Cryengine now has C# & more!

They have a new UI system with tons of widgets objects which you can code with C#, pretty easy to use, you don't need Flash anymore.
Coding is a lot faster now thanks to C#, debugging with Monodevelop and the engine works like a charm. Though there's no assembly hot reload so you have to restart the editor or game (which ever you are using). The CE API it's a bit bigger than Unity one and will seem a bit awkward but that's expected. Due to the fact that there's a game framework, there's a couple of things you have to take into consideration when coding such as registering, activating and pooling entities
/objects also because entities are networked enable by default but again this is true in any game framework.
Creating gameplay code in C# will require more steps and knowledge, so don't expect to jump in and start creating stuff on your first day. Documentation of C# framework is scarce but will give you a head start (they are adding more as we speak) but you'll probably have to dig other parts of their docs to figure out how things works together, how they behave and relate to each other.
Editor is a bit more intuitive, the are deprecating a couple of old editor tools. The new launcher creates your basic project automatically (no more manual file/folder digging).
I'm also trying to figure out if the assets workflow got any improvement (didn't found out anything yet).
This is not an engine recommended for small tiny projects or for spare-time one week demo games, you have to spend a cheer amount of time learning the Engine API, how the editor works and their "rip my arse" archaic asset pipeline (which hopefully will improve more over time). Improving their asset pipeline will make the gap a lot closer to Unreal and Unity but until then still behind in that department.
Lastly and noteworthy, their new renderer is a lot faster than Unity and Unreal ones.
NOTE: I've been following their development since their first Crysis gam, made few crappy mods with various versions of CE but I'm not a CryEngine expert in anyway.

 

They sold their old one. The new renderer is exclusive.

But I'm pretty sure CryteK is the one that doesn't want to sell itself.

 

Well, i need a UI designer, i don't want to mess with code to design UI interfaces on the design phase.

They claim hot reload, are you sure ? Or it's coming ?

Still the editor needs practice, and they have deprecated the great LOD generator, what a shame. We don't know if they will bring a new one or just skip it ? Like you said C# is not as simple as Unity, the framework is still geared towards high end PC games so it is more complicated.
I don't need a high end engine, but if i would start such a big game using high detailled models and level i would go for CryEngine for three major winning points : really faster than UE4 engine and looking as good - C# support - no royalties.

But this is always a personnal preferences and project needs , some people will want UE4 Blueprints and a shader editor, while others will want Unity easy framework and plugins.

Their engine is the fastest on the indie market and it is used by come big companies, i think they want to keep that position. Amazon will not benefit the huge performance improvments or new clouds rendering for example, they are on their own, and i would not bet in Lumberyard because who knows best CryEngine it's Cryteck itself.

 

Unless there's real evidence that it's faster than Unity 5.4 I remain a skeptic. All things being equal ie shaders with similar complexity etc.

Reason for this is I'm not convinced it would run forgotten memories on mobile at the same speed. Will it?

 

c'mon hippo, CE is not for mobiles you know that, and yes CE is times faster than unity , they already have all kind of complex shaders out of the box : water, SSS, humaskin, vegetation with SSS , POM , silhouette POM, tessellation etc etc....with volume clouds, SSAO, fog, TOD and on and on

 

Ok then, proof? It just painfully illustrates you don't understand what shaders are. How they can't be magically faster in a different engine. If you use the same technique in your own engine or Unity, it should basically be the same perf.

If cryengine is faster, it won't be because of the shader, which you can freely replicate in any engine. It'll be how it manages scenes, draw calls, lighting etc. So I'm asking where and why it's faster. Hint: it's not POM.

You can port all the shaders to anything, a shader is just a set of GPU instructions. It's not engine specific. I'm all for cryengine being actually faster, so that Unity does something about it. But I don't understand or see the proof where it is faster. I need to know low level, why it is?

And not just because people say it is, proof is required for bold claims. Everyone did say UE4 was much much faster. Turned out to be a load of hype.

 

Download CryEngine V, download SDK game level on their marketplace and run it, you will be surprised.
It is faster because the engine was already fast and they have rewritten the rendering entirely for CryEngine 5.This is Cryteck that made Crysis 2 & 3 or Ryse, they also made Crysis 3 on Xbox 360, so you can expect a really fast engine. Until Unity make AAA games you can't expect the same rendering speed with Unity 5.

From http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC1/CRYENGINE+V#CRYENGINEV-ReleaseHighlights

 

Their renderer is faster for a multiple reasons, they've completely removed DX9 and DX10 support, minimum requirement is DX11 and this removes tons of layers, complexity and overhead plus it's heavily multithreaded, smaller and simplified. Unity 5.4 still fast though but also have more room for improvements. I'm in the process of doing some stress test and post out the results here once I'm done.

 

If you want to see AAA games made within Unity, then take a look at P.A.M.E.L.A or Escape from Tarkov.

 

Yeah, this is more like the answer I expected since a lot of those improvements are also in 5.4 - seems like a common goal of most engines (mostly driven by research with VR) so I'm hoping that we can highlight the proper bottlenecks, rather than vaguely pointing at shaders

 

mm you post sounds a bit contemptuous mate .... i worked with cryengine 4 years ago during 2 years, i'm on unity because the team i work in use unity, so i can compare.... have you ever done something with cryengine ? just opened it maybe ?
and if you say i don't know nothing about shader, search, these forums, i actually made some shaders , not at a professionnal level, but i know what a shader is....
and... about cryengine shaders system , they have perfectly optimized shaders and their renderer is optimized for large amount of DC.

the first thing i made when i downloadeds unity is a simple terrain with vegetation and trees...juste to compare....
so...cryengine with 400 000 trees (one of my models), plus water , plus grass, plus rocks, plus all effects and environment runs fine at 30 fps.
... to compare just try this with unity..... and we talk....

and please, i don't underestimate you, please try to do the same , we are gentlemen.

 

Escape from Tarkov as mmo fps seems more interesting because it is a big outdoor game.
About CryEngine if you want to know what is able to run on your PC you can play these games and some coming ones :
-Miscreated
-Star Citizen
-Everybody's gona to the Rapture
-Evolve
-LichDom Battlemage
-Monster Hunter Online
-Kingdom Come : Deliverance
-Sniper Ghost Warrior 3
-HomeFront the Revolution

CryEngine has been created for big AAA outdoor games and Cryteck are still pushing graphics ahead and making AAA games. You can achieve good looking games on Unity but you'll need lot of plugins and lot of work while game engines designed for AAA games are ready out of the box and have lot of features to help you (for example CryEngine has an advanced AI ready to use and many AI and navigation utilities for level design, Unreal 4 has many AI tools and a really good avoidance system).

 

@hippocoder here is a screen of the test i made, just for you to see that i made some

 

@antislash - how big can Cry terrain be? Or is it under the same restrictions as Unity's?

 

terrain size depends on resolution ofc, i didn't make a big big terrain but i went to 10 kmx10km as far as i remember, but must say it was not very detailed, unreal has better tools for terrain refining IMO.
the interesting thing in unity is you can have multiple terrains and seam them by code...wich you cannot do with CE, unless you get heavyly into deep code...
but check http://miscreatedgame.com/
i helped them with some vegetation 2 years back,, left the team because of no time available and cryengine went EAAS(gasp)... they have a pretty big terrain....

 

Actual terrain is big enought but limited to one terrain. Still you have source code and you could implement multiple terrains if you have some skilled coders or code a procedural system if your game was space ships.

 

@hippocoder is right about the shader part, a well optimised shader is a well optimised shader irrelevant of the engine it's in. They all use the same API's which is DX or GL Vulkan, so there's no reason a shader should run faster in a certain engine.

That being said, never underestimate the speed of a properly optimised light game framework. If you base a framework atop of GL 4.X for PC / Console only, it'll run rings around Unity etc.

As @tatoforever said, decent OC / instancing / multi-threading / lightweight shadows / lighting / CR streaming / post over a lightweight framework just = fast.!

Of course you can still make CE run like a slug, I saw a Jimqusition? Video was it, where someones game was dropping a Titan X.. LOL!

 

Yeah, throwing default standard and a bunch of random non optimised post fx at a laptop in Unity is hardly a good test of how capable Unity is. It's just hobbyist mode / easy to start with.

Having said that, its probably a good idea that Unity does have more learning materials how to optimise Unity because it's clear people are having a hard time figuring it out.

 

The issue is that Unity relies a lot in plugins to achieve the best graphics , terrain, vegetation and many effects and shaders and any users will have to try to optimize all that and Unity.
While CryEngine have already all that features made and optimized by Cryteck themselves, CryEngine is ready out of the box and you don't need to optimize it because it is already optimized.

I agree, Unity could make a "High End PC" empty game template with the right shaders, the good image effects.
Still people will have to deal with Alloy, Ubber, Motion blurr plugin, Natural Bloom, Better shadows plugin, terrain shaders plugin, vegetation plugin , water plugin etc ... It is not too many plugins impacting performance ?
Would not Unity run faster if all that was in engine integrated and optimized ? and some C# plugins integrated in Unity as C++ components instead ?

We are comparing potatoes and carrots, Unity and CryEngine don't have the same framework, one is easy another is harder, one is real time Svogi another is Lightmapping based.
Each on is better on some platforms, Cryteck works mainly on PC platform while Unity is mobile mainly, Cryteck integrate all visual tech in the engine while Unity relies a lot on Asset Store plugins.
One will always be the best in some platforms than another, i don't think they will catch the same features and quality on the same platforms.

 

Well the issue I've identified with Unity is:

a) there's not enough core engine stuff available to
b) make high quality shaders that rely on existing buffers

So you end up having motion blur have to hack around things and do more work so that motion blur works. Then you have the same problem with any temporal based post effect, and if you use asset store they probably all render their own and don't work so hot with each other.

Next up, you have shaders like alloy, uber and friends. These are actually a fair bit heavier than the approximations used in cryengine. Put simply, they're going to be maybe slightly slower because they do more by design for extreme quality.

I don't expect cryengine to have better performance than unity at lower quality levels. I do expect it to beat unity up at high or extreme quality levels. But the heart of what is happening with Cinematic post and the engine changes to come to support that post, will go a long way toward optimising Unity for a higher quality bar.

Unity then needs to merge the hell out of it's post. We can't be blitting from texture to texture, even though there's now a performant way to do that. We need it merged. Any ms saved, is a massive deal.

Then there's culling groups, instancing and IL2CPP plus the VR optimisations (which also affect non-vr) in 5.4 (once it's stable) should in theory put them within ballpark of each other.

This doesn't address fast open world rendering, but for a corridor shooter I doubt there will be much performance difference between engines given similar shaders after the above has taken place. Open world rendering needs a *lot* more work with Unity, not least how shadows are handled. Rendering all the shadows all the time? Insane.

TLDR: Unity can't remotely hope to beat Cryengine outdoors. It probably CAN match cryengine indoors, all things being equal. But this isn't a retraction of my previous comment, which is: you're wrong if you think "shaders are magically faster in another engine" - because you could do that in this engine. Is it out of the box? No. And that's maybe a problem if you're going to do out of the box comparisons.

It's important Unity's users stop throwing around uninformed comments, it's also damaging to everyone. It's important to properly identify what the bottlenecks are so people can improve their games. As it is, Cryengine is carefully designed to tackle open world. I don't think Unity would be harmed by extending Unity the same capability.

It's hogwash that Unity can't ever do it because it's "generic". It's just a matter of Unity finding the time and engineering effort to add features so that it can.

 

They absolutely can be faster in the other engine if the other engine is better at reducing CPU overhead and reducing amount of time spent on non-shader code. Also, even if two shaders implement the same effect using the same algorithm, that doesn't mean their code is completely identical, by the way.

 

Yeah I believe I said shaders, not cpu or anything else. You're creating an argument for zero purpose. Perhaps there's some purpose but I already covered that. Try reading posts, thanks.

 

Your post did not cover the portion I mentioned. When people say "faster" they usually mean better framerate and do not imply that someone clocked how many nanoseconds per pixel this specific shader takes.

Also, there's more to it than just "IL2CPP and culling groups". One of the older DX version had that amazing trick where reodering mesh vertices greatly improved rendering performance because cache memory got hit more often. Thinking about it, there were more fun oldschool optimziations like triangle strips. Oh, right, there were that one suggestion of using texture atlases to minimize state switching, etc. There are many ways to get better performance while using same shader.

Honestly, Unity engine is not exactly famous for being fast. So I'd be extremely surprised if Cryengine DIDN'T perform better.

 

So you're saying that Unity doesn't use shared buffers to save precious MS on post, but it's somehow as fast as CE for indoors because? Umm!?

Wasn't Unity also doing work on properly multi-threading the engine as of 5.4? Then aren't they also doing things like worker jobs and instancing as of 5.4? So yeah it's "getting there", but it's not inconceivable that CryEngine can be quicker. Especially such a light weight engine..

Just like it's not inconceivable that Unity is easier to use.!

Again, Unity will move the goal post, then CE will and we'll rinse and repeat into eternity..!

@neginfinity

Not if you copy and paste them ...

 

some seem to take offense each time someone criticizes unity.... grow, boy.
install CEand just test. the final test is how your assets run on a level
yeah CE is WAY faster than unity with standard assets and standatd fx, it sucks that i have to buy tons of plugins from third part people out of unity.
that said, i re-say what i said previously ... unity ends where CE begins and vice versa, they are different engines, not for the same purposes like girls and boys, no one is better, just different ....

 

You are right, it will never run Forgotten Memories as fast as Unity allow us to (even on PC). The reason is that we use a custom renderer, a pseudo Forward+ without the culling part with 3 dynamic lights at time (per frame) made exclusively for our game which is quite optimized. On the other hand CE only does deferred rendering. Under same circumstances, deferred rendering, similar large open areas, etc then CE beats Unity by a marge.
PS: I'm still in the process of creating a stress level test on both engines, kinda hard to achieve similar visuals on those different beasts, but I'll try to keep things simple and close as much as possible. Keep an eye.

 

Only CryEngine can include tasty options like 'GPU Fluid Dynamics' in their particle system, particle lights affecting volumetric fog, area lights affecting volumetric fog, and then fail to document it or show it off I really hope that changes at some point this week, I cant handle being teased for this long.

 

@hippo,
Also keep in mind that by default CE have other sub-systems and simulations running when you render those beautiful outdoor scenes while Unity have none which implies that CE is doing a lot more than just rendering a big outdoor scene, running an entire game framework too.

 

@tatoforever interesting work you made on the renderer, if you mind share the principle of your work on another thread it would be intesting for me and team. we make a voxel base game and at some point, that kind of optimization could be interesting to know about ....

just back to CE ..... an example of what i'm looking for and can get in CE not in unity.
i sculpt and model some unique trees... how can i put them in unity with standard version ? no way,
while i CE i just have to paint some vertex colors (add LODs and colliders), put a vegetation shader on it and that's it.
but im the meantime, tested a moss shader of mine that i likevery much but that i can't port to CE .....

 

.Unity don't have volumetric clouds or Svogi for example. Is this damaging or doing misinformation ? no.

Both CryEngine and Unreal 4 have lot of optimisations like mipmaps , shader quality switching and many tricks to still look great while running faster.

I agree , for example CryEngine has all post effects, clouds, fog, Svogi , time of day and others imbeded and optimized in the engine directly, not as external code or plugin.

I think Unity can reach CryTeck indoor graphics and performance, but a game is not only geometry and shaders, you'll have AI , decals, HUD, particles, physics , characters animations and CryEngine has these features implement in a different way than Unity.

Open worlds are becoming more and more popular these days, but does Unity really needs to put lot of effort on this ? How many indies made big outdoors interesting games selling very well ?
What are the most produced and winning Unity game titles ? I don't think this is PC high end games or big outdoor games. What about mobile, 2D PC games ? the demand is perhaps bigger than open worlds with Unity.

But why not ? If Unity could bring vegetation shaders , voxel terrain , alloy, ubber, ai groups, image effects , time of day , all in the engine and make optimisations and use many tricks in the engine , why not.

 

This is both benefical and a downside in fact

If you target older machines, if your game is made with CryEngine 5 it will not run with DX10 or DX9 3D cards.
Somewhat like Unreal 4 asking a really good 3D card , you will not be able to target a really large audience of players.

In another discussion i found this really interesting article :

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-10-09-shattered-horizon-the-fps-that-got-lost-in-space

Unfortunately for everyone involved, DirectX 10's exclusivity to Windows Vista, and Shattered Horizon's exclusivity to DX10, was to prove disastrous. Reviled by gamers for its high system requirements and DRM-friendly measures, most were content to stick with XP rather than invest in Microsoft's new operating system, which meant game developers remained loyal to DirectX 9 as well. "There was nothing out there to give gamers a reason to upgrade", rues Gallagher. "Windows 7 came in October 2009, a month before we released our game. Windows 7 was a big improvement over Vista, and gamers were much more enthusiastic about DirectX 11, but it put us in a difficult position.


"We couldn't delay releasing the game for long, but according to the Steam Hardware Survey at the time, only 50% of players had PCs that were capable of running it. It was a major problem for a game based on pure online multiplayer. Our only option was to release it and hope that more gamers would upgrade. It wasn't until 2012 that major games started appearing that required DirectX 10 or higher. Sadly, that was too late for us."

You make a choice as always for PC games , CryEngine for outdoor fast performance , or UE4 for tools and graphics , or Unity running on a bigger range of PC.

 

A friendly reminder, if you have tried the new CryEngine and have feedback don't forget to let them know too.

 

From the same article:

That was four years after DX10 was released with Vista, which - as most of you surely remember - wasn't "particularly popular", to put it nicely. It has been SEVEN years since DX11 has been released with a very popular version of Windows. Make of this what you want.
Personally, I don't think the developers who made/use the CE of all engines, really target ancient hardware. The CryEngine became somewhat synonymous with "state of the art graphics" for a reason.

Which it doesn't.
A friend of mine has a REALLY S***ty laptop with some old Intel Pentium CPU and integrated graphics. I don't know which one it is exactly, but on benchmark rankings, you're better off sorting the results ascending, if you know what I mean.
A couple of friends he knows released a game called "Ben and Ed" some time ago. It was made with UE4 and runs like charm on his laptop. On the other hand, many with Unity games (like Satellite Reign) he cannot even use the main menu because his laptop chokes on it, even if he uses the minimum graphics settings.

Just because UE4 comes with all the fancy 3d graphics enabled by default, it doesn't mean that the developer has to use them. From what we've seen UE4 scales VERY good towards the bottom end of the hardware spectrum. And from what I remember seeing/reading about Crysis 2 and 3, the same can be said about the CE. If you turn the settings down, it runs very fast, while still looking (comparatively) good.

-----

Unity's current post processing is awful, period.
Aside from the many outdated techniques/algorithms, you know that there's something going really wrong, if third party asset developers (see: SSAO Pro, Scion, etc.) are able to release post processing tools that look and run better at the same time.
Last time I checked, the situation with ambient occlusion was particularly sad. Not only does SSAO Pro run faster, but Unity's default AO looks unacceptably bad (comparison).
It makes me wonder how many of Unity's internal systems are in a similar shape. That is, how many internal systems besides the terrain, input and OpenGL renderer. Old, probably poorly implemented systems that need an update badly.

That being said, looking back at the state of Unity when I first started working with it (Unity 4.x - I think 4.2 or 4.3) and comparing it to Unity 5.4, which I currently work with, makes me optimistic though.
Unity has come a long way and the roadmap puts a smile on my face, too. All the outdated systems I mentioned earlier, are being worked on. (I really hope they merge the new cinematic post processing algorithms though, because currently they're still separate scripts)

 

The problem is that their forums are still not working for newly registered users.
Can't write anything there right now

 

One more thing ^_^.

It would probably be the best if people didn't go into "I must defend the honor of my favorite product!!!" mode every time they hear some criticism. ^_^

Spoiler

P.S. Couldn't resist ^_^.

 

This...

 

No way! They're probably aware but I'd tweet them to let them know they're accounts are messed up.

 

Whilst I'm not a fan of dropping the hammer on these sort of threads, any problems with other engines shouldn't really be on Unity forums.

I always hope that these "engine" threads serve a purpose to Unity themselves, innovation is a great thing but perspective is another. So getting honest feedback about what users (indie devs) like about a certain engine including reasons why seems like free valuable market research to me.

That is of course if Unity is paying attention and / or it doesn't become a flamer ..

A lot of stuff from the UE4 threads have been implemented in Unity (or on it's way), so a success all round in my book.

 

haha! but I think everyone is ignoring my criticisms of Unity only read fanboy praise for some reason.... it is frustrating. I need Unity to be better so I do (and have) criticised it constructively in this thread. Nobody reads it though?

Sure I'm the one defending anything at all? or pointing out where misconceptions can arise?

 

Ohh hippocoder you're such a fanboy, I even remember your fanboy posts on IndieGamer

 

The last discussions was why Unity is slower and has issues with big outdoor games , or what could be done to improve performance, what ideas ?
We didn't pointed any CryEngine issues

It is good for Unity to compare with CryEngine ? Yes.
We start to get Unity good Image Effects, without UE4 appearing this would never had happened, so thanks Epic.
And the last Unity impressive tech demo at GDC would not have happened without UE4 challenging i think.

I played with CryEngine i gave some informations about it , but this is all.
Unlike you i am not making a big outdoor AAA game and i don't have a team and i don't want to put lot of years trying making one, so i really don't need CryEngine or UE4.

Unity remains the best compromise between quality , easy to use, fast iteration and fast prototyping. I can't work as fast with CryEngine or Unreal 4 when i have some free time.
The entire thread was about CryEngine C#; the answer is simple : No, CryEngine C# is not easy ,Unity C# framework is more easy by far.
CryEngine doesn't allow multiple C# components per entity, it doesn't have Unity friendly Physics setups , it doesn't have prefabs.

Take the right tool.

 

Actually did I post there? I've no memory, must have been a few years back.

 

Nobody said you / we did. Twas a generic statement like pizza is tasty.!

It's called relative context, it doesn't matter if CryEngine is 10X faster performance wise if in Unity your game runs flawlessly on target hardware. That doesn't mean Unity shouldn't improve as a generic engine, because the more exposure and needs it can cater to the better.

I won't even mention Unity 4, I used it because I had to and no more reason. Although for all the critcisms Unity 5 is getting, it's actually shaping up to be a cracking engine which can stand on its own merit against the bigger AAA guru's. New sequencer looks mighty cool, multi-scene editing is sweet and a bunch of gorgeous graphics upgrades is vey nice. Decent MT and lets face it stuff like Umbra has always been awesome..

The only main criticisms I have about Unity now is, it needs a proper good looking GPU based particle system and terrain.. It also needs to deal with frame rate issues, like Unreals FR smoothing. I'll be honest I'm not sure how CE does it but transitions are pretty much seamless. Maybe an option for better shadows?

A helping hand with a lot of "defacto" standard tech you get in CE like volumetric fog (or examples of), in-built fog post with cool stuff like light scattering etc.

There is always the question "where does the engine stop and the developer begin"? Volumetric fog doesn't come with UE as standard, I know how to "fake it" by using camera based position offset "fog sheets" using a sort of "depth fade". Finally using a transparent shadow material with a vertex shader that projects out in the direction of lighting.

Or you could use particles etc. (if particles are light and look good).. Or I could just y'know go implement one myself Many ways to skin that one.! Not fully read it, but this siggraph is pretty sweet: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2014/wronski/bwronski_volumetric_fog_siggraph2014.pdf

Question being, papers like these do the R&D for you. They remove a lot of common pitfalls, but it's still not as simple as I'm going to make volumetric fog whilst I eat this sandwitch. It takes time, time you need to be spending on your game really. I also gotta ask, honestly how many of you can do it? It takes a hefty amount of time to learn these things.

I understand stuff like this is either covered by the asset store, or so low down on the priority list that it'll be a long way off and for people making 2D games all this is pretty useless. Although every little helps right?

 

The generic argument is a giant fallacy though because for every comment where you want Unity to be less generic, there is an equal amount of people in other engines asking them to be more generic.

It's possible to please everyone, but it takes time to develop that optional functionality. An old criticism of UE3 was - you could only make FPS games unless you were willing to invest a truckload of engineering effort. This is far less the case now in UE4, but it's still pretty clear it would suck at 2D games. Same for cryengine. But users there do request that functionality. I don't believe this will weaken the engines at all.

Just takes time.

 

No the terminology from the start is flawed, Unity has 2D and 3D tools already. So it's already not "generic" in the first place. It's all a misnomer.! What I mean by generic is having toolsets to cater to more than one type of game without having to fight the engine too much. Like your example with UE3 and CE in earlier iterations for that matter..

The last thing we want to do is get bogged down in semantics, all "engines" technically are "generic" because they work on the same API's in which you can do anything with them if the source isn't closed. It's all a matter of how much work it is to achieve the goal for your type of game.

The main issue with 3D is keeping up with it all, it changes so fast..! After the engines have become thouroughly sorted out, it will be a tools race.

 

I agree, Unity is years behind in terms of vegetattion and terrain, so people going for these games tend to go for UE4 or Crysis when they want "out of the box" and in engine optimized.

This is the main point, each engine have really strong points, what do you really need for your current game ?

I think adaptable way is better for Unity.
I make a mobile 2D game and i go with Unity, i need to make a 3D PC game i keep using Unity framework , editor and components, i don't need to learn a new interface and a new framework i am already experienced to work fast.
This is an advantage for many solo devs and small teams.

You are wrong, still with UE4 missing more 2D tools, it can be done

 

exactly..

oh yes...just that.... a decent terrain and a vegetation systemthat allows custom models with a good vegetation shader
it's just want that ...

 

Thing is, it doesn't necessarily have to be "one engine or the other" as @hippocoder said. Unity could make it so everyone has their cake and eats it.. It's a matter of time and resources.

I've found Unity does tend to get through these things slowly, whereas Unreal is like a bull in a china shop. Both having some major pro's and cons.. As for the reasons well, unless I worked for Unity I'll never have a clue?

One of the main issues is Unity can NEVER do right, because lets say they spend a year doing nothing but top tier 3D upgrades competing against the likes of Unreal / CE then people will complain about 2D and mobile. If they focus on mobile / 2D then people complain about that. If they do both, people complain they're too slow..

If they don't keep archaic old rubbish in the engine and it breaks projects, people will complain about that even though it would greatly benefit Unity to say screw it and dump all the old rubbish.

Like CE said, screw backwards compatability you're using DX11.. I'm not sure that'd go down too well in Unity. Even though I agree with CryTek..

 

My experience with Cry Engine so far...



Jokes aside, I want to test it out so badly!

 

bahahahahah,