I play around in the CryEngine SDK quite often and many aspects of it are VERY easy inside the sdk. I personally am not much of a coder, but it still isn't hard for me to play around in the sdk. However, I still stay away from things like the flow graph and other advanced things.
Still, I do agree unity is great for being cheap and easy but if you want to get amazing immersion and awesome fx, I would not suggest unity.
If you want to test out the CryEngine sdk, it's free (so long as non-commercial) and easy to use on crydev.net
EDIT: One of the reasons why it's easy to use for me specifically is because it already comes with all the amazing gfx (that can be edited/changed) and quite a large number of models. Even without these it's a bit easy to use for me.
unity seems to be good with large dynamic worlds and weathering
It's not really out of the box. But it's extensible enough that we can make it so.
Opinion alert: the graphical differences between various engines are negligible these days, and we are choosing the engine that is best in terms of workflow, cost, and flexibility. Unity seems like the clear winner there. We think it's worth sacrificing cutting edge graphics tech for all that.
Well neither of you have to worry, since technically Unity is in the lead so far for beautiful graphics... here is a realtime interactive demo using Unity engine, (that you can download yourself) displaying photorealistic textures in a video game engine:
Well neither of you have to worry, since technically Unity is in the lead so far for beautiful graphics... here is a realtime interactive demo using Unity engine, (that you can download yourself) displaying photorealistic textures in a video game engine:
I worked with both UDK and Unity, briefly, I can hardly call myself an expert. But the idea I got is that UDK makes great looking shooters. If you want something else then unity is often easier to work with. The UDK scripting is just impossible to get into without someone to show you the ropes.
As an Unreal evangelist, I can mostly agree with this sentiment. You need a thorough understanding of the majority of UnrealScript's class hierarchy before you can dish out anything decent with it. The language has some neat features for game development, though.
We recently switched from the UDK to Unity as well, since there's no way we can afford to full license cost of the UE3 in order to develop for consoles.
The Wii U is going to support Unity out of the box, IIRC, and I think the PS4 is going to jump on that train too. And other platforms are just $1,500 per platform, which is still a lot cheaper than the full price of other engines.
While it certainly is possible to develop other kinds of games with UE3 as well, there eventually comes a point where you need to start hacking things together because you are bound by the limitations of having no access to the C++ source code.
And one major gripe I always had with the UDK was the asset organization. Everything needs to be imported into the engine's own packages, which usually means that you will download and upload a lot of redundant data in your version control system just by changing one property in one of the packages. The only way to get around that would be by using Perforce, which is directly supported by the UDK.
Unity handles every asset as individual file and while there are other drawbacks with that, it's a lot more enjoyable for small teams with limited resources since it keeps the organization overhead at a minimum. And Unity hosts its projects in individual folders in Windows' User directory, so you can work on multiple projects with the same Unity installation.
The UDK handles everything in its installation path. You never really feel like you get to work with a clean slate, you need to manually go into INI files to set some things up correctly and upgrading to a newer version always means that you need to download and install that version and then move all files there by hand and update the INIs again, hoping that nothing breaks.
So yeah, there is definitely quite a big difference in the learning curve and time it takes to get a prototype done. I am hoping things will change in that regard when UE4 gets released.
Each user effectively builds all assets on their local machine. This is usually fine, except when you haven't updated in a while. Large textures can take a while to compress, shaders take a while to compile, etc. but so far, this hasn't been a big deal, and is fine for our small team. We probably will need to setup a build monkey system soon.
Well neither of you have to worry, since technically Unity is in the lead so far for beautiful graphics... here is a realtime interactive demo using Unity engine, (that you can download yourself) displaying photorealistic textures in a video game engine:
A game is so much more than it's graphics. I don't pick games for the pictures. But for the idea they're selling me. And I think that's how most people perceive it.
Lightshafts are admittedly super sexy for any underwater action though..
Lol if this was using CryEngine my PC wouldn't be able to handle it- if the graphics were at that video's level. Therefore I"m happy that's not the case :P
Unity isn't a terrible engine by any means, and it does have some nice features especially if you have the full version of it. It uses a language that is nearly identical to JavaScript as it's primary language, but it also can use C# which I would prefer over LUA. It also has a nicer way of doing occlusion culling: docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/OcclusionCulling.html
I believe this may be a step up from the way Spark's rendering works, but it's hard to say since I can't really compare the 2 methods directly with the same maps and settings. One thing I heard a lot of problems with Unity about was the netcode though. That portion of it seems to be a nightmare. Overall I think if used well Unity can make a great game. Anyway just my 2 cents.
Whist cryengine is an amazing thing, the system requirements would be a higher, which reduces the amount of people that will buy the game, which means less money for UWE and less money means that it will become like NS2 (no more frequent updates), now don't get me wrong NS2 is an amazing game but from what it seems money was the main reason for moving on to a new project (correct me if i'm wrong). I hope SN makes you all millionaires. :>
They made the right move using Unity over cryengine.
I believe workflow is the biggest factor for choosing an engine. As was mentioned before, most of the common engines are fairly similar in their capabilities but some are more cumbersome to use than others. Unity seems to be pretty well made from a workflow perspective from what I hear, so if it means that your dev team spend less time researching how to do this and that and can just jump into developing the game efficiently, then that's a huge plus.
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Still, I do agree unity is great for being cheap and easy but if you want to get amazing immersion and awesome fx, I would not suggest unity.
If you want to test out the CryEngine sdk, it's free (so long as non-commercial) and easy to use on crydev.net
EDIT: One of the reasons why it's easy to use for me specifically is because it already comes with all the amazing gfx (that can be edited/changed) and quite a large number of models. Even without these it's a bit easy to use for me.
It's not really out of the box. But it's extensible enough that we can make it so.
Opinion alert: the graphical differences between various engines are negligible these days, and we are choosing the engine that is best in terms of workflow, cost, and flexibility. Unity seems like the clear winner there. We think it's worth sacrificing cutting edge graphics tech for all that.
@steverock
Well neither of you have to worry, since technically Unity is in the lead so far for beautiful graphics... here is a realtime interactive demo using Unity engine, (that you can download yourself) displaying photorealistic textures in a video game engine:
Realistic lighting too: http://www.marmoset.co/skyshop
I don't know, there seems to be something "off" I can't determine, while CryEngine seems "better".
For games with Unity; One of the better games with unity I know of is Guns of Icarus Online.
As an Unreal evangelist, I can mostly agree with this sentiment. You need a thorough understanding of the majority of UnrealScript's class hierarchy before you can dish out anything decent with it. The language has some neat features for game development, though.
We recently switched from the UDK to Unity as well, since there's no way we can afford to full license cost of the UE3 in order to develop for consoles.
The Wii U is going to support Unity out of the box, IIRC, and I think the PS4 is going to jump on that train too. And other platforms are just $1,500 per platform, which is still a lot cheaper than the full price of other engines.
While it certainly is possible to develop other kinds of games with UE3 as well, there eventually comes a point where you need to start hacking things together because you are bound by the limitations of having no access to the C++ source code.
And one major gripe I always had with the UDK was the asset organization. Everything needs to be imported into the engine's own packages, which usually means that you will download and upload a lot of redundant data in your version control system just by changing one property in one of the packages. The only way to get around that would be by using Perforce, which is directly supported by the UDK.
Unity handles every asset as individual file and while there are other drawbacks with that, it's a lot more enjoyable for small teams with limited resources since it keeps the organization overhead at a minimum. And Unity hosts its projects in individual folders in Windows' User directory, so you can work on multiple projects with the same Unity installation.
The UDK handles everything in its installation path. You never really feel like you get to work with a clean slate, you need to manually go into INI files to set some things up correctly and upgrading to a newer version always means that you need to download and install that version and then move all files there by hand and update the INIs again, hoping that nothing breaks.
So yeah, there is definitely quite a big difference in the learning curve and time it takes to get a prototype done. I am hoping things will change in that regard when UE4 gets released.
Compare that to this:
Watch at max quality full screen.
CryEngine wins.
Lightshafts are admittedly super sexy for any underwater action though..
moddb.com/games/apocalypse-not/
Unity isn't a terrible engine by any means, and it does have some nice features especially if you have the full version of it. It uses a language that is nearly identical to JavaScript as it's primary language, but it also can use C# which I would prefer over LUA. It also has a nicer way of doing occlusion culling:
docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/OcclusionCulling.html
I believe this may be a step up from the way Spark's rendering works, but it's hard to say since I can't really compare the 2 methods directly with the same maps and settings. One thing I heard a lot of problems with Unity about was the netcode though. That portion of it seems to be a nightmare. Overall I think if used well Unity can make a great game. Anyway just my 2 cents.
They made the right move using Unity over cryengine.
Best of luck UWE
Wasteland 2 was made on Unity.
Just of the top of my head I know "The Long Dark", "Sir Your Being Hunted", "Frozen State", "Plague Inc. Evolved", and "The Forest" are Unity.