Gamebryo has always been great engine, many games that I’ve played have been made with it. Lots of those games turned out to be some of my all time favourites. It seems to be a powerful engine, albeit buggy. I was recently granted a evaluation kit from Gamebase. I’m currently waiting activation but I’m curious to what you think. If it’s great I might choose to use that engine, given the android and iOS licenses are cheaper than the normal 50k license for PC. In the email I was told more independent companies are able to negotiate the price to a more reasonable price, it just depends on your budget.
I’m assuming the price will still be way beyond my budget(basically none), but if it were offered at a lower price, for example unity’s price point. Would you consider it as an engine to use?
Thats true, but after being recently bought out by another company and being “improved” do you think It’ll be come an engine known for power and speed and not the latter?
I haven’t used Gamebryo since 3.1, but I didn’t like the experience. While you could access the C++ level of coding and you could probably eke out greater performance… it was not a good tradeoff.
It had an editor that was somewhat useful for visual layout and property editing with LUA scripting.
Direct code access to find bugs in their wrapper code and fix it.
C++ allowing for better performance.
No per seat license, which is better for larger devs.
Getting C++ to hook up to the editor was a long and arduous process of nondescript macros and trial and error.
Lightspeed visual editor at the time was a sad state compared to Unity’s editor.
Custom asset importing pipeline meaning content creators had to export in a particular format in order for the engine to use the asset.
Confusing engine with a considerable lack of tutorial content.
Lack of built-in features… no memory manager, no UI system, no multiplayer, no profiler, no input mapping.
LACK OF USERS! Abysmal situation trying to learn and understand the engine, no useful plugins like the asset store to get you on your way. Little to no forum activity.
I’ve not used it since it was called NetImmerse (11-12 years ago). It was interesting back then, as the only real alternative to Renderware, but by all accounts it hasn’t changed a whole lot, which means a lot more (not good).
I evaluated it in 2009. It had some nice rendering features then, but not much else. The workflow in Unity, I think is more streamlined, akin more to a professional tool like 3dsmax and maya, than a jumble of system which is the usual game engine feeling.
I had to use it for a client before (whatever version was current in ~2009 or thereabouts).
Documentation was not up to par
It was relatively easy to break things in strange ways
The API was unintuitive in many parts that I worked with
In comparison, I found OGRE/Irrlicht to have easier APIs.
The content creation tools were probably good, as they have shaders for Max so it was a bit WYSIWYG once it lands in the engine, but I didn’t get to interact directly with their artists so I don’t know how good the workflow was.
Unless things have improved much since then I wouldn’t recommend it over Unity.
I have always wondered about gamebyro, I know Bethesda used it. I never understood why it was so expensive when it’s so clunky and hard to use. What business reason is there to buy it for a company?
Because for the longest time Gamebryo had one of the best asset pipelines and content streaming on the market. Like Cannon said, the entire process for content creation was SUPER smooth when working from 3DSMax. It also had some of the best large terrain support in its licensing range.
Well, I’ve been reading the wiki, it’s in beta for RakNet networking so that should be cool. And yes I’m sticking with Unity, I just wanted to try out Gamebryo.
I used it a couple of years ago and while it has some power to it, it is also very difficult to use when compared to something like Unity 3D (or even XNA for that manner.)
I don’t get why everyone bashes Gamebryo for bugs and being slow, while I think most of you are reffering to the games Bethesda made with it.
Fact is, all of the bugs were made by Bethesda themselfs. They just ruined Gamebryo’s reputation and therefore, they have to higher the price, and people won’t be on the forums so it’s harder to learn to use etc. Bethesda will probably ruin the next engine they’re using’s reputation as well.
Are they still in business over there? If so the question I would ask is ‘for how much longer?’. Outside of the features of the engine one thing you have to consider is long term support and that’s definitely one of the powerful reasons to go with something like unity or UDK which is used by so many people and will easily be here in 10 years or longer. I’ve had friends who have had huge huge products have their long term viability completely destroyed because of the company who made the engine they were using going out of business which means you’re game is stuck without engine updates at that point. I know people who have spoke with the guys over at Gamebryo and while there is nothing overly alarming about their future in my mind I still am more comfortable with the long term prospects of the Unity, Crytec or Epic guys being here in 10-15 years to support their engine than almost any other company in the industry
Would love it if Unity actually had this. You’d just say OK this is my mesh, and add the imposter component in the world, everywhere, rotate them duplicate them, populate that world. Unity bakes occlusion and uses same data for imposter streaming. That would be so good. So automatic. So easy to just work well. Sure, it’s hard work for Unity but imagine it.
Nobody would want unity free again. The key to people going from free to pro, is a really badass feature you couldn’t ever live without, and I think being able to stream worlds (even if room sized like last of us - it’s all relative) would truly kick ass.