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Cryengine or Unreal Engine for city simulation

Hello everybody
I have a simple, ok maybe not so simple question :-) We are looking to build up a city simulation within the cry or unreal -engine. I would like to know what you guys think which one is the better choice for this project?

So far we couldn't find any big differences between both engines, the unreal engine is maybe a bit better to work with "for know". So we are now testing for around 3 weeks both engines with our objetcs and environments.

any suggestions?

Replies

  • Visceral
    Define: "City Simulation"
  • David1983
    Something like Sim City.... but in the first step we just try to build up the city within the engine... some animations.. driving cars etc... the game modus is our second step.

    i found this promo video on youtube, it is not a game but it is made with the cryengine.
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EySdWbR4qcg"]Enodo DemoReel 2012 - YouTube[/ame]
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    At first glance Cryengine sounds better, it has great outdoor lighting and day cycles, arguably better terrain and large scale landscape tools and systems, and seems to be designed around being more dynamic. But if you could get your hands on UE4 that'll be a different comparision.
  • David1983
    ok thats sounds very interesting, so maybe i should change my question in Unreal 4 Engine or Cryengine, where are the differences.

    I just checked the unreal engine site, it looks like a kind of "candidature" for the unreal engine 4 ???
  • ambershee
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    ambershee polycounter lvl 17
    My answer would be neither. If you want to build a real time city simulation on any real scale, you'll want to build it from the ground up. Generalised game engines will not be suitably optimised to meet your needs.
  • SanderDL
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    SanderDL polycounter lvl 7
    UDK's ProcBuildings might be something worth to check out:

    https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html
  • ambershee
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    ambershee polycounter lvl 17
    Procbuilding is just a tool that places instanced meshes. You'll get a much better result by building a pipeline yourself, using something like Houdini to generate your city layout, indvidiual structure layouts, and generating an appropriate import for your target engine that respects mesh instancing / batching.
  • McGreed
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    McGreed polycounter lvl 15
    While I love UDK, I would vote for CryEngine, simply because of the dynamic lightning and outdoors. If you make a game like SimCity, you might want to have day/night cycles, and I don't know if that's possible in UDK.
  • ambershee
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    ambershee polycounter lvl 17
    McGreed wrote: »
    While I love UDK, I would vote for CryEngine, simply because of the dynamic lightning and outdoors. If you make a game like SimCity, you might want to have day/night cycles, and I don't know if that's possible in UDK.

    I'll vote for option A, because I've never looked at option B.

    UDK contains an example day and night cycle out of the box that can be pulled apart or copied:
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb5trFSX85c"]Unreal Engine 3 UDK - Day and Night - GTX 480 - 1080p - YouTube[/ame]

    Other people have implemented their own, such as this one:
    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zGxKXEQHOA"][UDK] Day Night Cycle - YouTube[/ame]

    Both were found with a 20 seconds google.
  • David1983
    thank you very much for your answers,
    Yes the day and niht circle is very important, but we are also looking for the maximum amount of details and "graphic quality" my impression so far us that the cryengine looks better on our created environments and buildings? How is it about the Unreal Engine 4 ???

    @ambrshee but Sim City it also build up on a standard engine from EA, they use the frostbyte engine for sim city but also for all other games like battlefield or racing simulation games... The trailer looks very nice.... if you never have seen option B please take a look at my posted video, this clip is made in cryengine.
  • ambershee
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    ambershee polycounter lvl 17
    David1983 wrote: »
    but Sim City it also build up on a standard engine from EA, they use the frostbyte engine for sim city

    1) It is not a "standard engine" that they just used out of the box for all those games. Heavy modifications to the engine would have been made by respective teams to suit their requirements, because a 200-strong AAA team will have a number of very experienced developers specifically around to do exactly that and squeeze exactly what they need out of their target platforms.

    2) Sim City did not use Frostbite. It has it's own custom engine built from the ground up, internally known as 'Glassbox' (because modifying an out-of-the-box solution was not going to be adequate).
  • David1983
    ouh ok, i thought they are also using the frostbye enginw... i thought i read it somewhere...
    hmm ok so it could be a bit hard to realze such a project on the existing engines... but for now we have no plans and the ability to create our own engine :-)

    what about the unreal engine 4 ?
    By the way, what is the main problem building a city simulation in cryengine or unreal engine ?

    @sendrdl, thanx for the tip!
  • iniside
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    iniside polycounter lvl 6
    ambershee wrote: »
    I'll vote for option A, because I've never looked at option B.


    Both were found with a 20 seconds google.

    You should also mention how poorly the first demo perform, and how much effort you need to puto to create even simple day-night cycle in UDK.
    Yes I know. You need to put effort into everything, to make it good. But using CryEngine 3, in this case, at least give you advantage of engine tailored for rendering big open spaces with fully dynamic conditions.

    With UE4 it would be different, but if I had to choose between UDK and CE3 for city, I would go with CE3.
  • David1983
    We have done some tests today with the cry and Unreal -engine day and night System. The cryengine day and night System seems to be the better one.
    Maybe it is a funny question but is there something like a season sytsem ??? Would be nice to have a Switch from summer to winter time :-)
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    I believe that the CryEngine has time of year and latitude settings within the day/night cycle settings so you can get shorter days and longer nights. But for actually changing and blending between looks of foliage, CryEngine has a more restricted material system so I'm not sure how that will work.
  • James Ordner
    As far as dynamic lighting goes, CryEngine is a good choice. Programming in UDK is MUCH better than Cry though, for great documentation and a helpful community. I personally would pick UDK for this reason alone. With some work you can get a decent day night cycle in UDK, while imo it would take much more time to get the game simply running in Cry due to the programming issues. And I've heard Crytek isn't too nice to indies trying to get a commercial license (no personal experience with this).
  • e-freak
  • ambershee
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    ambershee polycounter lvl 17
    iniside wrote: »
    You should also mention how poorly the first demo perform, and how much effort you need to puto to create even simple day-night cycle in UDK.

    It runs fine. You can get a good 20fps on a 9800GT - you need to remember that it runs quite poorly because it's using 100+ instruction materials everywhere. It's a visual effects demo.
    iniside wrote: »
    Yes I know. You need to put effort into everything, to make it good. But using CryEngine 3, in this case, at least give you advantage of engine tailored

    I would genuinely say that CryEngine's lighting setup is better for day and night cycles, but it has other problems like an inflexible shader pipeline.

    Either way, I still don't think I'd pick either engine for this task unless I were licensing them and had people on task to make relevant modifications. Then I'd probably go with Unreal for the tools, rather than for the engine.
  • David1983
    thanx guys!
    What about the Unreal Engine 4 ? so far the is no free udk version of it avaiable? Maybe the unreal engine 4 is the better way ? But how to get it ?

    One big plus is the support of tutorials, there are so many good tutorials out there, for example we have purchased around 6 months ago some eat 3d tutorials for the Unreal Engine, so it really easy to go ahead with skills and problems.

    @james ordner, yes i heard excatly the same, but i can you or the forum some more details soon. Cause we are one step away to contact the cryengine team for more details...
  • Brygelsmack
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    Brygelsmack polycounter lvl 11
    David1983 wrote: »
    thanx guys!
    What about the cryengine 4 ? so far the is no free udk version of it avaiable? Maybe the unreal engine 4 is the better way ? But how to get it ?
    There's no such thing as CryEngine 4 (or 3 for that matter), and never will be. It's just called CRYENGINE now. It's just a build/version number now. Right now the latest version is 3.5.7, and you can download it here:

    http://www.crydev.net/dm_eds/download_detail.php?id=4
  • David1983
    sorry i mean Unreal Engine 4, my mistake :-)
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    There's no free SDK for Unreal Engine 4, on the Unreal engine website there is a form you can fill out and submit to request access to UE4 for development.
  • David1983
    do you know what the requirements are?
    Is here someone who can tell the difference between Unreal Engine 4 and the Cryengine ?
  • James Ordner
    We're not allowed to say anything about UE4 not already publicly available via Google. If you talk to Epic and your project is legit and has a fair chance of succeeding, you probably won't have much trouble getting access one way or another.
  • David1983
    Ok, so they make such a big secret about the unreal engine 4 ? :-)
    I mean it would be good to know or see if there are any differences between the newest version of cryengine and unreal engine 4. I just read that cryengine claims, that they're engine alreday uses all the technology which are new in unreal engine 4.... ?
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    There's a lot of public information about UE4, it's just the people that have access to it right now don't want to leak anything by mistake. Originally UE4 had a completely dynamic lighting system that used a form of voxel cone tracing, but that has been completely scrapped and they are using a improved form of their light baking. Some of their biggest features so far is vastly improved interface, speed, compiling, prototyping, etc. They still have a more advanced and flexible shader system than CryEngine. Try looking for some of there feature preview videos

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vFZPEIUIB4"]Unreal Engine 4 - Tech-Video zu Layered Materials - YouTube[/ame]
  • David1983
    i know this video, very nice... the material feature is a nice idea, can be very helpful.
    by the way i hate this "fries" looking grass :-)
  • Jacky
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    Jacky polycounter lvl 6
    http://youtu.be/eRUZGCZdXUk

    A day & night and city example in UE4.
  • David1983
    Jacky, haha thanx. fantastic a city demo in the Unreal Engine 4.... ok, the day and night system effect looks good ... but the buildings are very cheap :-)
  • iniside
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    iniside polycounter lvl 6
    David1983 wrote: »
    Jacky, haha thanx. fantastic a city demo in the Unreal Engine 4.... ok, the day and night system effect looks good ... but the buildings are very cheap :-)

    It's programmer art ;)
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