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Unity 3 Vs. UDK

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Mangopork, May 28, 2010.

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  1. GeneralGrant

    GeneralGrant

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    Mirrors edge used the Unreal Engine. Not UDK itself. It's not indie.
     
  2. hmacyt

    hmacyt

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    The unreal engine is older than the UDK, but yeah the UDK is better and way more indy friendly.
     
  3. Filto

    Filto

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    Noops. But I look forward to the trial once it is released. I'm just a hobbyist when it comes to Unity and aslong as there isn't a more userfriendly method for making shaders that doesn't involve programming I'm not even considering investing in pro cause I will still only be half of an artist in it :)
     
  4. TwiiK

    TwiiK

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    I was under the impression that AAA was actually just marketing jargon refering to the budget of the game, not the actual quality.

    "AAA" and graphics definitely doesn't have anything in common just to make that clear. When someone licenses the Unreal Engine 3 to make a game they're working on an AAA game simply based on the cost of licensing the engine.

    That hit the nail on the head as far as I care. :)
     
  5. dogzerx2

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    lol @ "bullshit expression" I never heard that AAA expression before either, although I'm a "n00b" so it doesn't matter

    UDK shader maker sounds quite interesting, we should give it the credit it deserves. If I wasn't hooked with Unity already I'd give UDK another try
     
  6. kirin

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    yeah, but unearthly challenge is a scene maybe or just a hero prop with surrounding contextual environment. If one person or 2 or 4, it'd take them a long time to actually build an entire game. Not just a scene. These 4 people would have to do everything from top to bottom. Artistic side, technical side (codes) and Business side. I think the bottom line is, engine is just the format of the game. What makes the game great is not just visual, not just game play, it's a balance of both. (of course there are other elements, too. with these two being the main I guess.)
     
  7. Artimese

    Artimese

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    bottom line imho...

    UDK = more time, more skill, and bigger team...
    U3.x = less time, about the same skill, smaller team...

    UDK results = great, maybe not crysis but... great appearance.
    U3.x results = great, and MINIMAL difference with udk, a moderate difference between crysis.

    Summary = UDK if your making the next gen AAA games and you got a big budget and big team, U3.x if you got a smaller team, but still able to make a next gen AAA game (because unity can still do it!!)
     
  8. TRM

    TRM

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    I think most people have missed the most important measuring stick between Unity and UDK, for three betas now UDK is broken and a lot of people are now stuck with the Aug Beta as the last working one. There is no support for users and apparently they care not whether it works for everyone or not. Sure they are adding wondrous things every month but what good is it if you can't even install it! The big problem is , what do I need for it to load properly, do I need a 64bit system with a dual core or quad cpu, they don't know!! So for now the answer is not to upgrade your gear because there is a very good chance it still won't load or run. Just my 2 cents worth, Unity loads and runs just fine, for hobbyist what more could you ask for.
     
  9. ColossalDuck

    ColossalDuck

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    The magical 'make my MMORPG' button.
     
  10. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    Unreal engine is not only uses an hybrid deferred rendering system but also uses a pre-computed lighting system (that's why you always need to bake lights) similar to Valve's one. There's a lot of data baked into maps (its ot only lightmaps and AO), but also baking bump and specular values to speed the h*el up while rendering at runtime.
    Unity rendering engine is not even closer to 1/4 of what Unreal Engine's Gemini can do. I mean, there's a long way to do in order to catch up Unreal Engine rendering quality/speeds. I just hope that Unity Beast integration is used for more than lightmaps. Beast can bake any kind of data to create a powerful pre-computed lighting system (as Unreal Engine and Valve).
    We are using an in-house pre-computed lighting system and the rendering speed benefits are huge (something really crazy), specially on mobiles devices! However, due to Beast API restriction, the current workflow is a nightmare.
    Unity, what are you waiting for? Its time to unleash the "Beast". Make a build-in pre-computed lighting system! :D ^^
    Cheers,
     
  11. taumel

    taumel

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    Although they only target the more capable platforms, i think doing things in realtime like the Cryengine does is very nice.

    Baking this and that is needed on a realistic level, if you want to target less powerful machines as well but to be honest those baking processes pretty much suck. After rendering Beast maps, calculating the culling, Unity can more feel like a conventional renderer than some realtime software package. Sadly it's needed but not really wanted. At least it's more ressource friendly.
     
    Last edited: Nov 26, 2010
  12. Dreamora

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    For people with that point on view, Leadwerks engine offers a great home ;-)
    S*** performance on non high power systems but offers high end visuals features that nobody with a reasonable interest to ever sell a game would use ;-) (but its nice for tech demo and alike)

    Also if you invested into purelight for unity you might be happy to see that it uses purelight as its primary lightmapping solution

    CryEngine bakes a lot too on lower end or just omits it, which is fine for their purpose but no option for unity as it would create a fragmentation that would prevent it from selling any longer for its target userbase.
    the problems we have at the time with performance in deferred to me look much more related to problems in pipeline and shader optimization than "just a general thing" so hopefully something that will change (at the time its slower than leadwerks and leadwerks generates the same visual output in near realtime with realtime lights blending with lightmaps in realtime etc) so obviously there is a lot of room for optimization.

    I am personally looking forward to the integration of light clouds that make kind of a day - night difference on what the look can be especially if unity fully integrates it and not just as gimicky as beast and umbra are implemented at the time (both are implemented on their very base level with most of what made their name not being enabled and used at all)
     
    Last edited: Nov 26, 2010
  13. n0mad

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    Am I belonging to a minority to see how great those new Surface shaders are ?
    Basically, they let us code very complex shaders, without the need to write tons of rollbacks for lower hardwares.

    I also found the CG / HSLSL lighting and texture coding manipulations to be more powerful, more flexible and more attracting :eek:

    Before U3, it felt like some very complex, difficultly accessable code structure.
    But now, it gives me the will to search for more artistic shader treatments :)

    Or maybe it's just a coincidence ...
     
  14. Dreamora

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    no coincidence but I guess the new "focus" on just the surface instead of the "whole monster" makes it much easier to focus on surface effects which make 90%+ of the visual look

    Also stramits shader editor definitely does its share to make it even more interesting
     
  15. Nick3d

    Nick3d

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    I saw what Leadwerks engine can do, the tech demos are really nice and the overall quality is amazing, the bad side is that you need a powerfull machine to run it...
    I remember try the demos, and even if my pc is quite good ( i920, ATI 4870x2, 6GB Ram ) wasn't able to run it very smooth, so I was very surprised about that...

    On the other side my main concern is to have very good quality performance, this mean that I would work with Cryengine if they follow the same licensing as UDK, but the problem remians the same: the hardware.

    And, on both UDK and Cryengine, the pain in th a** is that you have manually import and place your meshes, which means that you can't just export your scene in 3ds ( or whatever ) and import all the geometry as it was in your 3d app, but you have to position everything manually, which is one of the most annoying thing in the world and really time consuming...

    Unity 3 offer a good quality visual, not really the same as UDK and Cryengine, but you can achieve good results with it.
    I'm experimenting some shaders that I found on the forum, and with some of them the feeling is quite similar to UDK ( fake HDR, bloom and nice shading do a lot )
    And Unity licensing is almost ridiculous if compared to Unreal Engine or Cryengine, because its damn cheap.

    At the end, you need to choose what is the right engine for your project, that's it.
    If you want a game with high end visual using an indie game engine you probably choose Leadwerks, if you want a medium visual with lots of resources and easier development you choose Unity, if you have lots of money and you don't care if people will be able to run it you choose Cryengine...

    I'm not 100% happy about the graphic performance of Unity3D 3, but damn, is much better looking than 2.6.1, and I really hope that Unity guys will do lots of stuff to upgrade once again the rendering engine, but right now Beast+realtime lighting+post process effects are a very nice and good looking solution.
     
  16. n0mad

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    Yeah that's pretty well resumed, the old thing was looking like a monster :p
     
  17. bigkahuna

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    UDK's licensing scheme is ridiculous IMO. Royalties are 25% of your GROSS income (including advertising income). That's nutz. If you consider overhead, income taxes and development costs, you'd be lucky to make a profit at all using their licensing scheme.
     
  18. Dreamora

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    Yeah but look at the consequences of a 300'000 USD loan to license it otherwise
     
  19. bigkahuna

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    That really means the only realistic use of UDK is to build a portfolio or some other non-paying project. As you'd certainly not be able to earn a living if you had to pay 25% royalties. Unfortunately, I've seen a few other engines that have followed this same royalty scheme. Not a very smart move IMO.

    Off topic for a moment, but on the subject of competitive engines, I've been keeping an eye on this one: http://www.neutrone.net/swf/#/home/ I quite like some of the features and the workflow. Check out the tutorials for the physics engine and the terrain creation, the work flows are so much more intuitive than in Unity. I bet someone like our resident genius Neodrop could create editor scripts that worked like this in Unity. ;) The license is kind of pricey for what you get, but it definitely has some good qualities IMO.
     
  20. Dreamora

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    @bigkahuna: don't know, talking about realistic or unrealistic licending and then throwing one into the arena with totaly unrealistic licensing? $2000 / seat / year?
    And that with what they offer? Sorry but there I know half a dozen engines with better boom / buck ratio than this overpriced thing and that are especially targeted at realtime interactive use, not DX10 presentation primarily (isn't that a field where they would compete with Quest 3D and comparable but not with game engines at all).
    "Realtime GI" (crytek has the globally most advanced yet still realtime performant solution and not even that is realtime gi), unified shader architecture, ... that speaks books as for what you better have under the hood to get anywhere ;)


    Also I don't take development business serious that use fullflash / silverlight / just not html-ajax webpages. Only PR airheads and game studios can go that path as their usebase is a brainless horde of multimedia addicts. all others should focus on an informative page instead of pr trash talk and basically 0 information as they have
     
    Last edited: Nov 26, 2010
  21. bigkahuna

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    @Dreamora - Slow down a minute and read what I posted. I never said that NeutronE was a competitor in this field, it's far from a complete engine. BUT it does have a few features that I think are very well thought out. Yeah, $2K/year is nutz for what you get.

    I think one of the very good things about Unity is its licensing scheme, and if I'm not mistaken, Shiva3D offers the same plan, doesn't it? A $100K/year cap is reasonable IMO. Most Indy's won't earn that much and in most countries earning less than $100K/year could definitely be considered as a healthy income. Larger studios will likely earn a lot more than that per year and it's not unreasonable to expect to pay a higher licensing fee if that ends up being the situation.

    But on the other hand a $5K cap with a 25% royalty is absolutely ridiculous. It's almost a guarantee that your business plan will fail IMO.
     
  22. Nikolay116

    Nikolay116

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  23. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    I might have missunderstood it then, I thought it was in relation to the context that was ongoing :)
    If it were for pure visualization it likely would be a cool thing, but really only there (guess thats also its purpose as their example indicates).


    As for the $100k border: A team of 3+ people that does not earn 100k per year isn't something I would consider healthy income though, at least not if you are living in europe or the USA. You always have to keep in mind thats the income brutto not income netto after deducting the plentitude of taxes, just plain income - expenses
     
  24. bigkahuna

    bigkahuna

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    @Nikolay - Yeah, that's a sweet looking demo and yes, I've looked at Unigine, but at $10K to get started it's kind of out of my league. ;)

    @Dreamora - True. Any idea what the Unity license fee is for studios earning more than $100K? I haven't been so fortunate as to have been in that situation yet. ;)
     
  25. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    The regular Pro fee as thats all thats required once you cross the border, given you don't own it already. No hidden backstabbing thing.
     
  26. bigkahuna

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    It's been so long since I even looked at the Unity EULA I guess I missed that. Guess I better get on the stick and start earning over $100K, huh? :p
     
  27. taumel

    taumel

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    @dreamora
    Mit dem Vorschlag der LE hast Du zumindest Sinn für Humor bewiesen. :O)
     
  28. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    German to English translation:


    The proposal of the LE you have at least demonstrated a sense of humor. : O)
     
  29. Dreamora

    Dreamora

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    There is nothing wrong with LE, aside of the fact that you need a power plant, money tree and a large enough budget to offer top notch visuals to attract those with hardware to run it reasonably at all.

    I've been with technology of Josh for an eternity (fate of blitzers eh taumel) and know he is / can be a very smart guy.
    But from rather harsh fights I also know that he has his specific view on such matters and that it makes no sense to even approach the topic.

    I personally got myself a license through the torque deals, as I did for Shiva Advanced and C4, which I've used in the past for evaluation and other purposes, so in case of LE I can now at least hope that 3.0 will approach the issues.

    Also we must be fair: LE might have high hardware requirements but they are easily lower than Unity deferred while looking worlds better, doing all in realtime and for once just work instead of pretending to do so to look ugly and go broken as U3 deferred at the time does :(
     
    Last edited: Nov 27, 2010
  30. taumel

    taumel

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    LE in it's current form is a waste of time, at least for what i would need it for but let's just wait and see (sound familiar), how V3 shapes up. Josh for sure is a clever guy when it comes to coding but he lacks in the other disciplines and so quite often had opinions on subjects regarding his engine or other technologies which are just nonsense. On the bright side i also had the impression that within this year he kind of cooled down a bit and learned his lessons. Nevertheless i think it' s already stirring enough dealing a.o. with Unity.
     
  31. Antonee

    Antonee

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    sorry to bump this thread but. but think there have been a few updates to udk that grant a a re-comparison.

    Udk comes with udk iphone/ipad and android support is in the works. so far two platforms are fully supported, pc and iphone so the only thing missing is mac support. as far as the myth that udk is for big, talented dev teams....the game Dungeon Defenders developed by small indie "Trendy" was made completely in udk in just four weeks and has been released on all major platforms, pc, iphone, android, ps3 and xbox.

    i just don't buy the "only big studio teams can make a game with udk". We a living in the collaboration era. your team may be spread a out across the globe but you can still collaborate and work together. there is also a big ocean of international udk talent. unity has a good centralized community while udk has a very large spread out community. I might add that udk also has good kinect support and if rumors turn out to be correct sony is going to launch a PC version of move so i would imagine there will be move motion control support at some point.
     
  32. Tudor_n

    Tudor_n

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    Antonee, as was concluded earlier in this thread, you should try both engines and then decide. Everyone has different workflows and some are better suited for UDK than Unity. We've tried both for at least 1-2 months each before deciding.

    We've detailed our findings but: UDK = great asset pipeline (I personally am in love with it), higher requirements (esp. when pertaining to casual games, requiring a pixel shader 3.0 card is overkill for us), totally different workflow (compared to unity), clunkier scripting workflow (subjective ofc), not enough scripting documentation, small and (some times) really unhelpful community.
     
  33. xCyborg

    xCyborg

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    Oh, can't resist UDK/U3 blahervations
    (Unity3.2 fixes + Antares Visio + Strumpy shader editor)= UDK°,°°°°²:D
     
  34. michaelvoigt

    michaelvoigt

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    Does anyone have any definitive metrics that could be used to determine the quality achievable for each engine?

    When making the choice on engines, a lot of folks would consider the user experience the most important factor. With game engines, much of this experience is based upon how fast and how many. In this case how many objects, triangles, meshes and how fast can the engine do it.

    I sometimes get confused when I try to compare specs of video cards, each company seems to use different metrics and there isn't a solid single method to determine that card A is bigger,better and faster than card B. I am wondering if the same is true for UDK versus Unity?

    If I were to hear something regarding the potential raw performance of the engines, I think that I would be closer to being able to determine which engine is going to make the better games.

    Lacking any data on the raw performance of these engines... I do believe that Unity's largest weakness is the shader system... I think UDK's weakness is the licensing...
     
  35. dogzerx2

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    how to code in udk is still beyond me, I'm sure if I gave it enough time, I'd get it right, y'know... opening that UDKEngine.ini file, and add the line ModEditPackages=MyMod to the [UnrealEd.EditorEngine] section, etc etc etc whatever

    ...but meh, why would I do that? after UDK I tried unity and I started coding right away, no brainer right from the beginning, that's what I want!
     
  36. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    The strong point of Unity, is broad platform support, easy workflow, ultra rapid prototyping/devellopement.
    The strong point of UDK, is a fully featured tools/features, raw power.
    I trully think Unity Editor workflow is beyond anything out there.
    Yes, Unity Desktop lacks in power compared to UDK but not because inferior engine design, mostly because of some rendering techniques/systems not yet available in Unity eg: RNMs, static shadowmasking, lighting-grids, pre-compute lighting, etc. All those clever stuff makes rendering less-heavier.
    Unreal Engine games uses few or almost no lighting at all, everything is baked (even if they look as dynamic). But Unity is catching up on that side too and big competitors are really aware/scared of that.
    Just imagine a fully featured engine, with toons of tools to make your life easier, your workflow fast and your dev time shorter, thats what
    Theres a lots of very good stuff coming to Unity this year. Unity is becoming, the no 1. :p
     
  37. tatoforever

    tatoforever

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    Forgot to add,
    Unity on mobiles is really fast, even vs UDK, unity still faster. On mobile, nothing comes close to Unity, no doubt about it.
     
  38. Melonsoda

    Melonsoda

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    If you get used to UDK, you can be really productive and fast too. But yeah, UDK is harder to learn.
    Every Engine has its Pro's and Con's. Unity is perfect for cross-platform development. For casual games, web games, or mobile devices. Its easy to learn and there is a big and dedicated community.

    UDK aims more the ambitious games with high end graphics. The performance is great and you get a lot sophisticated tools like Kismet and Speedtree.

    UDK is nearly free, besides the $99 publishing fee. Unity Pro costs $1500 +additional costs. But if you make more than $5000 you have to share 25% with Epic.Plus the cut from Apple or Valve, if you publish your game via iTunes(UDK iPhone), or Steam.


    Anyways...
    Lets see what happens, when Crytek release Cryengine for indies...
     
  39. dogzerx2

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    my motto is: UDK? IDK! :-0
     
  40. kimba23

    kimba23

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    all this discussion will change if the cryengine comes to compete (which apparently will) The sandbox editor has a great flow and the game itself looks fantastic, I have been modding with it for few years and it is just a great system. Hopefully they will have a good licensing deal when/if they decide to compete in this market
     
  41. Tudor_n

    Tudor_n

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    Very true. For the PC market anyway.
     
  42. kimba23

    kimba23

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    they support the consoles on cryengine 3, It would not be a stretch to think they could expand their support to other platforms
     
  43. dogzerx2

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    If cryengine manages to release a user friendly engine with good documentation it might be a worthy adversary, but I sense it wont be that user friendly, and it will lack documentation... just a feeling!!
     
  44. kimba23

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    Ok, it is very, very user friendly. The editor has a visual programming tool called flowgraph better than kismet and the documentation is already pretty good for cryengine 2... plus the community is nice and helpful. Don't want to sound like a fanboy, but it is quite powerful and user friendly, the sandbox editor is IMO the best out there, i hope they do this developer version, it is already free for universities. We'll see about the licensing.
     
  45. PrimeDerektive

    PrimeDerektive

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    I would bet that a free "indie" release of CryEngine would be very partial to first person shooters, no?

    I can't envision the myriad of 2d games you see that come out of Unity for iOS being developed on CryEngine.
     
  46. JRavey

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    I doubt many people expect so many to use Unity for 2D games.
     
  47. PrimeDerektive

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    Alright, maybe 2d was a bad a example, but I sort of meant non-fps games in general. There are far more games made with Unity that are not first person shooters than there are Unity-made first person shooters, whereas I imagine CryEngine would sort of be tailored for that specific genre.
     
  48. Tudor_n

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    It all depends on the documentation that they will provide. If it will resemble UDK's, than yes, I expect to see people try and (as UDk) not succeed at making fps'. However, the Cryengine is not exactly a house-hold name like Epic or Unreal so maybe it will attract less fanboys and more devs. Who knows. A new player on the engine market is always welcome from my pov.
     
  49. JRavey

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    This idea that Cry and UDK are FPS engines while Unity is this massively robust engine capable of any genre is rather pathetic. None of these three engines are genre-specific.
     
  50. PrimeDerektive

    PrimeDerektive

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    Well that's true, you could make any genre of game with any of the three, but the fact that Cry and UDK were originally developed for the express purpose of powering a first person shooter isn't really debatable.
     
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