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CryEngine 3 : What is your opinion?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Grady Lorenzo, Apr 1, 2011.

  1. janpec

    janpec

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    Yes i think that its all about smaller communities.
     
  2. brn

    brn

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    Slightly off topic but does anyone know what is the best way to utilize skinning in unity? If this it isn't general knowledge then i'll start another thread and see if i can get some info from the Unity devs, by the way I havent done any real skinning tests in Unity yet.

    Based on other Cpu based skinning engines these are the sorts of things that can really effect the performance.

    1) number of verts , Obvious, but UV's, Vert color and normals and material counts can make a big difference to this.
    2) Is there a bone limit per Mesh, eg 256 or 128 even 64 bones before it does a second pass to cater for the extra bones.
    3) If you do go above the bone limit per mesh do you pay a cost per bone of for the whole 64 ect.
    4) Is the cost for one bone vs the bone limit per mesh the same? So if you are going to skin something is it worth using all the bones up to the limit.
    5) Does unity have cheaper versions of skinning eg 4 bone weighted down to a single bone? If so, if you have one vert in a mesh on the same bone heirachy thats 4 bone weighted will that make the whole mesh 4 bone weighted?
    6) Does unity re transform all the bones if a character had multiple meshes. Each time for each mesh?

    With these questions answerd perhapse we can extract a little more out of performance out of unity until improvements come.
     
  3. brn

    brn

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    Ok, seems I'm not the only one who needs this info. I'll chase it up and post what i find out.
     
  4. RElam

    RElam

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    This is not true if you have a flexible shader/material system, one that builds shaders rather than using single purpose, hand built ones. What you say in Unity would be true using the current system, but it certainly does not have to be.

    But admittedly, if MT is used with skinning, on most modern machines/games, it could work as well. Of course, it's highly subjective, since it's basically assuming that you have free processing power sitting around, but in most games your gpu is tapped out, and cpu is not.
     
  5. Grady Lorenzo

    Grady Lorenzo

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    A lot of us, myself included, don't know how to write ShaderLab. I've been messing with Strumpy for a while now, but I think I should take a decent look at shaderlab mechanics before i shoot for anything advanced. Agree?
     
  6. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    cpu based skinning has no passes.
    Only shader based skinning has cause the register limitation does not allow to handle an infinite number of bones (there the limit is somewhere between 30 and 60 per pass depending on what it offers)
     
  7. MrSweet

    MrSweet

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    Are you joking? Unity is £1500 and Cry will cost your team £500,000 + , we own Cry2 and that cost us 80k for a none game lic version.

    For cutting edge RealTime CGI V3 is stunning, for Game dev geared towards iPhone etc, UNITY can't be beat for ££ and has cracking tools.

    Have you talked the the Crysis guys regards pricing?

    PM me if you want more info
     
  8. flim

    flim

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    The antialias is amazing in CE 3.
    I hope Unity support multicore and 64bit. It is 2011 now and 64bit should be default for gamer.

    start64.com
     
  9. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    64bit clients are a rarity per se, only one genre uses them and thats graphic slutiness erm sorry FPS and Unity is not an engine that can compete in this field at all so I doubt its gonne happen anytime soon (unless it happens along the required 64bit upgrade of the editor).

    Stronger multicore is indeed needed but its likely to happen more sooner than later due to the tablets that don't get that much faster but more parallel, phones that go parallel and consoles that suck at single core performance due to the "do or die" parallelism paradigm
     
  10. Flapman

    Flapman

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    2dfx, Mindark did that with the current version of Entropia Universe, a RPG with a Real Cash Economy and all CryEngine3.

    A
     
  11. CkSned

    CkSned

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    Cry Engine > Unity
     
  12. Artimese

    Artimese

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    Way to state the obvious, how do you compare unity which is free, or 1.5k for pro with cry engine thats like near a million :S

    I wouldn't use cryengine merely cause I dread learning new software, sure I'd love to mess around with it, making water or whatever but I would never try and make a game out of it, never....
     
  13. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Cry Engine very well probably is better - at graphics. But for how long? 4.0 of Unity may well put the pressure on. Last I checked I couldn't make cry engine games for android, ios, mac, pc and web. So in that case I'll just have to point out unity blows cryengine out of the water and doesn't look back.
     
  14. Kinos141

    Kinos141

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    "CryEngine 3 : What is your opinion? "

    Bleh, Unity and Unreal engines look better. Haven't used sandbox yet, so I'm not sure how that runs. Plus, it's not always the game engine. As far as I know, game engines need to have physics, graphics, input settings, etc as basics. Anything else can be added over time maybe by a indie team.
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2011
  15. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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    Not sure if this has been mentioned in the thread yet though, but a DirectX 11 2.32 GB patch was released for Crysis 2, which really puts the zing on the zang.

    http://www.geforce.com/#/News/articles/crysis-2-directx-11-ultra-upgrade

    Obviously Cryengine is the de facto standard when it comes to gaming graphics. We would all be naive to say otherwise. But for 1.5k Unity is much more bang for the buck :p
     
  16. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Reading the latest Develop magazine there is an article about Crytek's CEO who has gone on record mentioning that Unity is their main competitor now, not Epic.

    This is because crytek fully intend to go multiplatform (mobiles, etc) in exactly the same manner unity is. So things are hotting up. The fact their CEO mentions unity many times in the article shows that unity is now up there.

    They did say that the main advantage of cryengine is that everything is realtime, so therefore there is much more creativity as you are changing things while you play. This is something unity needs to bring up one or two notches as well as address DX11 - I am betting 4.0 will be when the big guns are rolled out. Good luck unity staff.

    Interestingly Epic also mentioned unity in comparison to their engine too.

    It is clear... that unity has hit the top 3 middleware game development engines for multiplatform - at least in the eyes of crytek and epic.

    Interesting times afoot. I am putting my backing with unity. Sometimes you have to pick a team and stick with it. After being looked after by Andy (unity european staff) I am pretty sure that I have made the right move.
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2011
  17. janpec

    janpec

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    Hm cant agree with that completly. UDK is targetting mobiles too, it had some good improvements in latest update for optimisation on IOS, there are also many developers using it for mobile games. All i am saying is that you shouldnt just pull Epic from table, i am pretty sure they are important on IOS development too.

    I thought that was pretty obvious for almost a year already:D
     
  18. Maurice-Hoffman

    Maurice-Hoffman

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    The lead programmer of Battlefield 3 is coming to work at Unity to testify that it possible to make an AAA title with Unity3d

    Look at the road map and the interviews with David Helgason they are aiming for AAA development but they need to pursuede the big devs, there competitors like epic en crytec are mentioning this already.
     
  19. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Just hope the price doesn't soar :p
     
  20. Silence

    Silence

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    It's like an arms race, just people (us devs) actually profit from it.
     
  21. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    In fact the oposite will surely happens. Epic and Crytek will provably low their licenses to match Unity ones! Cause, Unity will not change their plans (based on what David H told recently).
     
    Last edited: Jul 12, 2011
  22. janpec

    janpec

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    Yes you are right about that, it has happened with UDK already, i think that Cryengine will have even better licencing fees.
     
  23. mrtyninja

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    I my own opinion Unity is better then Cryengine or UDK for the simple reason that its easy to use and fairly cheap (in the world of game engines) yet VERY powerful. Most people don't use Unity to its full potential. Unity is capable of amazing things, the problem is just lack of serious developers, most "major" indie developers turn to things like UDK because it is essentially the industry standard.

    I mean this.... http://www.interstellarmarines.com/ .... is being made in unity and its AMAZING, if more people used unity to its full potential more games like this could be developed with it.
     
  24. tatoforever

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    I just don't get it why some people still comparing UDK vs Unity. Is not even fair. Unity at it's current public form is beating the h*ll out of UDK. Not in Desktop performance or pure rendering power (in terms of workflow, licensing cost, API access, easy/fast developement, platform coverage and mobile optimizations).
    But guess what, v3.5 will set a huge line between UDK, CryEngine and Unity. In favor of Unity of course! ;)
     
    Last edited: Jul 13, 2011
  25. Regularry

    Regularry

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    There is a recent article at the link below with some statements from Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli comparing CryEngine with Unity.

    I've never tried CryEngine so I have no idea if these things are true or not, but it's interesting that he mentions Unity twice right alongside Epic as the primary competition. :)

    Here are some quotes:

    "We are actually the only engine on the
    entire planet – and by far I would say
    – including Unity and Epic, that is 100 per
    cent real time. People underestimate what it
    means to be 100 per cent real time."

    "And from a gamer’s perspective, there are
    games that are developed with CryEngine
    that I would argue you just cannot develop
    with the Epic and Unity engines. But at the
    same time, those games that have been done
    with those platforms; all of them can be
    replicated with the CryEngine."

    The full article is here:
    http://www.develop-online.net/digital-edition
    Issue 118 - July 2011, starting on page 62
     
  26. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    Yup unity is up there with the big boys. David's collar just grew that much larger.
     
  27. COL.MAC

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    ive been playing with all 3 , unity,udk, cryengine 3

    #1 Unity is user friendly for 1, has many assets you can download, lots of free scipts for it, fps and 3 person easly added, animated models easly added, from mmo to car games, get a game up fast less a time consumer faster builds and can be used on most systems

    #2 udk is like half life, doom, stock fps, modern weapons ,must script all new (OLD STYLE) weapons with animations that you would like to add has classic old unreal T mesh ,and textures that you can use but for making a game , you will likely start from scatch with models and textures ( the stock ones just in the way ), but importing exportimg models and textures are very easy to do, it has a c++ scipting, can be used on most systems
    .
    #3 cryengine 3 comes empty.... very few assets, you need to get crysis 2, update 1.9, then update to dx11, then update to highres texture pack, just to get a good start for textures +( need a i5 Quad core, 1 gig ddr5 gtx 460 or better card and 8 gigs of ram with a win7 64 bit system to run it ) if you got all that it runs sweet, nice dinamic sun, day\night tranisions
    classic fps, and also has c++ avalible ,heavy scripting is needed, 3ds max modeler needed, has the abilitty to be great but it will take a team alot of work

    all in all unity is the most friendly ,both build, community and good assets

    UDK classic sdk style mapping fast builder for average joe thats blowing out free games old school doom style, good scripter could go far though .

    cryengine 3 nice but stripped assets mean you start from scratch need top line machine, good at modeling and scripting, good photoshop skills, good team could go far but it will need a team and take time to learn and use
    also if you do not have the right system to run this it will crash the terrain editor all the time ( note that you must have the fonts on your pc at stock size or sand box will crash constantly )

    i have used all 3 testing each for a full week, as well as 3ds max 2012, milkshape "gtradiant - garbage"
    i have used and mapped cod radiants for 10 years as well as sdk,
    1,2,3 these are all nice tools unity is the best for average builders , hope the minor lag when you load up the assets will be fix and then i feal UNITY can rise above the 2 game linked editors like UDK CRYENGINE 3

    thats my 2 cents after 45 days of head-ach lol review of all 3 game building systems :cool:
     
  28. Morning

    Morning

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    I like cryengine because everything is dynamic and it has GI approximation engine. This is just perfect for games that require day/night cycle and good looking realtime lighting.
    Going dynamic is something I'd love to see unity do. Less bake more update. Optionally though, mobiles won't be able to handle all that dynamically. Not for now at least.
     
  29. janpec

    janpec

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    Nice to see old cod modder here:D

    I would dissagre with Cryengine description. It does not comes empty, in fact it comes with much more stuff than raw Unity engine. It also comes with almost all asset examples that UDK does, it just doesnt come with full game, but eh who needs that?
    There is at least 1 example asset on every area, and you have it quite nicely explained in documentation how to create stuff from scratch.
    For now 3ds max or maya is needed, but sooner or later there will be blender support, now with Direct3d and user content patch added.
    -You do not need that high end computer that you described to run engine, and neither you dont for DX11 system, but ofcourse if you want to run things on really high frames then yes. But for main development that is not necessary.
    There also isnt needed heavy scripting as you can do many things with their visual scripting editor, actually there is already tutorial for full RTS game for Cryengine with just using visual editor.

    Yep indeed, i think that for FPS games BPS brushes are THE main feature. Cryegine BPS system is a little chunky and doesnt work nearly as good, but basically the main problem is becouse Cryengine doesnt uses unit scaling to fit BPS brushes, but rather realtime units, just like Unity. Thats why probably getting BPS system in Unity wouldnt help a lot.

    Yep indeed cycling is very good, it would be great to see cycling of this quallity in Unity. Actually there are already few cycling tools on asset store, the only thing that Unity staff needs to change is lighting to make daylight system more appealing.
     
  30. Morning

    Morning

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    Cycling itself isn't that hard to code, but without any kind of GI the lighting looks eh. It looks great when baked but if you need realtime lighting then quality gets sacrificed. In cry realtime lights look pretty damn sweet, especially for being realtime.
     
  31. SevenBits

    SevenBits

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    Unity is awesome in every way. The other's can't match us!

    In addition, both CE3 and UDK have a royalty share type business model, so in the end you'll make more with Unity.
     
  32. dogzerx2

    dogzerx2

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    I'm going to download it and give it a test just for fun! Hope it's not another UDK....

    EDIT: so far looks like a mess, no idea where to start, I'll give it another try tomorrow
     
    Last edited: Mar 27, 2012
  33. saymoo

    saymoo

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    there are more things to consider than price alone. :)
     
  34. markmods

    markmods

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    It is not that great. The engine like UDK. I download their trial NDA and contracts and the first thing opening the tech demo they display errors. The tiles on the ground are interlacing problems and its a joke. The grpahics are nice and the editor is very nice. If you are wanting to through money into your budget for your game dont work with unity do the engine.
     
  35. lmbarns

    lmbarns

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    Can't use any of my models with it and it took a full page of ugly code to do a simple raycast when I checked it out.

    Looks pretty though! If that's all you cared about and not how far you get with a project.
     
  36. dogzerx2

    dogzerx2

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    When I first opened unity, everything was totally intuitive. I knew a bit of coding from blitz3d, but still. I created a box, and made it move forward, then I made it spin.. I had a lil problem because I was accessing the rotation's Quaternion as if it was Vector3, so the spin was weird, but it was a matter of asking at the forums.

    With UDK (which I tried before unity) and now Cryengine, I don't feel it! After being dazzled with their high tech AAA demos, I open the editor enthusiastic awaiting all the great things promised; but when I step down to reality when I face an empty blank project, I don't even find the most basic things... and I don't require a lot!!
    Three things come to mind: A script editor, a way to get art into the game, and good documentation. None of those requirement were met in UDK or Crytek. Sadly, without good documentation, I have no idea where to start, in an engine where there's no obvious way to get started with some basic scripting! And when I want to settle just by bringing some 3D models to see how the engine renders it, there's no easy way to do that either, not even that!

    How can I not fall back to unity, every time?

    Tbh, I don't think my graphic card supports cryengine, I have an ati 5770. I don't see anything on the viewport, just black. And it crashed several times, randomly. I wasn't able to do anything with it! And there's this launcher.exe that also shows just a black screen, but if I hover the mouse around I hear sound effects.

    I think I'll stick with unity!
     
  37. Kridian

    Kridian

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    You're silly.
     
  38. PolyMad

    PolyMad

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    Unity is not the best rendering engine but it's the quickest dev environment for sure.
    And at its cost, how can you dare compare it with those other engines?
     
  39. HolBol

    HolBol

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    Your Graphics card is fine. I have the same and it works for me (as does Crysis 2 :p).
     
  40. keithsoulasa

    keithsoulasa

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    Its a nightmare to get it to work right , I think it actually damaged one of my hard drives, i'm running on a old clunker though...
     
  41. janpec

    janpec

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    Dogzerx your graphic card is more than fine to run Cryengine, i have lower card and i can run it great ( i however turn dynamic shadows on while workout with it in console -svn_draw_shadows 0). It is normal that you see black, this means that you dont have any project loaded. You need to start new project and also create new level all from main menu, just like in Unity, except that Unity asks you for that sooner and Cryengine does later.

    You can use visual scripting editor, which looks pretty much like Playmaker, except it isnt as easy and you have also coding editor, which i havent used yet so i cant talk for sure. Getting art into game is more complex with Cryengine than Unity for sure, no doubt but if you really want to use that tool this shouldnt be a way to stop it. Basically it takes 5 times longer or more to get art functional in Cryengine becouse:
    A- you need to convert all textures one by one to CryTiff, adjust their size, pixels, lighting contrast and what not.
    B- you need to export models from Max or Maya with their exporter which you get when instaling engine (in bin folder i think). Then you need to save model Max file in your project folder and also export model with Cryengine exporter from max (yes very wierd, i have no idea why do you have to save model first as max file, maybe some sort of protection?).

    Documentation is good, actually great far better than Unitys, EXCEPT for coding. You have to know C++ in advance otherwise you will be lost. Documentation for art is excellent, it also goes into areas which suggest you how to model for game with minimal impact on performance, how to model trees and plants, also you can ask Crytek developer that did all plants on their forums how to hand model good plants, which is cool.

    You will need to get trough tutorials to learn that engine, there is no other way arround it. I needed to watch full 20 minute tutorial few times just to get terrain textures working properly, it is similar engine to UDK, without properly learning it it is hard to do anything.
     
  42. returnString

    returnString

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    Oi, some of us poured blood, sweat and tears into embedding Mono in CE3 especially for C# programmers :'(

    But then the fact that a lot of our design is emulating Unity's, to some degree, speaks volumes. Frankly I like both engines for different things. :)
     
  43. ZJP

    ZJP

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  44. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    What do you exactly mean? Will Mono be fully (and natively) integrated into CE3? :O :O :O
    I really hate LUA and the fact that i can't use a proper IDE with debugger etc (such as Visual Studio) for simple stuff as the game specific/code, is a nono for me to use CE right now (and btw makes me loves Unity even more). But if you guys support C# natively as your main scripting language, i could then give CE a second go for our next project. ;)
    I really hope Unity4 will integrate similar Uber/unified environment technology as seen in CE. More nature features (yes, i love natural photo realistic gigantic worlds and landscapes), such river/road tools, cave tools, realistic weather features such as rain, snow, wet, etc. It really adds lot of dynamics. I'm not talking about simple particles effects, what i mean is, real systems that connects/affects and let all game objects interact all together.
     
  45. kantaki

    kantaki

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    yes, but its still in development. Give them atleast 6 months.
    I should also mention that crytek does not implement crymono, its inkdev
     
  46. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    You guys, Really need to push forward your asset pipeline for your next CE4. Getting models into CE(specially animated models) is really a nightmare. On Unity it takes few seconds (just drop on the Editor). On CryEngine, it requires a special and very specific careful setup, lots of text file editting and constraints. When i bring models into CE i feel like mod/hacking the old way. You should probably follow the Unity model regarding content pipeline/setup. Until then, Unity still winning that battle (ultra rapid/fast lightspeed developement).
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2012
  47. returnString

    returnString

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    Working on VS debug support atm but it's a real pain. No plans for a full integration at present but we're not even out of alpha yet so who knows what the future holds.

    Coincidentally, I work for both of them ;)

    Anyhows this is a Unity forum and I'm not here to convince people to switch to CE, I'm here to build games with Unity! There's a lot of things all game engine devs could learn from each other but time constraints will definitely ensure that no single engine is ever the game engine to use.
     
  48. lince5

    lince5

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    i hope unity 4 can bring better rendering and graphics with dx11... that's the feature i feel jealous of ce3 (and ue3)
     
  49. hippocoder

    hippocoder

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    There's a lot going on in unity that can't be done without huge amounts of work in UE or Cry, like the whole mono behaviour vibe going down and cool managed languages and sick extensible editor.

    I've frankly fallen in love with unity's way of WORKING... I trust myself to be able to deliver if it looks nice or not...
     
  50. Almaj

    Almaj

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    Remember unity, Light is everything, without it, the world is just flat and ugly.