Crytek reported to be in trouble (apparently)

Not sure if you take stock in this as believable, but anyway:

http://www.dsogaming.com/news/cryte...ngine-not-good-ryse-development-catastrophic/

Shame really I always thought if CE had combined Unitys toolset / workflow / ease of use and support / platform support / licensing and indie political standpoint with their rendering tech CryTek would of dominated the market. Because that's what Epic did and it seems to have worked out for them.

Well if it's true, then it's a crying shame (no pun intended). There is so much potential..

 

Alternatively, Unity can just do less work to update their rendering than CE would have to do for improving their usability... especially since Unity's already trying to do that.

 

Oh I agree, well Unity have already addressed this in Unity 5.0 with the likes of Enlighten / FDR / PBR (PBS) and speedtree inclusion. Some better post and maybe a sky / sun / water upgrade template and they are already on par with everything CryTek delivers. If their streaming and occlusion tech is on par then I couldn't think of a reason Unity 5.0 can't be the complete solution to all devs bar a few tools like cinematics and some nicer looking particles.

Thing is as an out the box high end 3D games solution, CE really hit the mark in a lot of areas. It didn't lack in potential and could of been a dominant force, it's a shame really. The licensing format came way too late, the basic toolsets like .FBX import is only appearing now whilst Epic and Unity don't have to do too much as you said.

 

Well, this just goes to show that the AAA games industry is a F***ed up place.
I feel like studios are getting closed like clockwork. Why? Hmmm, I don't l know. Maybe it's because putting millions and millions and millions into every single project is a stupid idea. Especially for new IPs where you can't know whether they will be successful or not.
I bet if there's something to it, there will be a Jimquisition about it where Jim will spend 5 minutes calling the industry/people in charge stupid. And tragically he will be right.

 

Whilst I agree, I've been more interested in the engine subs.. I'm not sure using Steam as a DRM centre amongst all other things was the right way to go?

With the CE SDK I can't say I'm suprised in the slightest, but still it's not nice to see a company struggle.

P.S explains why Sony and MS are all over Indie devs with AAA outfits dropping like flies.

 

Well, what should I say? It's a rumor. I think the best thing to do now is to sit back, relax and wait for more details to emerge (hopefully debunking this rumor).

 

I hope this is NOT true, I really want them to finish Homefront 2. HF2 has the recipe for great Crytek game, good setting/story, open world and no aliens/mutants. They proved great graphics and gun play, so there's little they can screw up with this title.

 

If Unity 5 is as awesome as it looks (and as successful financially for Unity) then Unity 6 should be phenomenal.

This engine has improved so much since the days of its birth. Seriously, lol.

Although Apple is getting pretty serious with game development, and putting out some pretty impressive stuff.

 

I never liked CryTek so I'm not crying about it. I have my gripes about their games and engine. I wish them better luck next time.

 

You'd be surprised.

 

It's not CryTek I'm concerned with, hopefully their employees will go to a decent place in the event CryTek should tone down or shut down.

We all know of there exploits with Indies in the past and pretty much the SDK has always been to me a level editor as opposed to a full blown engine with a suite of tools. One can argue semantics with this, but if you were making a game with OpenGL chances are you'd at least have .OBJ and .FBX support in the editor.

It's not like the community didn't give them fair warning of all the issues, I'm still unsure what CryDev is for TBH? It didn't seem to serve much purpose bar the odd dev and modders hanging out. All the well thought out feedback fell on deaf ears..

 

Unity 6 ~3 years out maybe?

As fast as things are moving in the industry right now by that time Cryengine could be OSS.

 

It's survival of the fittest, the studios dying are the ones that are being badly managed. Games are super profitable, but it won't matter if the people in charge are following the latest trend like it's a pot of gold with ill focus(another good example of this is CCP; who brought you only one good game in their lifetime yet have more things going on than a single mother with three jobs).

The "new" IPs that Crytek were bringing out were borrowed/carbon copies of other games that came before them and for a company of that size releasing F2P games that objectively suck are not going to cut it. Nothing new or innovative was seen, this is why they're dying.
The only thing they have going for them is the insanely talented people they have working for them at the Frankfurt branch, but it's not really going to matter when their management is making them chase their newest idea without clear vision or focus.

The only branch that has produced anything noteworthy was Frankfurt and yet they have more subsidiaries than you can count on one hand and yet the only thing that came out that people recently that people may know of is Ryse(you may or may not have heard of Warface, which is another flop)..which is not a failure because of the lack of talent but because of mismanagement. It doesn't take an idiot to know

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. public float ChanceOfFailure
3. {
4. get{return (quicktimeScreenTime/totalScreenTime) * 100;}
5. }
6.  

They're blowing cash faster than George Lucas can ruin another manchilds childhood.

 

I don't care if a studio makes bad decisions and suffers for it. That's the normal way of things. You can only do so much wrong before you cannot get away with it anymore.
However, when the studio isn't the entity that makes the bad decisions, but is the one that has to pay for them, I feel differently about the issue. The whole "publisher drives studio into a wall and shuts them down" is far too common (*looks at EA*).

 

I agree wholeheartedly, just that's not what happened with Crytek.

 

Is Apple competition?

Somewhere in the 5.x cycle Unity could easily add Metal rendering as an alternative to OpenGL in its export. If Swift is as much faster than ObjC as it appears to be, Unity's new IL2CPP compiler could probably cross-compile code to Swift in much the same way.

 

It would be a massive waste of time IMO. Metal would have to be adapted by others and Apple themselves stated that they don't yet know whether Swift will be Open Source. Adding Apple-only stuff would be stupid since one of the biggest advantages of Unity is its portability.
They should focus on feature parity (aka. upgrading the OpenGL renderer already) instead. A situation where part of the features are Windows/DX-only, part of them Apple-/Metal only, etc. would be very bad for the engine as a whole.
The same games should play the same regardless of the platform they're running on.

 

I disagree. There are some very nice DX11 features that I would really love to have the ability to play with, and it would be very nice if compiling with Metal would give a performance boost on a platform. I'm not saying that all games compiled for iOS should use Metal, nor that all games compiled for Windows should use DX11, but if you're willing to put in the time make sure all your shaders and whatnot are compatible, why not allow the options?

Otherwise we're just stuck with the lowest common denominator between all platforms.

 

We'll most likely be seeing Metal in 5.x, there are a handful of examples where Unity staff were hinting towards it.

 

You missed the point.
Instead of adding Metal, UT should get their OpenGL renderer up to date first. Christ, they could even ditch DX11 altogether and only have OGL4.

Right now the situation looks like this:
Windows has DX11
Linux/Mac have OpenGL 2.1 which is pretty much DX9 (if I remember correctly)
Linux, Mac and even Windows all could use OpenGL 4.x which is would mean feature parity on a DX11 level.

That's what I mean by feature parity is more important. There is a difference between "Platform X has some new toy and we let people develop with it. Other platforms cannot utilize it and it's not in our power to change that." and "We leave certain platforms behind even though it is in our power to keep them up to date". The latter is something I have a problem with.

I would have no problem with them adding Metal somewhere down the line, but doing so before maintaining their currently supported platforms would reflect poorly on UT's way of prioritizing tasks.

 

@TheSniperFan

You bring up a good point, if it wasn't for Xbox I'm unsure as to how much use DX would get tbh.

Also I'm not sure what stops Unity upgrading OpenGL to the latest revision? Run GL in compatibility and it's up to us to define the shader version. You don't need them running side by side, it's backwards compatible.

Personally I love GLSL, I like the layout and find shaderlab harder to understand.

I suppose it could be a lot of work.

 

Somebody asked whether Unity 5 will finally add OGL 4 support (it won't ).
They said it's due to Apple being slow with their OGL implementations. I'm no OSX user, but wasn't OGL 4 just added in the last version or so?
They should have added OGL 4 regardless of this and kept OGL 2.1 as fallback. You know, just like they did with DX11 and DX9.

 

You got that right. Their F2P game was WarFace. Not only was it generic, it had a stupid name to match. These guys made Crysis MP, and they think the best idea for a F2P model is CoD clone? FAIL.

 

I really feel sorry for the employees in bulgaria who didnt get paid for two months (thats what the rumors said). But somehow i feel a little bit "glee" in me since there where always acting pretty smug/cocky especially when I met some of their upperclass empoyees on some game exhibitions (gamescom eg). they always acting like they where better then small studios or even indie developers. "look at us! we are doing someting for the US military and you? keep doing you small ipad game...pff"

But never the less its one of the bigest studios in germany betwean all the crappy browsergame companys and ubisoft/bluebyte and it hurts our industry... but damn! crysis looked god but was a really S***ty game. and then developing RYSE exclusive for XB1 when you are nearly broke isnt that smart

 

This is an intresting article from a few months ago talking about the "engine wars", and one of the things the guy said was

"
Oh, and Crytek is basically giving their stuff away. At $10 a month and no revenue share, I’m not sure why they are charging for this at all. That can’t possibly cover even the marketing costs. I’m not very familiar with Crytek, but my biggest issue with the current offering is Crytek for mobile is a completely different engine. The mobile engine Crytek built their iOS games with is not yet publicly available to developers."


http://ralphbarbagallo.com/2014/03/26/unity3d-vs-unreal-4-vs-crytek-gdc-2014-engine-wars/

 

regarding Ryse...
http://kotaku.com/sources-crytek-not-paying-staff-on-time-ryse-sequel-d-1594967505