I’m just really niffed with Unity’s Visual Performance in contrast to CryEngine 3 - Any asset you chuck into CryEngine, Looks simply mind blowing, And with unity… They just look pants.
I’m however working on a Racing Game, and to Build a Racing Game With CryEngine 3 I would need to do Alot of work, revamping the Character System (ie, Getting rid of it) and to reconfigure the AI system , which I don’t even think is possible on the normal free SDK licence.
So, is there any plug-ins which boost HDR lighting effects and Global illumination and the light thingy, where colour from materials is bleeded into the light.
Unity is great, without a Doubt, but… Not AAA quality. I have no budget, And yet CE3 makes my assets look AAA quality…
I HIGHLY recommend anyone to just play around with CE3 - I’ve learn’t so much from it, it’s unreal and I now believe I have a huge understanding on how Projects should be structured in Unity. Thanks Crytek
There is one thread with great car game made in Unity, it has interior of car, basic gameplay and very nice environment assets too. Basically it has everything that AAA car game needs, it only lacks very good lighting, which Unity cant provide. You can use dozens of ready - to -go car packs from asset store and you can really build nice demo quickly. And if you are optimistic enough you can wait for Unity 4.0 which will provide dx11 as mentioned and better rendering.
About Cryengine 3…you dont need much work there at all. If you dont know any programming then yes, it will be little hard, but in that case it wont be any easier in Unity either. Cryengine has vehicle editor and ready to go car system, there are some solutions on forums about car games, just scroll down forums a bit. AI system will ofcourse need to be rewritten since Cry offers only civilian and enemy - human AI as far as i know. It is possible to writte your own AI system with free SDK, you can even do most of the stuff trough visual scripting.
Unity HDR posteffect sadly doesnt do enough to create realistic outdoor scenes, the biggest impact on this are GI and good lighting. However you can pick Shader Box v1 package from asset store, where you can use good shaders for cars / environment and still make up for something.
CE3 is nothing like unity , in regards it shocking bad.
Unity :
“rigidbody.AddForce(Vector3.forward * speed * Time.deltaTime);”
CE3 - I haven’t a foggiest idea where to even start - the Documentation is dreadful, doesn’t explain anything - well it does, it explains how to create your own flow graphs with C++ , but it doesn’t explain what flow graphs ACTUALLY ARE… it is this constantly aweful all through the documentation.
It explains the structure of classes, but it doesn’t explain there main purpose, it automatically assumes you know the difference between the IGame interface and the CGame class, and all the data structures in the engine in the first place…
CryEngine is another UDK - a glorified Level Editor, unless you’ve had 25 years of experience with C++ and live with your parents still.
Yet I’m constantly drawn to the useless documentation To Try and grab a least an inclining on what the hell is going on.
I’ve been 14 hours straight looking through C++ code that I haven’t a clue about… time for some rest
Unity - 20 minutes and I was flying blocks and changing materials like I was a god.
As i said before you need to be knowledged in programming if you want to make unique game with CE3. If you want to make FPS game, basically CE3 gives you everthing you need, all you need to do is assets. The same goes for UE3, except that UDK documentation is a little better.
Its not possible to recreate Cry3 in Unity as it relies on hardware features that are from GPU generates and shader models not even supported by Unity at all, even less these things are and will be ‘accessable’
Could you not take an existing C++ render and integrate it using the exiting plugin feature?
I have done the following in unity:
Created my own renderer [outputting to texture].
Intergrated a third party phsyics engine.
Used custom networking libraries.
Used third party GUI systems.
And there are many other examples by others.
My point?
Just because Unity does not have a certain feature does not necessarily mean that it prevents you from doing something. All a game engine is a collection of code that is reused by multiple games - Unity just happens to provide a large chunk of it for you, it isn’t the be and end all though due to the care taken to be flexible.
TL;DR there is a big difference between a LIMITATION and MISSING FEATURE.
Why do people complain about things they cannot do with good tools? It’s like saying the pencil is crap because I have no idea how to draw a line.
I am still waiting for comparison shots of what cry does that unity doesn’t.
How about we provide actual examples (Screenshots, demos, etc) for the OP, instead of slinging around insults and getting into arguments about terminology and such?
Here is an example of a CE2 screenshot, directx 9:
Unless they do something special with shadows and lighting and such, seems like Unity should be able to get very close. From what I understand, it’s about the art and shaders.
I started to post a link to some CE3 pictures…but there isn’t an point. CE3 is an even greater step forward in beauty. Darn, now I guess we’ll have 2 pages of discussion on whether photorealism is actually beauty.
Looking at the CE jungle screenshots reminds me of the jungle mega pack for Unity:
Not bad, I think.
For the OP: Could you post some screenshots of your assets in Unity, and then in CE3? I’m curious to see what the deal is…since Unity supports DX9, they should still look good right?
Becouse it does. The answer is simple. UDK or CE3 on startup are loaded with posteffects, better rendering, and better lighting.
Good point, but ask yourself, do i want to make game or develop existing game engine into eternity? This is the whole point of engine comparision, otherwise we would all use Ogre, which is free and struggle with putting and developing different plugins forever.
Cryengine offers you many things that Unity does not have, and it works the other way arround. Unity offers dozens of things that Cryengine doesnt have, however Unity has advance in workflow, platforms, ease of use, licensing while Cryengine offers you some few advanced tools which are more or less bound to graphic.
@jc_lvngstn That scene can be implemented in Unity for sure. I can put my hand in fire for that. However that is really bad example to compare engine power at maximum that can provide, there are tons of scenes that can be hardly reproduced in Unity or basically cannot be reproduced at the momment with same quallity.
Basically there are many scenes that can be reproduced with additional work, and that could ground your game development for years, thats the whole point why engine comparisions are made and thats why people decide for that engines that are suited best for their projects.
Take a look at those two shoots. Generaly speaking, can you reproduce that in Unity, exactly the same looking? No, ofcourse not.
While that example of jungle pack in asset store is the finest vegetation in Unity probably made so far, it is still not in same league as hand modeled plants that can be used in Cryengine. Realism of lighting is far better and cannot be matched in Unity, but hey its great that Unity gives oportunity to those developers that make cartoon games or heavily stylised games, becouse cartoon games in Cryengine look awful…but thats already away from discussion.
Then again quallity of posteffects can be seen from those two shoots that it is far better than anything in Unity at the momment, thats very clear if you used posteffects for 1 minute.
This brings back to point that you can do most of that stuff in Unity, if you would dig deep into engine (as much as you can without source code), change posteffects, fx, and what not but that would give you so much extra work that you can forget about game development for a while.
What I like about cry outdoors is how it renders massive amounts of vegetation in such far distances. Looks sexy and performs amazingly well. I’ve heard scenes reach 1 mil polies on screen and run fine. Their instancing is implemented damn well.
Being a realist painter, I would agree there are things in the CryEngine screenshots that would be nice to have in Unity. The softness of the light, bleeding light blooms in the palm trees and if the stats are accurate it seems like the number of polys on screen without choking is awesome.
However, I would also argue the missing 5-10% of image quality is not going to make much of a difference in whether or not a game is successful. It’s not like a game running in DX9 is any more fun once it’s running under DX11.
Just the basic creation of art assets is a bigger issue than render quality. Not to mention game-play, concept, etc…
These screenshots he posted all are on DX9. Crysis 1 didn’t have any DX10 features (I think it didn’t even have dx11). And Cry3 does mostly the same except tessellation. You don’t need dx11 for fancy effects that are in crysis, but you do need good optimization to run all that with good fps.
