Hi.
I am just interested in knowing: has someone been able to attain a CryEngine look map/level while maintaining the same level of performance? Or is it at least or will be possible with Unity 5?
Basically, right now I am only using Unity for 2D, but one of these days I’ll be giving 3D a try and I want to know if I could make a level like the Crysis 1 jungle, without losing performance due to the high amount of ongoing vegetation, physics and destruction. But doing research, I have read some old Unity users abandoning ambitious projects because “the engine got to a limit that while we had a good look, the engine couldn’t keep up”. I have also heard that there’s no way to match the speed of the build in Unity vegetation optimizations through scripting due to some low level optimizations being requires.
I am also interested to know if Unity 5 Enlighten will provide a lighting solution identical to that of CryEngine’s Dynamic GI or if it is something totally different.
Do not even know why I ask because I am not moving to neither Unreal Engine [annoying sheen that hurt my eyes] or CryEngine [many much more talented than me have never released anything on it even after 7 years of usage to the extent it is called “the portfolio engine”]. Might as well make my own engine [will only take a few decades ]
All that, and me liking Unity scripting.
And maybe not OT, but [I don’t have the staff for this so it is just curiosity] think Unity 5 will be able to match Battlefield 4 graphics and performance out of the box by simple scripting, or will that still require getting a source license for doing low level optimizations?
In case someone asks what’s the Cry look, that it is about big staff or art direction, I am refering to the countless vegetation single-user mod/showcase videos in Youtube like this:
For doing something like that, a lot of it just comes down to whether you have the talent/resources/manpower to make it. For example, in terms of post processing effects that video has HDR bloom, vignetting, lens flares, light shafts, and motion blur. Unity has all of those (although you’d have to get a third party motion blur on the store since the built-in motion blur isn’t too great). All you need after that is mostly occlusion culling, a good LoD system and high quality art assets.
Unity has Umbra occlusion culling built in, and while I haven’t used the Pro LOD system, rolling your own is straightforward enough. So things aren’t too tough on the programming side. So the main thing you’d be worrying about would be making the 3d assets along with their LoD meshes. Obviously the whole thing would look much better with Unity 5’s GI system, but other than that I don’t see much reason why you couldn’t do something like in that video in Unity. There’s proof it can be done to some extent (as far as handling that volume of assets anyway), and unlike that video, this one includes actual gameplay on top of rendering a very pretty forest.
In short: you would have a hard time matching Crysis 1 (a 7 year old game). Don’t even try with Crysis 3.
Maybe you can match the look, but performance would suffer badly. And read all the papers about all the effects in Crysis. You cannot just buy some assets from asset store. Maybe it would not look bad, but not the same. For Crysis they invented a whole lot of very subtle new rendering techniques, the professionals eye will immediately spot that it is only “almost Crysis”. Redoing those in a way the performance is still good is an art only very few programmers can achieve. You better try to clone flappy bird than Crysis.
Long answer: No. Unity’s performance for a lot of its built-in image effects even is so poor that you may as well not even use them. The amount of time you’ll spend just getting performant fullscreen effects out of Unity is actually a little mind-boggling. To add to this, GPU particles only work on a single platform and you’ll be writing your own code for those as well. The best you can hope for is a reasonable approximation through faking most of the effects.
Crysis has a ton of new rendering effects they invented. For a quick and dirty clone you are maybe right, but those rendering effects matter, it is maybe subtle so people not reading about this don’t see it, but it is what makes the mood.
If you look at the details of those 2 videos you see that those two things are not the same. The fog/bright light in the Unity one is not for mood, it is a trick to not kill performance. But both videos do not show the real test cases, like walking down a straight road from a hill top in clear weather (with another forest hill top in view), or something like that. Like in Crysis 1 where you can see over the island. Doing that is art. Just rendering trees around the player and making sure he cannot see very far is not the same.
Don’t get me wrong. What they do with “The Forest” is very impressive. But comparing it with Crysis 3 makes no sense.
The crytek engine is multi-threaded and version 3 can use up to 8 cores. Unity cannot, it does offload some work to another core but the engine only runs on one core. Run your game or a demo and check the windows task managers CPU %, then run a crytek 3 game and check again.
Wait until Unity 5.0 comes out and then see if it’s possible or not… I’m heavy into CryTeks technology, I love the way they do things but don’t underestimate the power of enlighten coupled with speedtree for terrains…
I guess it is all down to performance.
Think there’s a chance they implement those rendering techniques with Unity 5?
No way to implement them with scripting, right? [not that I have the ability, but I have heard some things are better done at a low level]
It looks really good but yeah, like someone said the fog effect feels more like if it was being used for better performance rather than direction due to how close some vegetation LoDs are set, like the ones at 1:04. The fog fits the game mood and atmosphere, but the distraction due to LoD swaps gives that impression. Not that I am that nitpicking when playing a game, but I am talking about high amounts of vegetation at the distance without the engine flinching.
Easily the most realistic looking forest scene I’ve seen from any game engine. Wonder if it’s hold up without the fog and with noon sun? I’d like to see if such a demo scene would even run on my PC.
Most of the post will be shader based (you can do fog that way too), the core lighting functions and middleware like Enlighten you can’t touch. But why would you? It’s better than an LPV solution (IMO). After lighting and post it’s just more shaders, you have to understand that CryTeks ILLUM shader for example is amazing and their approach to tech as a whole is very well researched and thought out.
Although I like Unitys approach, can’t beat them? Get in a company who can .
On a tangent; In my opinion making a forest look great in a video isn’t the same as making a forest look great in a demo. I see a lot of this crap online where people post a video and say “look at my demo video” and I think “wow impressive”. Then I download it and it looks only half as good. Like many model vegetation assets have great videos but when you download the actual product are crap. Don’t be suckered in unless you have actually tried the real program.
That user generated forest is far above what AAA games have even on max detail levels. It’s a portfolio piece. Even the game doesn’t contain that detail levels. So you’re not making tonnes of sense, no.
You can do that in Unity if you must, but there’s little point unless it’s just a tech demo. What matters is how well something performs under game stress.
ATM no one seems to have a reason to make something like that in Unity. I wonder if AAA quality assets, imaging effects and shaders would be popular enough on the asset store to pay themselves off.
It’s not just that nobody has reason to, but that it’s prohibitively difficult to do in a way that both looks good and is performant, which is a huge problem with the ongoing quest for photorealism in games.
If someone had a reason to do it they would overcome those issues, big cash money wads would be the key but ATM I’d imagine the Asset store wouldn’t have the sales to suffice. A game perhaps but then it comes down to whether or not its worth extending Unity to do this or not.
If somebody had a reason to do it, they could just do it on an engine better suited to the performance needs of that sort of endeavor, since the cost of extending Unity to do that is well beyond trivial.
No, it can’t, not without some hard work, but why? IMO, CE3 is a tech demo engine. I have yet to see a good game made with it, and it’s graphics are “blurry”. I like clear graphics, where I can tell a baddie from the scenery.
Maybe the question should be how much would it cost to do this in Unity?
The problem being that you can probably get the CryEngine Toolset and out of the box throw a forest together with this level of detail and scale. With Unity you cannot, so how much extra will it cost in additional assets / work hours to achieve the same results?
That is not the question at all, we have a 24KM2 world machine tiled output with highly detailed terrain foliage. We have built our own LPV solution and all terrain is async’d and we have our own post… Unity at the moment can not handle it, you have to use dynamic shadows because whilst importing / exporting that amount of detail to beast the editor will fall over plus the performance is horrid, prefab streaming is hit and miss to say the least and the SC performance is rubbish and looks ugly.
The engine has to be built from the ground up to start managing this sort of stuff, whilst the look is mainly lighting and post which isn’t too difficult. Level streaming / multi-threading / 64-bit editor is a must, there is no way around it.
In CE you just slap some trees in, tweak some settings and it runs fine… That 24KM2 terrain full of foliage ran @ 100 FPS on a 6850 and that’s including the 500,000+ poly ocean they have going on…
I will be testing out Unity 5.0 to see how capable that is of doing large detailed terrains.
I don’t play AAA games so I couldn’t tell you that this in fact exceeds all of them, simply that it does for those that I have seen.
The graphics of AAA are vastly overrated as is the game play. I just read a game review for the first time ever of the new Wolfenstein (being as it’s the 1st and one of the few games I’ve paid for, it’s a bit sentimental so I decided what they are doing with the IP 22 years later) and graphics wise it looks as if it was made with assets I’ve bought in the asset store. Really.
further…
I simply state that forest scene made in a video posted to this forum and generated by a game engine is the best I’ve ever seen.
I wonder, knowing something about my PC whether or not I could download that project and create a video that looks as good on my PC.
Other threads are absolutely howling that UE4 and CryTek shame Unity in this regard because they want such a nice realistic look in their games but I’m told in this thread it doesn’t make sense that I would want do that myself.
Yet the selling point of new consoles and new versions of game engines is the graphics but my interest in such a beautifully done forest doesn’t make sense?
MS is buying game IP as a selling point for xBox but MS Sony mostly depends on improving graphics otherwise the Wolf3D I was given 22 years ago is as good or probably better as the newest released version of Wolfenstein. At least if you’re to judge by the bizarre comments left by readers at the review web site (Kontacku or something like that). Really.
Why?
Is walking through a forest too boring? Perhaps I want to create a botanist training program?
So unless you create cruddy graphics and the uninspired game play of the second video in this thread it’s just not worth doing? Must everything produced by these game engines conform to some type of horror / crime genre with inferior graphics to be ‘worth while’.
Maybe this Speedtree can create the needed assets for botany training simulations? Eh? In Unity 5? That’s not worth doing? And here I thought civilized folk appreciate being able to differentiate between eating poison and eating food. Or in my case watching the skin of my right hand peel off like a glove after pulling what I thought was English Ivy off the side of my house. (It was poison ivy)
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(It was poison ivy)