Task 4: Personal Enquiry - part 3

Focusing primarily on unreal engine 4 and its competitors comparing their features and see how it is beneficial to the developers.

Starting off with unreal engines top features as shown on their home website is having the full source code access making the engine fully customizable and easily can be built upon any new or old feature. Having old tools that come from unreal engine 3 and also having new tools that are used to enhance the engine. However they also removed features and implemented it in a new different way which is named blueprint.

I will compare two engines specifically because they have been competing with each other for many years and developers always have to choose between them; I left unity out because I’m mainly focusing on AAA engines. Unity has many powerful capabilities that are used mainly for lower class platforms and indie game development.

Engine	Unreal Engine 4	Cry Engine
Price	$19 / month + 5%	$9.90 / month

	Platforms
Windows	YES	YES
Mac	YES	NO
Linux	YES (modify source code)	NO
Android	YES	NO
iOS	YES	NO
Web	YES	NO
PlayStation 3	YES	YES
Xbox 360	YES	YES
PlayStation 4	YES	YES
Xbox one	YES	YES
Wii U	YES (modify source code)	YES
Middleware (Oculus rift, etc.)	YES (modify source code)	NO

Unreal Engine fully accessible source codes makes it easy to ship to any platforms shown here and many other platforms that will come in the future. Making it better for developers that want to get their game across lots of platforms. Cry engine lacking lots of support for other platforms however it maybe be in future support them. In terms of pricing cry engine is a lot cheaper than unreal having no royalties and only one fixed pay per monthly price. Pricing is very important for young companies because of financial support is hardly there unless the game is sold.

Moving to the features between the two it’s hard to make a table for both of them as they both have separate types of features even though they fit in one category. I will be more open and talk about one broad feature and do a comparison on that.

Visuals:

unreal engine 4 - elemental demo

crysis

Cry engine is known for its high visual appeals and always won that part of the prize having real time global illumination and natural lighting and dynamic shadows. Also with normal and offset mapping which is very good for optimization and having a very powerful tessellation system. Many other feature compiles together to make a very realistic environments and characters. However it has similar features that unreal has such as ambient occlusion, HDR lighting, parallax mapping and many more. Unreal has its own special tools such as its variety of post process features and multi material support.

Editor:

Unreal and Cry engine has both advanced editors that allow the artists and developers to make the game they want easier and faster, starting off with unreal editor being fully customizable and with changeable hotkeys, its fast and reliable content browser, and its unique possess and eject feature allowing you to track and fix any problems while the game is still playing. The material editor if unreal engine 4 is the same as UE3, however improved performance and more nodes. Cry engine has the same feature but its more alike 3ds Max materiel editor.

cryengine editor

unreal engine 4 editor

Both engines have scene editors allowing to create cinematic and time controlling object movements, Matinee cinematic for unreal engine 4 and track view editor for cry engine. Both having equal familiarities and functions it’s not really liable to compare them as they both do the similar task effectively. The same goes to their particle and effects editors.

AI:

Artificial Intelligence is always never perfect system however both of them achieve this very well; both using C++ so you can add anything to it however cry engine has an edge by having an AI editing system which the user can create visual based AI controls with many functions and full control. They both also have live real-time dynamic navigation mesh change giving developers to create believable and imitate realism through AI.

Sound:

Unreal engine audio pipeline somewhat remained the same from its previous engine however has advanced editor giving control over audio playback on the other hand cry engine has built in audio mixing and key frame sound animation giving it more control and adding more flexibility for developers to create believable sound.  Cry engine won in this factor by having more user input which is always a plus.

Scripting:

Unreal new advanced ‘blueprint’ feature gives developers without programing knowledge to create gameplay and events without writing any code; this feature in my opinion is their biggest selling point. Also you can live debug to see and fix any problems giving more control over the game you make. This option can be used for any artist without programming knowledge to create the game they wish to create. Also with the source code you can create custom nodes and add into the blueprint editor.

cryengine - flowchart

blueprint - UE4

To conclude both of the engines are very capable of producing AAA titles and they already have. Cry engine on the edge over with graphics but user ability I would say unreal engine is better, by its engine in general and learning curve which I think is easier than ever before. Cry engine having a slightly higher learning curve however even then it’s still liable to use. Unreal Engine produced more and bigger titles than cry engine such as mass effect series and bio shock series to name a few. Cry engine was used to develop very popular games only in terms of visuals in my opinion. Crysis 3 have to date the best visuals any game can accomplish right now and that game was mainly used to advertise the engine more than actually focus on the game. Ryse: Son of Rome was made for Xbox one and had again really high visuals but not much of gameplay as described by IGN and telegraph reviews. This concludes my subject of interest and my opinion of unreal engine compared to cry engine.

http://www.cryengine.com/

https://www.unrealengine.com/