UDK/Unity/CryEngine/Other? - Need thoughts and opinions!
polycounter lvl 6
Hi there! I'm approaching my final year of university on a 3D art course and I'm planning to create and construct an environment for my final year project. I'm still undecided on art style (though leaning towards realism) and "genre" of environment.
I want to use an engine that is easy to use for constructing environments, I don't necessarily need to have any gameplay elements or scripting or even animations.
BUT I would like to have the potential to get other people involved later on in the project to add in these elements to hopefully create a small game or demo or even just a cool level to walk around in.
I'm leaning towards Unity, but I have more experience with UDK. Does anyone have any input or opinions they can give? It would be super helpful and I am open to any other engines. I just feel I don't have enough experience to make an informed decision.
I want to use an engine that is easy to use for constructing environments, I don't necessarily need to have any gameplay elements or scripting or even animations.
BUT I would like to have the potential to get other people involved later on in the project to add in these elements to hopefully create a small game or demo or even just a cool level to walk around in.
I'm leaning towards Unity, but I have more experience with UDK. Does anyone have any input or opinions they can give? It would be super helpful and I am open to any other engines. I just feel I don't have enough experience to make an informed decision.
Replies
If you want just some simple environment without much to do, like gameplay, animations, etc. then you could eather choose UDK or CryEngine.. depends on what kind of environment you want to do. UDK works pretty well for most stuff, while I would suggest choosing CryEngine for "realistic" stuff, it's way better if you want to have it close to real-life optic.
UDK: Graphically, it's everything an artist, quick prototyping is pretty OK with Kismet and it's co-tools like UScript. Real problems starts when you want to dive into more hardcore stuff, even if you buy Source-Code, it's been said it's far from the simple as many people would wish it was.
CryEngine: I'm biased here, but it's the last engine in the world I would think of using in it's current state. The online checkup thing they have is horrible, since there are plenty of times it went offline and didn't give me a chance to save the packages. Not to mention, all the realism it has can be toppled by UDK if you know your shaders.
Unity: Never used it really hardcore, but as a whole, it's the best when it comes to creating games and prototyping them since it's more open right out of the box. If you want graphically fidelity to be better, then you need to drop some cash and get the Pro version.
I have to disagree with cryengine here. I have used it for many years and I have to say it is a lot easier to pick up and understand than UDK for a first time user. It's extremely simple and very powerful. The online check is only at startup and has never given me issues. I think it and UDK have pros and cons but I think that for different uses they are at the same level as far as making great content goes.
http://www.garagegames.com/products/torque-3d
It has a pretty awesome outdoor leveleditor build right into the game too.
Please do tell us about Torque if you feel it's improved a lot, I'm always interested in keeping up with what's available.
I used Cryengine for the first time on my last project(escape challenge) and found it easy to pickup. They've got some pretty good documentation, so all it usually took to figure something out was a little digging around. I did start to miss the material freedom that UDK gives you, but they've got quite a few built in materials that work well. Especially if you're going realistic, it should do everything you need.
The worst I got with UDK was "link broken, cannot save, blah blah blah" which is solved with a simple sanitation of your assets or making copies of what it's linking to, in the base package.
With CE3, it refused a couple of times in opening a scene for me and threw errors which I couldn't find the answer to
Again, it's not an issue with CE3 ENGINE ITSELF, however, everytime I got screwed over, it was during some time involving some issue with the connection. I never had this issue with the SDK tools from the official game, since those are akin to modding.
Also, yes, it is powerful, and I do recommend it for it's graphical prowess, but I was also surprised as to how many effects they had that were locked in DX11 mode, when these effects didn't require a DX11 mode to begin with, especially with a high end DX10 GPU. Their also recent decision of locking away material/shader code away, because they couldn't fix their pseudo-hlsl for your everyday user also sucks balls
Either way, it doesn't really matter. UDK and CE3 fall in the same ballpark for me, with each one having some limitation or form of control that doesn't make sense that only adds burden to the Dev's in minting, in which Unity beats them both in the Pro version and Strumpy's Editor addon. You pretty much get CE3, UDK and Torque in one package at that point, and this is coming from someone who has no interest in Unity, but most likely, ever made a robust game, would go for it.
Again, it's down to preference at that point, and luckily, you can test all 3 engines, it just depends on what you have a higher affinity to and what quirks you can tolerate vs. what are deal breakers.
Unity = More effort to create good graphics
This is what I am trying to say.
As for the corruption issue that is actually a false positive and was somehow introduced in the latest version or two, they are working on it but if you open it in an older version like 3.4 or if you restart your computer it should work, I had this happen recently and I know it is a fake corruption, it continues to work after restart for me as well.
I personally think for personal scenes cryengine can quickly yield good results. They are all good engines. To the OP, pick one, cryengine is good for starting imo, but if you learn UDK it will most likely be a larger learning curve as the material networks are all done visually in cryengine like a master shader, but the up side is you can learn what is really happening instead of adjusting value sliders as well as learn to optimize better than Cryengine can from a material standpoint due to the amount of things you can re-use. It's up to you. Cryengine has no baking, UDK does, that is another thing I would consider.
Can't deny the open-source bias, but I really do think that this offers a lot if you want to make a acual game out of it. Since it's recent open-sourceing the development speed has also picked up a lot with some cool stuff emerging.
Otherwise, well my impression of Torque3D is that it still can be aweful to work with (at least the Blender3D art pipeline pretty much sucks, but it is supposed to be much better with 3Dsmax). The outdoor and terrain editor is pretty good though, and it should do the trick for showcasing some level work as the OP was asking for.
Oh and it has already full occulus rift and leap-motion support, so if you have either of those, it might make for a cool tech-demo.
P.S.: Also this: http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/22088
and some more here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Torque3DOpenSource
@Jason Young - It doesn't have shadows in the free version? I do have access to the Pro Version but that seems a little weird?
Ah, it's really hard to choose! Though I guess which one I pick won't matter too much? Some of the features about Unity that were pointed out as a positive are how easy it would be to create a linked "demo"/"walkthrough" of my level on my portfolio. I assume UDK has this ability too?
EDIT: I'm reading everything you're all saying!
For realism unity is an arse to work with imo, even with the pro version.
CryEngine gives you amazing graphics pretty much out of the box, especially for outdoor environments and with dynamic lighting. Probably even more so when/if they finally release that 3.5 update. However there currently isn't any support for commercial projects/licenses. This may change ofc, but about a month ago I still heard the license *has not been finalized yet*. So be carefull about that.
UDK graphics on the other hand do better for indoor scenes with static lighting. In terms of finishing a game with it, I would say UDK is the middleground between the other two.
I only tried Torque3D briefly so can't comment on that, but I kinda liked it. It's definitely one to watch, if that open source concept takes off.