CryEngine or Unity?
It's something I've been interested in and have wanted to know, I wouldn't say one would be necessarily better than the other, although I have never used CE. But what engine is best for creating MMOs and FPS'?
Can people list the pros and cons of each and some features they both contain and state there overall opinion and why?
Can people list the pros and cons of each and some features they both contain and state there overall opinion and why?
Replies
Disclosure : I work at Epic.
www.unrealengine.com
@ WarrenM
The CryEngine pipeline is super quick for artists once you have everything setup in Maya/Max and also now supports FBX import if you feel more confident with another DCC.
It's also the most powerful in terms of real-time lighting and it supports PBR with all bells and whistles. And you can create an indie game with the Steam subscription that won't cost you any royalties in the future.
Full disclosure: I work at Crytek. :P
As much as I love UE4, I'm currently using Unity since it fits my needs better. What kind of team do you have at the moment? What platforms are you targeting? What is your budget like? There are tons of questions that need to be answered before randomly nosediving into an engine for a serious project.
On top of that, by the time 5 is launched, we'll have PBR, Enlighten Global illumination plus the thousands of awesome assets on our store (AI, image effects, FPS kits, models and more) the widest multi-platform one-button publishing support, cloud systems and much more that helps developers make games more easily and more succesfully than ever!
Full disclosure: I work at Unity :P
(Waiting for someone from Autodesk to have a full-disclosure argument with himself)
XSI... oh... wait.
To be that one guy who said anything about Autodesk Game Engine in a serious conversation.
Full Disclosure: I hate Autodesk.
What is better Marmoset skyshop or Marmoset one
Not to Jinx it or anything but I could really get behind a "full disclosure" meme.
8monkey Labs JaneGoodall.
Yeah I'll do that.
Also Thank You, everyone for the feedback! Really helped.
As an artist, I'm a fan of the results achievable with UE4/Cryengine, but I personally prefer Unity from a workflow perspective...its just simpler and easier. Also...Hoping that PBR + Enlighten from Unity5 will close the prettyness gap.
At the very least...there is a free version to get your feet wet and try it out.
Disclaimer...I dont work for either of those companys...but I do have a hard-on for Unity.
I read somewhere that UE4 uses C++? Isn't that like...outdated?
-having no experience with either but interested in diving into one or the other-
Well, in Unity you use C# or a Javascript derivative. Unreal 4 has a nice visual script editor called blueprints that is fantastic. That alone makes me recommend it. You can make an entire game without touching a line of code (I know this exists for Unity but it's an addon). It's quite elegant.
C++ isn't outdated in the least, I would wager that most game engines are programmed in C++. Unity uses C# or Unity Script or Boo for game logic but a lot of the core engine is written in C++.
As Dashiva said, C++ isn't outdated by a long shot. It's got a massive range of libraries for just about anything and is used in an ungodly number of games.
Having said that, some people prefer/recommend C# as its a fair bit easier to pick up and a bit more forgiving to work with compared to C++.
Full Disclosure: He's a vending machine
Say what!?
the reason, as far as I can tell, is that UE has prettier tools to work with immediately
and unity is much easier for learning the engine and starting to write code (with the exception of FPS games, which is the "default" in UE where a lot of code is there for you out of the box)
so the question might become, do you want to display your art in a live engine and maybe tweak some things in the scene to move through scripts? if so I'd go for UE. do you plan on writing more serious code or working with a group of programmers? maybe try unity
edit: to be clear that's just for the "I'm a beginner starting to learn" case. if you're a professional and/or working with a professional team then it doesn't matter which engine you use - you'll make it look good and work
Competent programmers tend to prefer Unreal as they can work in C++ and have full source code without an exorbitant price tag.
While UE4 is definitely easier to work with than UDK, I'd imagine that people who only do art would run into quite a few roadblocks within their projects at a pretty fast rate. Blueprints are great and there are many tutorials, but without a technical mindset you'd gain from programming experience, it might become very difficult to solve certain problems.
I'm curious to see what the Unreal marketplace shapes into in the near future. While there's more to Unity than just the asset store, the quality of work that can be found there is incredible.
CryEngine is for people who love shiny objects and pain.
'Wow, an 85 stage content pipeline whose stability is determined by the conjunction of the orbit of Venus and the fair market price of a gently used Fiat? Sign me up.'
i could agree to unreal beeing more artist friendly, but not recommending Unity because a lot of the games done with it are not AAA titles?
There are plenty of great and fun games done with unity, not just ripoffs as you claim.
How much did you use Unreal 4 in production? From my experience it is not anywhere near as final as UE3 was back at it's peak, it will take time until its the beast it wants to be.
But yes, out of the box Unreal4 does look better and they learned a lot from Unity, they are trying to get back to old strength now which i think is a good thing. But there are reasons why unity is so strong at the moment and took a lot of unreals market from the bottom and climbing up.
Full disclosure: I dont work!
Yah, I just felt like piling on the AD hatewagon. It's fun.
As far as making MMOs, the only recent MMO focused engine to come out was Hero engine. It seems like every dev who's worked on Hero & Gamebryo prefer the latter for MMO development. I haven't messed with the new build, Lightspeed, the prior versions weren't all in one development suites like Unreal, Unity or Cryengine, you make the tools yourself. I think that fact causes a majority of the complaints because I haven't heard anyone give a concrete reason why they hate the engine.
I dunno man, since years every smaller or even bigger production, mobile or indie, we worked on was Unity (or inhouse tech but by far more Unity). Unreal 4 is AAA and we are working on the second production with it right now - still many complaints here. And nobody really wants to work with UDK and the reason is simply Unrealscript.
Hopefully the UE4 store will get as robust and start luring away the Unity faithful; so Unity will be forced to match the UE4 subscription model.
I can't wait for Enlighten
http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?p=1224463#p1224463
Is it worth taking the risk right now?
If you're not making a game with it, there's nothing to risk... although I think everybody should at least learn the basics of UE4.
Takes one button click for me to export my assets to Cryengine 3, and they instantly update in-engine. Setting up a new asset with the correct material group and a new cryexport node literally takes 30 seconds.
I do not understand the issues people have with the CE3 pipeline... other than it being different than what one is used to.
Yes, you cannot make games with Cryengine at all. Crysis 3 wasn't made with Cryengine, of course not.
Exporting an asset takes seconds for me. Don't really understand what you're talking about here.
Again, you must be skimming your eyes picking things you want to see. I spoke directly about character pipeline, not simple static props. Though I could make a statement how exporting an asset (such as a static prop) is nothing more than a click of a button. But knowing how the material editor can mess up saving. Well, I am sure you already know where I am going.
I'd be willing to bet you use 3ds Max and Photoshop. Use anything beyond that and you're screwed. The 3.5.3 Maya exporter screwed up my Maya install so badly I had to reformat my computer. Not to mention even the example content wouldn't even export properly with Maya. God forbid you want to use Blender, either.
I've never understood why the couldn't just use FBX, it's 2014 you know.
That's impossible, sorry. Whatever happened there, a simple Maya exporter isn't going to screw up things so badly that you have to reformat your computer.
I dunno man. I nuked every single directory that could conceivably have been related to Maya and CryEngine and reinstalled a few times. It still didn't work right. Basically it would crash on 'importing CryTools' when there were no CryTools present or any settings. I still don't know to this day how it happened, it was really weird. The best thing I could come up with was that CryTools installed themselves in a hidden directory somewhere that kept propagating whenever I installed Maya.
I know what I'm doing with computers, too, worked as a computer tech for 3-4 years, so it's not a knowledge problem.
But anyway, that encapsulates the CryTek attitude: if you don't work on exactly our pipeline don't count on our stuff working, even if we 'support' it.