I would like to give some feedback on some of my experience with UDK and Cryengine and what they are lacking to help make Unreal Engine better.
I used to use UDK, but I stopped using it and switched to Cryengine because of:
- Lack of basic road/river editor
- Lack out-of-the-box water
- Lack general foliage
- No Dynamic GI
- Lack of weather system
I came back to this time Unreal Engine 4 because of Cryengine’s lack of:
- Documentation
- Support/Tutorials
- Source Code
- Blueprints
and because of the awesome community Unreal Engine has, and the amount of support.
As good as those engines are, both of them are not a complete package and lack things to be one.
It just evades me how for so many years this team of talented people with such a great business model,
didn’t sit down once and say, “What does our competitor have that we don’t” and get the most basic features done.
Water for example, doesn’t get any more basic than that and unless you are doing a Mars environvent, you will need it at some point.
Road/River tools - with the spline tool this should take no more than a day to implement - look at Cryengine’s tool - so simple, yet saves so much time.
You can say all of these things you can make yourself, but why do we need to reinvent the wheel every time. That’s a huge waste of time.
To give you a small example: It takes a few seconds to create a road with Cryengine. With spline tool it would take several minutes to do the same.
Say 400,000 spent 2 minutes extra creating a road that’s a combined year and a half wasted.
Say 200,000 users spent 1 day creating good water shader and adjusting it with reflection/refraction that’s more than 500 combined years(!!!) wasted.
I’m only saying this for the good of the community and Unreal Engine itself. If you implement those you’ll be way ahead of the competition.
I can spend a few extra hours making an ocean and once I’m done, I don’t have to do it anymore, but I don’t want every user to have to reinvent the wheel every time.