Crytek unleashes major new graphical upgrade for Cryengine

http://docs.cryengine.com/display/SDKDOC1/EaaS+3.8.1

It looks to me like Epic is now at risk of losing the arch-vis and walkthrough markets as the graphics on this page now look far better than anything out of UE4. It also looks like they’re starting to make headway in taking a chunk of the indie market away from Unreal as well. That apartment scene with baked lighting in UE4 could perhaps now be made fully interactive if it was in this engine instead.

Self-shading in textures, real volumetric fog, a generic game template, and official OpenGL support. It’s now at the point where some of the Unreal users who used to dismiss the engine are now getting awestruck by it.

Your move Epic, but it looks like you might’ve wanted to keep the monthly subscription (Crytek is getting guaranteed revenue with no dependence on hoping some users will make it big).

Its very pretty , particularly the volumetrics…

But the game scripting is not friendly the way i see.

You’re a little behind the times. Epic stopped charging a monthly fee a little while ago.

You probably already know that besides pretty graphics it’s about tools, ease of use and support. And on how many platforms you can run a game.

So CE has been plagued by horrible support, ugly DRM, poor documentation and high hardware requirements. Not to mention horrible quality of code.

There is no way CE take away anything from UE4.

Also, CE is aimed at photorealistic rendering. In order to build a decent looking game, you need top notch content and commercial tools to author that content (64bit images for example). A small indie (or garage indie) with little time and resources wouldn’t be able to make much with it. If CryTek could allow commercial exploitation of Crysis 3 content, then I see a benefit of CE for indies. Otherwise it’s no use.

Bt he is saying they should have kept charging, that epic is about to be bankrupted by crytek. you are both right in a way. cryengine may be prettier but hardly anyone uses it. the biggest market for game engines in games. there are about 30 game in development that use cryengine. there are about 200 that use ue4. two of cryteks branches closed last yearr, usa and uk, because crytek could not pay the employees. epic made almost a billion in profits last year. epic is actually the profitable company while crytek is flirting with bankruptcy. crytek is moving into the free to play market, they dont even have a single retail game in development. and they are using kick starter to fund even their free to plays.

blender is a much bigger threat to autodesk than crytek is to epic. and i dont see autodesk going bankrupt any time soon.

compare epic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games
to crytek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CryEngine_games

i dont think arc vis is going to make a dent financially. if crytek were a threat epic would just buy them with the money they made in just the last month. the reason ace seen the story is cryengine finally got oculus rift support, something unreal engine has had for a year and is the prefered engine for. they also just got linux and opengl support patched in, something that ue4 has had for quite a while. who knows, maybe ton can raise some funds and buy crytek soon, make it a blender game engine.

microsoft paid over 100 million to epic for the rights to gears of war. amazon bought the rights to and now own cryengine last year for 50 million. the people making the engine dont even own it anymore. cryengine was bought for less than the average budget of a single AAA game. i doubt crytek cares more for the engine now that when it was theirs. amazon are not developers. crytek had to sell their money maker and no longer even get the licensing fees. i dont see it ending well for cryengine. the makes sold it last year to avoid bankruptcy, but they sold their income. without income how are they going to make money now? free to play? who maintains the engine when crytek goes under? the outlook for cryengine is why it was only 50 mill, amazon made a long shot bet and can afford to lose that much easily. with the money crytek paid off creditors to keep the company alive hopefully long enoguh to get their 3 free to play games out the door, if none of the 3 are hits they wont get funded on kickstarter again and fold up shop.

to bet on cryengine you have to bet on a company that isn’t even in the engine market anymore. you have to bet on a kick starter that couldn’t get backing from banks or real investors. them putting epic…the biggest engine in the industry out of business is like expecting a hotdog cart to put mcdonnalds out of business.

@rdo3: and how do you know all this “inside” info about CryTek not owning CE anymore and so on and so forth? Were you one of the people making a deal between Amazon and CryTek ? I highly doubt that. Therefore let’s not create unfounded rumours, please.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, honestly. As for archviz: UE4 still has baked lightmaps, which for interiors look way better than anything that comes out of a realtime-only renderer (like CryEngine):

As for this fancy voxel-based GI stuff: Nobody has ever shipped this in a title. UE4 had it first, but it was removed because it was too expensive. NVIDIA put it back into UE4 via Gameworks. EPIC seems to be looking into SDF-based stuff, while Lionhead is implementing GI in UE4 in the form of light-propagation volumes (a Crytek technique, ironically). Unity has dynamic GI in static scenes via Enlighten, which is very cheap but takes very long to precompute. Nobody has a silver bullet. You can’t trust these fancy screenshots, you have to see how it scales with hardware, screen resolution, assets, etc.

I didn’t have much time, but to skim through this so sorry if this has been covered… There has been work going on in this regard before Crytek released their version. Here’s the link. https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?44278-Realtime-Dynamic-GI-Reflections-AO-Emissive-plugin-AHR

So, it still comes down to good vs great tools to me!

@beerbaron …That youtube video just looks like a standard scene interior baked in cycles. Is it doing something fancy under the hood. There’s no real time interaction with objects, so I don’t see anything special?

I’m not saying it’s special, I’m saying this looks better (and is much cheaper to render) than anything fancy you can do fully in realtime. CryEngine cannot do that, because it’s “100% realtime”. A lot of use-cases can get away with a mostly static environment. Dynamic objects in such an environment are lit with light probes, and it looks pretty convincing, too.

Some of the best-looking games (like The Order 1886) use this process. If you can get away with it (which archviz definitely can) you should be using it, too.

About the above scene (Loft in London):

The room is hard for GI, and even with extreme settings of Lightmass I had very bad spots & splotches.
Even now I still have a couple of artifacts here and there, but I’m working on it and will try to fix them in the next updates.

More here (from one of creators):

Yes, lightmappers are a pain to work with, no question about it. Still, the results speak for themselves. Here’s some limitations for CryTeks voxel GI, btw:

Of course, if your GI solution is based on a low-resolution voxel representation, you won’t get to enjoy small splotchy artifacts like on a high-resolution lightmap. Instead, light will leak through entire walls :wink:

As I said, no silver bullet…

Epic doesn’t need to make a move because UE4 is still much better than anything Crytek could ever dream of creating. Just watch this lovely conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clakekAHQx0
Crytek can’t take the indie market from UE4 because that is still Unity’s turf. Also keep in mind that CryEngine is very difficult to work with: most of the tools are garbage compared to Unreal’s, and, in my experience, (which to be fair was about a year ago) CryEngine is buggy and unstable, whereas Unreal is continuously robust, providing stable and useful tools and has far superior rendering methods.
As for dynamic lighting, why is that supposed to be a good thing? It’s all about optimization- when you can bake lighting, you should, because it’s more efficient. Any dynamic lighting on static lighting is just wasted processing power.
It certainly is a good engine, but saying it is any sort of threat to Unreal at all is a bit of a stretch.

Is that coming from a mobile developer or from someone who has no clue about game dev?

Doom (new one) is all real-time, nothing baked. New Id Tech 6 engine. Doom 3 is all real-time too, nothing baked. Old id Tech 4 engine.

RAGE is made with id Tech 5. It requires a render farm to bake lighting for final release. Baking, when it comes to quality and larger scale projects is evil. Iteration times are horrible whether it’s Unity, UE4, id Tech 5, or even old Quake 3 engines. Sure one can bake with crappy lighting, however, it will never show what level truly looks like. And even after final bake you will find spots that need tweaking, and you have to re-bake.

All real-time rules for game dev.

Yeah anyone try baking cycles into the game engine and making it look good with the other objects I’ve yet to see.

But baking works when you’re just demoing a scene like that archviz vid. Not sure about that game 1886, the still look good but I wonder how it would look when the sun is moving and casting light on the road or real-time water. I bet it sucks.

Since you’re feeling obligated to make silly comments, I’m not going to argue, and instead lead you to the UE4 documentation:

Also, if you watched the conferenced I linked before, you would understand how they achieved such steady performance even from such a massive scene. (Of course, if you look at the recommended specs to run it in editor, you’ll see they also ask for 24 gb of RAM)

Got a source for that?

All real-time rules for game dev.

Sure, but it sucks for your customers when they’re getting inferior lighting and lower framerates (or otherwise worse visual fidelity) because you couldn’t be bothered to use a solution that uses precomputation, when your use-case would’ve allowed for it.

All lighting solutions have artifacts of some sorts, you have to tweak things to make stuff work. I agree that some of the artifacts in Lightmass or Beast are really annoying, but those are mostly the consequence of approximations used to speed things up (like Final Gather). Using pathtracing or radiosity can be more expensive but way more reliable.

I’ve got a solution for you: Don’t move the sun. This is a real game, not some techdemo for demonstrating a day/night cycle. Water is no different with lightmaps. You don’t have lightmaps on everything. The dynamic stuff is still lit dynamically, but the static stuff is lit statically - at the best quality possible.

Also, please ignore, for the sake of discussion, anything anyone has done with Cycles and/or the BGE. That’s not the kind of baked lighting I’m talking about.

You don’t need to show me the docs. I worked with Unity and UE4 first hand and it’s super slow on my PC when it comes to baking (UE4 in Editor mode is slow, period). I also work with id Tech 4 and iteration times are blazing fast, even on my old PC.

Watch E3 2015 Bethesda press conference and interview with Marty Stratton. Not to mention that CryEngine main rendering guy is now works for ID on id Tech 6.

But you can’t move stuff around with bakes lighting. With real-time lighting, you can rearrange scene in real-time and off you go. If you miss a deadline, no biggie - you don’t need more time to rebuild lighting.

As for performance, arch viz customer doesn’t care whether it 25 fps or 120 fps. And if you are making money with that trade, why not to get better PC that runs real-time lighting smoothly?! :slight_smile:

Btw, you can prerender 360 deg. videos now and show that on YouTube, and with Google Cardboard VR it will blow your customer’s mind :slight_smile: No need for any game engine.