I think this is a really really smart move by Amazon personally. I was talking to my brother (a webdev for one of the biggest sites here in Australia) and he really loves the scalability of Amazons services. He was informing me of how great they would be for multiplayer development and I looked into it and it was all just a bit “blah” in terms of trying to get it up and running with a game engine.
But not even a few months later and what have they gone and announced? Made exactly that process of getting it up and running easier.
Now as for whether it’s a “better” engine than Unity or Unreal we/you could all argue 'til we’re black and blue in the faces. (and just as a side note I’m surprised to see so much hate for LUA, I used it for a DotA2 custom map and found it really painless.) But ultimately certain engines will have certain advantages over another and for a scalable multiplayer (cross-platform? In the future apparently) game I really think Lumberjack will have the competition beat, at the very least it if it’s successful (or not) will encourage (or dissuade) Unreal/Unity to take this feature-set more seriously (or focus elsewhere) which can only be a good thing.
I am looking forward to trying it out at the very least.
Yeah pretty much the only 2 features I want to see in UE4 from Cryengine. The Total Illumination was great actually, barely any hit on FPS (Mind you I am running a GTX Titan X) and makes a huge difference to the scene, and the volumetric lighting is nice, something I really want to see in UE4. Everything else is typical Cryengine, some things I love (Like visareas/portals), and others I dont like (Flowgraph, LUA, etc.)
I will continue to give it a go, since now with full source, it fits one of my projects better than UE4 does, but my main project will continue on in UE4 just because it is a nicer engine to work with.
Is volumetric lighting the reason why GTA 5’s street lights / lamps look so good? At certain times during dusk there is also some fog type lighting around the cities & buildings too, looks really nice. How can a game that was originally aimed at last gen consoles have rendering features that next gen UE4 doesn’t even have?
What got me from day one in UE4 wasnt any feature of the engine. That was the community, epic feedback, and the effort to release learning content to game devs. Ill keep with unreal until it remains following this path.
There’s tons of features on last gen consoles (and older) that aren’t in UE4, there’s just not enough people to implement everything anyone could want. Also there’s a lot of features that cannot just be simply implemented, they need to be updated for deferred renders and PBR.
I’m also not a big Lua fan but we shouldn’t forget that Lua was choosen by crytek / cryengine for performnace reasons. When it comes to save performance lua is #1 bay far.
And yeah Total Illumination / SVOTI is just amazing, also the volumetric effects in fog and lights / point lights is fantastic. I’m curious why epic isn’t implementing volumetric light and fog into UE4, at least it is
a point on the public roadmap for voting.
Features are quite amazing, but I’ve wasted so many hours fighting the exporter and create a good workflow for animated characters to be imported into the engine that at the end I just gave up…
Poor documentation, too many restrictions, very tedious and strict rules for character creation, when FBX would solve 99% of the current issues…I’m aware that FBX is used for static meshes, but the major issues are with skeletal meshes.
As long as they’ll keep using their own format for importing content I’ll stay away from it
where this new game engine gets it revenue? I have red that it is hole free and no royalties, so where money comes for engine development or do I have misunderstand something
So, this (for me) brings into focus the topic of real time global illumination. Is VXGI the only decent implementation for UE4, or is there an alternative that Epic is (actively) working on?
Amazon makes their money back with AWS integration. If you make a multiplayer game or simply any kind of game that’s connected to the internet, you have the choice of either rolling your own server solution or use Amazon’s services. AWS is better for indies because the servers are maintained by Amazon and you only pay for what you use. Maintaining and hosting your own servers can get really expensive and thus unsuitable for smaller developers with very little money. AWS can get expensive as well, but only if you get big.
What makes Lumberyard really interesting for me is that it’s Cryengine made completely free with the source code available for anyone to grab and modify, something that Crytek is unwilling to do. I have no experience with Cryengine, so I have no judgements about it. It’s already got some fantastic rendering tech that UE4 does not, especially stable real-time global illumination that works with indoor scenes, which is a big plus for me. It’s also got fully-featured AI with, at first glance, appears to be a comprehensive perception system with light level querying built-in, which as someone making a Thief-like stealth game, is HUGE for me. You don’t normally see that in license-able game engines with a generalized game framework. It’s normally in specialized engines built for stealth games, like Thief’s Dark Engine.
It seems a lot of people have had bad experiences with Cryengine and I understand that, but it’s free and all the source code is available for you to modify to your needs, so if you don’t like something, you can always fix it yourself. As someone in this thread said, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Also more competition is good, especially in the indie-accessible AAA game engine market.
Unless it’s got a huge amount of documentation and drop the stupid pipeline (cgf plugins needed, which still wont/don’t work properly - I don’t need to be fighting a export problem when dealing with a engine) it’s DOA for me. It’s reskin of CE2 which you can make look fabulous and detailed but for beginners it isn’t …