Unity or UDK or CryEngine or...?

Look at this beauty
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/...-division-vgx-2013--world-premiere-featurette

nuff said...

 

Thats very swanky stuff, but is it going to be open to indie development? If not, then i dunno if its very relevant to the discussion, i think the main 3 that we know all have probable compromises large and small to be open to as big a range of developers as possible, i dont need to see that technology to have already seen things that made me think 'i wish i could have that to make stuff with', easiest example is the gta 5 stuff. But if its not open to indie development then its probably completely unsuitable for it - both that and gta 5 (and prob endless others) seem to suggest you need an enormous amount of extremely high quality art to even make best use of the features, i guess they may be very reliant on the developers familiarity with it and the exact needs the big lump of a design document specifies. It is gorgeous, and while ive been pretty disappointed so far with next gen titles graphics, it looks like super fancy things are afoot. But like I say! It's certainly not the only beautiful very expensive technology around, and i dont think i'm ever going to see a download link for it, so its not much of a thing to a small time developer's world.

 

Of course you can do CE3 water in Unity. There's no need to modify any source code in Unity. Why should I need source code to create shaders? Shader pipeline in Unity is totally open (not the case for CE3 where most effects are hardcoded in the engine itself). Both water versions DX9 (without tessellation) and DX11 (with tessellation) can be done in Unity. But again, you need the time (and skill) to create it.

 

With a depth texture you can easily put foam wherever you want son. ^^

 

You should probably watch the video, the foam isnt generated like that. Depth textures are used as part of the shading process but the crest foam isnt a texture (i suppose how its finally applied kinda is but you couldnt move it around wheever you want). Edge foam is something yet to be implemented properly and will be texture based, although that was much my point, i want the edge/shore foam to be generated the same way as the crest foam, but yeah, the main ocean foam is computed mathematically using fft

 

CE3 is a tight engine, where everything is connected, it have a higher level of abstraction than Unity and thus learning curve is also really high compared to Unity. In Unity (besides the MonoBehaviour component), nothing is really conected (you have to create, glue and conect stuff by your own). If you want it simple: There's more to learn with CE3 to get wonderful things and there's more to do (I mean really a lot) with Unity to get wonderful results.
It's really up to the developer. If you want a tight engine with everything connected or if you want to do all that stuff on your own (forget about learning, do whatever you want the way you want).

 

I haven't watched the video entirely but that's how i do geometry intersection in shaders (with depth textures). I guess you probably misunderstood me? Anyway, good work.

 

Thing is, i dont really think you actually have to do as much as people say you do to make something look amazing with unity, games look amazing cause of the art! You can have very simple shaders, or standard shaders, say whatever comes with Unity really, and it can all look amazing with some talented artists. You can dial your gi and your area lights and all your other bells and whistles and its going to look like crap without good art. Cryengine and Unreal have a reputation for superlative graphics because they come off the back of extremely high budget videogames staffed with some of the best cg artists on the planet. Diablo 3 is not a technically demanding game, it doesnt have demanding cutting edge graphics technology, i dont really enjoy it as a game but it does look beautiful, because of incredibly talented artists

The sad thing is i cant actually think of anything ive seen made with unity where ive thought 'that art is absolutely beautiful'. Some of the stuff in the asset store is first rate, the demo scenes trhose asset artists make would make for seriously beautiful games but is seems they just make game-less scenes to show off their work to get their well earnt renumeration. And the idea of a bunch of games that happen to look good, made on unity, that all have oddly similar seeming environment features is quite funny

I'd love to see some serious money put into a title made with unity, serious Epic/Rockstar/Ubisoft etc level megabucks, and get a studio with a hundred staff, with cherry picked texture, model, animation and tech artists, and a flotilla of art-world championed concept artists, and a visionary megabrain lead like Ueda. And then Unity is essentially exactly as pretty as the other options and people just have to shoosh and accept they should probably accept responsibility for their art, rather than blame the software theyre using

 

Agree yeah.

 

Because of what you said about CE3 being tightly integrated, sorry I don't explain well when tired. The reason why it looks so slick and shiny is mainly due to the lighting system, it heavily relies on the likes of RLR. Also rendering path's are a key to optimisation.. You use CVar's to modify how the water should be optimised.

How it's setup is relatively simple:

Normals, reflections, tiling, reflection, refraction, merged fog with a fresnel based shader and vertex displacement. I wouldn't say the water itself is the most difficult portion of it all.. Getting the lighting and performance right is a tricky task..

Whilst I've not got much into post effects and optimisation in CryEngine it seems everything is heavily based around the time of day system.

 

I heard they started to work on some shader pipeline to open their rendering system a bit to the masses.
Let me clear something out. I really like CE3, in fact I like tight engines architecture (where things are totally connected) what I don't like is their current license model.

 

You're not the only one TATO: This is what I posted on CryDev

 

I dont know if anyone said this already as im not going to sit here and read all 24 pages but for me this is why im thinking about unity more now then UDK.

UDK i have used for years playing around with the editor and stuff the lighting and materials are amazing simply THE MOST POWERFUL material editor in the gaming community thats indie or AAA title's its very very attractive, with that said I really feel every other aspect is a nightmare I can totally do whatever i want with the mat editor and have it come out exactly to the point i want it too, but everything else is convoluted and just downright grotesque with its complexity, the scripting language is akin to java/C++ hybrid and is super strict and annoying to learn, requires complete restart of the engine either in editor or game engine to get it to do what you want it too(granted this will be fixed in UE4 but who knows when thats going to be available for UDK users), honestly i found thru my 3 year treck into UDK its just not worth it to go it on your own, and when you ask for help on the forums you are bombarded with people yelling at you that you want them to make the game for you, and that your too lazy to learn it on your own, so if your a graphics guy like me you end up having to learn everything from coding to particles which if your doing anything amazing or trying too you have to use code to drive everything and its monotonous at best and a huge time sink to do anything simple. sure its very pretty but its also hard work for those whom are trying to work it out from a graphics stand point, which is why you see so many robots with UDK hud elements in many different game types instead of unique stuff, one thing at a time. Oh and dont forget the new scale form UI crap that you MUST have adobe flash to use, "thanks again for for the sub based licensing adobe you jerks!"



Unity.

Unity on the other hand now has access to substance designer that completely changes the ball field into its court with the fact that they finally FINALLY gave us RTL(Real time lighting) for free version, it greatly improved the attractiveness of this package, and brought it up to par with UDK's beauty benchmark, it still cannot do the same thing UDK can do with rendering but its still miles beyond UDK in user friendliness making game dev much better in the long run for users like me who are more graphically inclined, then code savvy, and the community seems to be better where you ask for help 9/10 chances you'll get it.

CryEngine3.

Lets just say this is the most expensive hard to use ill tempered engine devised I modeled and textured a car and had it working in UDK and UNITY in like an hr it took me several hrs(Read 3 days) of hunting video's and reading tutorials and trying to figure out how things were done(got everything working but the tire textures), also using only Max or MAYA which alienates the blender crowd which i am a blender convert and evangelist after 10 years of max and 3 of maya, i got tired of autodesk's crap, and the new monthly sub that they are going to implement thanks to adobe's success with it makes it really unfeasible for me who does this as a hobby for fun. Thank goodness UDK and Unity are smart enough to understand that pigeonholing people into the big expensive software bracket is not good business and doesn't help anyone make games but actual studio's, and that doesn't really help us little guys and gal's now does it.

all in all i really like unity for its ease of use and flexibility sure its not as visually stunning as UDK but who cares its good enough to get great graphics with and thats all that matters.

 

@ Opticon, I can definitely agree with CryEngine being ill tempered.. I've hit a bug on a level, now I've pretty much kissed goodbye to nearly three weeks work over a silly thing like exporting to the engine..

 

Yeah i never could get the exporter for 3ds max to work and without a proper fbx pipeline getting anything from blender is gonna be living hell so i said forget it its nice to look at and makes great games but i'm not a one man studio and they have been less then helpful with tutorials and helping the community at large. exporting to the engine should be streamlined from any package, honestly any engine that says you must use our proprietary system deserves a slow death, which is basically what's happening to ce 3 which is a shame cause it had so much promise.

 

So I'm at a complete loss, last night we lost nearly a month after a call stack issue wiped most of the data and terrains dry.

To get Unity to do what we need, we'll need the source code and a lot of changes will have to be made. Streaming and 64-bit editor will be the first things on the list, but at least we might eventually get something done.

Unity and a lot of modification seems like the best path so far. Wouldn't mind, but even if you have a rather large budget for an indie it doesn't seem to do you any favours.

 

Not to sound rude, but it's - at least partly - your fault.
If stuff is important, you keep recent backups. Just make a backup at the end of each workday. That way you lose at worst one day of work.

 

I'd love to say it is, but the backups we have crash the editor.. Or trips off the same bug, we started a new scene and tried again bug gone. We may never encounter it again but it's not ideal.!

I have a small tape library that backs up automatically every night. Anyway, I way messing around in Unity Free tonight so there's no real post processing effects or anything.. Started messing with tessellation and Vertex Lit shaders looking back and forth between the two with CryEngine shot's as my goal. I bet with some bloom and SSAO there wouldn't be too much in it graphically. The issue is with Unity, this scene is drawing 7000 draw calls but CryEngine doesn't struggle at all, the asset's need streaming and I've been looking into this: Might be a PITA but

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/StreamingAssets.html

 

Gotta say, bit unfair comparing cryengine with an out-the-box unity. Asset store's a core feature, fact of the matter, and can make a pretty profound impact on your options and result.

Is the bottom shot cryengine? Shot by shot i have no idea why unity cant recreate that. Camera fov is also going to have an effect on someones perception and how are you getting 7000 drawcalls from that shot?

I'm no pro, enthusiastic amateur, so im always willing to be shot down, hopefully with some education afterwards so i can be more helpful in future

I always thought this: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Application.LoadLevelAdditiveAsync.html would be quite useful for streaming style needs but ive never done the kind of scale project that needed streaming and suchlike

I suppose on the subject of this thread and what middleware can do what, what's coming up and what may take up most of the next year is a work that, while is intended to be interesting for its delivery of narrative, is, hopefully, going to substantiate a bunch of rambling ive done in this thread with some practical application, it's pretty exciting, although one thing is a bit intimidating (photos from the 2010 volcanic events in Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, give an idea) - luckily a pal whose work has very recently been deployed in orbit is always helpful so lets see

A bunch of the things planned are a shoe in, however, I know what I want, how they will look, and the ability to produce it exists, or is coming soon, it also hasnt been done before. Unity can do it. It's dotted even around these forums, or will appear i guess at times over the coming months.

I think more devs, or at least folk like me, enthusiastic, somewhat experienced with gamey stuff hobbyists with a lot of time on their hands can have a nice, reasonably realistic idea and set about making something that looks fantastic. It'd be nice to have conversations with friends in my various internet communities who love a bit of a game and them say 'Oh yeah, i know that unity thing, makes games right? I thought it was some drag and drop think but i saw something amazing looking done with it the other day'. Most ive ever heard so far ends at 'drop', its getting a bit annoying, i'm hoping my motivation stays.

 

Lazygun, I think the point of the the comparison is even without post effect rendering.. There's not worlds of difference, whilst CryEngines lighting and shading is better out the box (Better in general really). HDR and Bloom is enabled by default as well as SSAO and tons of other effect's, I think you could live with the difference knowing the workflow difference.

Yep the second one is CryEngine

The draw calls are down to A) No occlusion culling in free B) being forced to use forward rendering.

HDR + SSAO + 2X FXAA + Deferred lighting came in around 3K draw calls (Then water bumped it up another 2 to 3K in pro) and they are quite complex meshes. Also remembering there's trees / statues / characters and whatever else in the backend of that scene.

Download both shots, put them on a seperate monitor each or look at them one after the other and it makes more sense.. Small screenshot's aren't the best.

 

Ohh hah, you were using Unity Free? I seem to be on a roll of misunderstanding your intentions! I'm genuinely sorry, and yeah, i definitely would understand that cryengine might look better but your sentiments were bang on, Unity does a fine job, with only your isp charging you. Sometimes I think the only people who'd actually tell differences graphically are the people making the games, possibly cause they have to stare at the same things for very long periods of time. The average player? It's gone in a flash and they didnt give a damn about the lovely subtle shading on some wall an artist was terribly proud of.

Obviously, Pro warrants the investment but also honestly, Unity Free can knock out some smashing looking things. I'm pretty impressed with unity/proud of myself about a few things i've made with Unity Free that i'd consider decently pretty, all in all. They're not fps games though I suppose so they wouldnt matter of course

 

Yup that's Unity Free, I'm this close to getting some subscriptions and a bigger support package from Unity it's Unreal (No pun intended // well maybe )

I'm sure the issues I had as a lone dev will get sorted sooner or later.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W7c8QghPxk

 

haha!

 

Now David Helgason, Unity's CEO saw that thread and descided to get you switch back to Unity with some free subscriptions and support??

 

Nope (I wish), it'll be paid but compared with having to buy licences for all the third party apps when we have lightwave anyway it'll not be a drop in the ocean.

 

So as a little bit of fun and competition, I've set a challenge to our lead developer. I've bought him a copy of Unity Pro so he's not at a disadvantage and I'll see what he can do vs. four of us in Cryengine.

We previously both worked on our own engine and he's far more talented than I am with much more experience. At the end we'll sit down and finally make the decision for the long haul.

I'm very excited to see how it will turn out.

 

I was just joking

If I would make a vast Fantasy game like yours, I wouldn't use Unity either. But for smaller scale games it's enough. You might not get the entire next gen feel out of it. But with a good art direction, you can make some pretty games with Unity too.

 

Graphically I'm not worried there are ways to make Unity as nice as anything else with Pro, performance wise I am.. I'll be creating a lot of tickets ..

 

Sigh, another user advocating daily backups.

Use source control. Do not use daily/weekly/monthly backups.

 

That's what I meant with "for smaller scale games it's enough"
Unity is infamous for failing on bigger productions because of the lack of a 64bit editor, garbage collection, streaming etc.
But I'm a one man band. So this is out of question anyways.

 

Sorry for the confusion, I appreciate the discussion. Hopefully Unity will take notice of the limitations and move forward with resolving these issues.

I've been in meetings all day so professional face on at the moment .

 

Not true. The visual fidelity in both UE4 and CryEngine surpass Unity's capabilities in many aspects.

 

I'm not saying out of the box they don't, you know I'm an avid user of CryEngine for many reasons. But it doesn't mean with a lot of work and sweat you can't get it to a competitive level. Sorry I should of been more precise in my response..

 

He said it could be done, not that it works out of the box. And since it depends on art as much as or even more than anything else, for some games it'd take just as much work to make Cry/UDK look how you want as it would Unity.

This, a bazillion times.

 

I'm currently using UE4 and yeah it kicks every bodies assez in every departments.

 

Your not the only one ..

 

Awesome!

 

Make on Unity.

 

My god Michael O is ridiculously good, I recon if he made his own game he'd make a killing!..

 

Michael O is a person, but I doubt he is the sole person behind the amazing work he presents here.

 

I don't see why he couldn't be. At least in regards to modelling, texturing, and making the provided example scenes. They're fantastic, but there's nothing there I doubt a talented and experienced individual could do single handedly.

 

If it is one person the amount of work and detail is staggering. He should be doing seminars on time management and how to be super productive

 

I do agree that there's some pretty efficient work and/or good use of time there, yes.

 

I'm pretty picky about what I consider good artwork esp when it's mixing a few disciplines, like modelling/texturing then knowing what looks good with something else, and through ones body of work for one project, retaining consistency, and this guy has got exactly the kind of talent Unity needs to be representing itself with, really really good work. Love it. It's kinda a pity he hasnt released anthing I can use for what i'm doing as most of his stuff is fantasy based but the man deserves all kinds of respect for making unity shine

 

We implemented infinite terrain here, and it works really good. It was made using Unity.


The terrain we have, that works on Mobile iPad1, iPhone3GS or iPod touch and older Gingerbread Android devices. There are 8 terrains, each one having 4,800m x 4,800m. or 23,040,000m or 23,040 km^2 for a total of 184,320 km^2.


A person could walk, and walk for around 4 hours non-stop, using touch-controller, from one end to another end. The terrain is so huge that the modellers here had problems making so much content for it. There are many NPCs there, around ~ 20,000 NPCs per terrain.

 

What about NeoAxis 2.0? I found out that it has 64-bit level/world editor.

 

I mean as a level designer, the asset's themselves are not difficult to make and / or that time consuming if you have a fair bit of experience with 3D modelling. But his artistic style and level design is what makes it truly A+..

I bought a fair few of his packs for our concept.. But in the future / going forward will be replacing most of them at some point.

 

Is there a way to sort of work around the garbage collection performance problem Unity has? For instance, is there a third party addon that someone could program to make the garbage collection more performant?

In the game I'm currently working on, I'm having to cut back units by the hundreds that I originally wanted to have, simply due to performance. No doubt some of it could be optimized and I'm simply ignorant of the options at this time, however I'm also quite sure Unity could have much better performance given the state of other game engines and technologies that are out there right now.

 

Unity all the way!

I think the Game Engine that you start off with is the one that you'll always prefer.