just browsing engine and samples source, I was able to get my self around and code something meaningful. I couldn’t get myself do it in CryEngine.
The API in CE is just not thought out well, to be usable by anyone without any kind of support from people who made in the first place.
There is a lot of editors but none of them work in really consistent way. In UE4 there is effort for everything to work like Blueprint graph. So you can easily interconnnect various elements without really need to code something. In CE you need to ask programmer to do something at some point (or at least consult it with him) even when you do such things animations.
That being said I like the default shaders provided by Crytek. They are nice starting point for most of cases, and I honestly would like to Epic to do the same thing. Provide set of default materials for realistic rendering (since that is what the Engine is aimed at), for various cases like Metal, Foliage, Concrete, Wood (Most of them are in engine, but there are still miss some like Foliage).
Honestly low price is not everything. Especially when you spend more time on trying to figure out how to work with engine, than on creating game. It’s side note but I really feel sorry for games that are already invested into it.
edit:
I can also sing up on posts above. Crytek is not very friendly if you look at it from outside. They tell you nothing about future plans, there is very little communication between developers and community.
There were few developers that were posting on forums, but they are gone right now. Dunno what happen.
Honestly. They act sometimes like there were guarding FTL travel secrets, so afraid they loose monopoly on it. The problem is they don’t have it in first place.
It will always come down to which engine and licensing model best suites the needs of the developer for their project. One of key buzzwords a lot of people are throwing around is you have direct access to the source code which is a major plus but realistically is not something you would need for every project.
As it currently stands I believe UE4 is still is best position to lead indie market as an engine service provider. The culture Epic has been creating of actively engaging the community will be the major contributor to their success.
Only thing I have on my wish list now would be Scaleform, but that not a deal breaker. Worst case would just be a matter of redesigning an UI system of a serious games project I am porting over from Unity.
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We have included actually. Have you seen the “Include Starter Content” checkbox in the New Project menu? If it is checked on you will start with a lot of high quality materials and textures. It has about 5 different woods, at least 4 kinds of stone, some sci-fi stuff, brick, cobblestone, concretes, grasses, metals, water and a lot more.
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We have included actually. Have you seen the “Include Starter Content” checkbox in the New Project menu? If it is checked on you will start with a lot of high quality materials and textures. It has about 5 different woods, at least 4 kinds of stone, some sci-fi stuff, brick, cobblestone, concretes, grasses, metals, water and a lot more.
Yeah I corrected my self in the same post actually :D. But there are still missing some more advanced materials, like foliage, glass, water surface.
Including sample foliage material would nice with upcoming SpeedTree integration. But I guess it will be when ST will be released integrated.
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Yeah I corrected my self in the same post actually :D. But there are still missing some more advanced materials, like foliage, glass, water surface.
Including sample foliage material would nice with upcoming SpeedTree integration. But I guess it will be when ST will be released integrated.
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Hey guys, I don’t have the answer you want right now, but you can be sure we are taking the foliage shading limitations in UE4 seriously and working on a solution. It will probably be a new lighting model for two sided foliage and support for precomputed lighting on instanced foliage. Maybe even a dynamic grass planting system if we can get to that.
Be sure to vote on the roadmap for ‘additional shading models supported’
https://trello/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap
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Go vote!
Crytek’s attempt at making their engine friendly and easy to use as a service was a poor, half hearted attempt in all honesty.
They are years behind Unreal’s effort.
is the official reply to my email to Crytek:
"You can alter (cancel or resume) your subscription at any time. All you have to do is log in to your account, check your settings, and choose unsubscribe. You will receive an email with all the information regarding your changed settings and your subscription will run out automatically.
However, stopping the subscription means that CRYENGINE and its Tools are no longer available in your account and you should be on EaaS program via subscription when you release your project commercially. Otherwise, you can possibly violate EULA(End-User License Agreement) which you would sign when using the program. "
so yes probably for cryengine would be better to pay subscription as you would need to alter program from time to time , and its silly to not acess your tools afterwards , i myself prefer the unreal engine 4 package.
Interesting, the “Cryengine” thread in unity forum got like 3 pages, and its now burrowed, people there dont even take it seriously. Meanwhile, the Ue4 thread there got to almost 90 pages and they had to close it.
I expected little from them, and i was right. Its basically the exact same freesdk you had before, but now paying.
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Interesting, the “Cryengine” thread in unity forum got like 3 pages, and its now burrowed, people there dont even take it seriously. Meanwhile, the Ue4 thread there got to almost 90 pages and they had to close it.
I expected little from them, and i was right. Its basically the exact same freesdk you had before, but now paying.
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The licensing agreement is a no go for anyone that is honestly trying to release a product with the engine. Comparing the EULA for UE4 and CryEngine shows just how one sided the license you are agreeing to is:
UE4
“Epic owns all title, ownership rights, and intellectual property rights in the Engine Code and Assets. You own all rights in the Products you develop under the License, other than the Engine Code and Assets, Third Party Software, and any Submissions.”
Clear, simple and to the point - your IP is your IP - Epic’s IP is Epic’s IP - Third Party IP is Third Party IP.
does not exist in the CryEngine EULA. You are afforded zero protections for what you are bringing to the table i.e. your code and assets.
I do not even want to get into how difficult it is to do anything other than a very basic FPS with what they provide you as it remains a giant black box, (no source code where it actually matters exactly the same as the FreeSDK) which is horrendously documented, but suffice it to say nothing has changed other than PBS.
If I were a betting man I would say wait and see what happens when there is an influx or horribly designed output that comes from their EaaS and Crytek steps in and says: “No, forget it you’re not releasing and have no rights to do so!”
Yeah… CE3… I really do appreciate it is a technical masterpiece in regards to the renderer. But I just wouldn’t consider it personally for my side projects. I’ve always been a fan of Unreal technology. I really enjoy Epic’s attitude. For me it has been well worth the subscription. I enjoy knowing I can cancel my sub and still continue to work on my game. Even though I haven’t canceled my sub- it’s just adds a lot of value that it is there. I like the partial royalty/subscription approach
There is only Epic.
I will never again, in my entire life, even consider CryEngine. Believe me when I say they treat like absolute dirt and is NOT just a case by case situation. They are quick to raise their noses in the air if they deem you “unworthy” which essentially means “unwealthy.” I just spend the past month on their forums and the experience was abysmal, not because of the community but because of their staff members. After respectfully voicing my frustration with the fact that Crytek won’t communicate with their indie community and only gives info to big licensees, one of their staff members went on a rant accusing me of “faking” my frustration, and tried to pretend that he didn’t understand what I was talking about. He then went on to dump on those who were suggesting better integration for non-autodesk software (like blender), telling them they should be using the 3DS student license, as if to suggest that clearly these couldn’t be competent enough to release a game (as you cannot release a game commercially using an autodesk student license).
The kicker here is that he was not a forum moderator, but rather a “Database Support” employee, whatever the hell that means. After reading the Crytek employee’s endless attack paragraphs I promptly called him a “degenerate” and explained to him that accusing people of faking frustration is an idiotic way of responding to someone who is frustrated, it only aggravates the situation further. I was immediately perma-banned from the website, for “staff abuse.” gets worse, after he instantly perma-banned me, he wen’t on to respond to my post and purposefully pretended as if he had clearly explained why I shouldn’t be frustrated, and he tried to make it seem as if I was somehow misleading , knowing that he had just banned me and that I couldn’t respond. I had heard stories on websites like facepunch of Crytek employees trolling the community and banning them, but I had never witnessed something like until then.
Take it from me, is not an isolated situation, they are dirt. Besides, you should never depend on a company like Crytek to maintain an engine that you license for a game, Cevat Yerli is really a very clueless individual, just look at how he handled Crysis 2 - “We’re not making it sandbox, because we feel that sandbox games are for elitists.” was the beginning of the end, now, they’re pumping out trash like Ryse: of Rome and a DOTA clone.
Not to mention, you don’t get a source code unless you pay $1.2 million, and their documentation is laughably awful. There is a reason that almost no one but Crytek made commercial games on CryEngine, especially Indies, with the only exception being Cloud Imperium Games, and they’re lucky enough to have friends at Crytek (Warhorse too, which are friends with Cloud Imperium Games, who have friends at Crytek).
TL;DR -
If you don’t have friends in high places, you’re “unworthy” to Crytek.
