Let’s be honest, Unity is powerful, and I love it, but it is not the most powerful engine out there. So my team is looking at CryEngine 3, not as a replacement, but as an extension. So what is your opinion of CryEngine? And is there anything we should keep in mind?
It’s AWESOME. If you like dynamic lighting, easy to use tools and great performance, then it’s for you. If you develop for mobiles, then not really.
How do you plan to extend Unity with it? It’s really a case of going to be one or the other, as developing for both at the same time will be quite a headache.
Agreed, I’m not sure you could technically use it “as an extension”, unless by “as an extension” you mean “as a possible replacement on a per-project basis”.
Not an extension of Unity. An extension of the team, to be used alongside Unity as another tool.
That, is what I meant, yes.
I wanted to weep when I saw Cryengine 3. Power. Flexibility. Lighting. oh, that lighting… all of it wasted. On yet another FFPS (fucking first person shooter)
“The last of the great 1st person shooter engines…” You’ll tell your kid about it one day. That you were there, during Cryengine’s birth, and swan-song. How Crysis1 brought your PC to its knees.
That it created a mantra “…but does it play Crysis?”; you’ll patiently explain. “…enthusiast settings…”, you’ll blither about this little chestnut of gaming colloquialism. Once held so dear in your heart. You’ll prattle about it; as your son ignores you.
He can barely make you out through a veritable room of thought controlled holographic’s, couldn’t care less, for it’s what you don’t see that controls him, as much as he controls it; all the sensory simulations running through him are real, in a chemical sense.
– “Dad”, he thinks, “…quaint, in front of his ‘flatscreen’ all those years ago. Life must have been dull back then.”
You’ll mention how Crysis 2 and CryEngine 3 somehow distilled Crysis… made it work on a console.
Yet neglected DirectX 11.
amazing tools, curve editor is second to none. really nice information design. but as with all tools, they totally missed the point when it comes to interaction state.
if your asking about the game itself, it was a bit whatever, even with really great modeling, seems the lighting was a bit on the weak side (great engine, crap lighting designer). love the game, loads of room to make something more emotional with the cryengine.
I think at present they’re two engines with varying targets. That’s not to say they couldn’t target the same thing but I see CryENGINE as a much “heavier” engine for lack of a better word, whereas Unity is lightweight and better suited to certain types of game/platform (mobile, browser-based, etc). I can’t compile a gameplay prototype for web release in under 2MB with CryENGINE for instance. At the same time, if I were developing an AAA shooter that needed* extremely shiny graphics, then Unity might not be my first port of call. I haven’t seen a whole lot of Unity projects going in that direction however so I could be wrong there!
*I’m aware the necessity of graphics is debatable!
All i can say is that i guarantee you that in first day when Cryengine 3 indie is released their forums will explode.
I want someone to make a great rpg in ce3. With day/night and stunning visuals and gameplay. Shit would be so immersive.
Has anyone seen the interface of cryengine 3? Or know what scripting language it uses?
Interface is the same as cryengine 2. Aka sandbox.
As for languages, it uses c++ and lua.
Take a look at this paper if you wanna know more in deep abut CE3 rendering features:
http://crytek.com/sites/default/file…20Features.pdf
Impressive specs. I went ahead and sent a dev registration to see what more I can find out. As I said in the other thread, I suspect the licensing is likely not to be favorable for what I do, but it’s worth investigating.
All this rendering stuff sounds very exciting, the only problem is that cryengine 3 seems to basically completely abandon any sort of support for low end hardware, so if you were to theoretically make a game in cryengine 3 then it would have to be targeted toward high end pcs only. Still, very exciting stuff for that crowd.
In the graphics features specs that are linked to above, they show examples based on hardware spec categories “Low” through “Extreme High”. According to that same document, the lowest PC spec is their category “High”, whatever that means. For my purposes, it would be a benefit not to be tethered to what specs the lowest common denominator is capable of, I want it all. 
Wrong. You can turn down the graphics. Unless you are aiming at pcs from year 2000.
I think the real question is, what do people think of the Frostbite 2 engine?
Dunno, but the Creation engine and Skyrim kinda piss over all of them for atmosphere. Yay Bethesda!
So is there still a forward rendering fallback?
Thought they went all deferred now which has its limit on GeForce 7600+ to perform reasonably even if you make it look like crap due to the fillrate hit and other requirements it brings along, which for casual machines means 1-3 years (due to onboard - on cpu GPUs and their unfillrate), for gamer machines 4-5 years.
Still a pretty large userbase naturally but you won’t get onto casual portals anymore potentially.
I think CryEngine is some very fine piece of technology and the hardware is finally in an area where their approach with all dynamic becomes more than hardcore user useable. It definitely pays out of them to be there first and driving that way independent of the press it got them and the bad selling “sold tech demo flop” (Crysis with its 400k sales)