Cry2 vs U3

[KasuCode]

I made this thread because both engines have been known for awhile and keep looking better and better. I thought it was time for a more up to date thread. Both engines are very amazing and are still easy to tell apart. Post what and why you like or dislike something about them. Keep in mind we are talking about the engines not just Crysis and UT3. Also think about things like which scales better with other games. Would Cry2 do well with other games? Also think past FPS games.



CryENGINE 2

•Volumetric 3D Clouds
•Real time Ambient Maps with dynamic lighting and no premade shadows
•3D Ocean Technology dynamically modifies the ocean surface based on wind and wave direction and creates moving shadows and highlights underwater
•Depth of field to focus on certain objects while blurring out the edges and far away places
•Vector Motion blur on both camera movement and individual objects
•Dynamic Soft shadows with objects casting realistic shadows in real time
•Realistic Facial Animation that can be captured from an actor's face
•Subsurface scattering
•Parallax mapping
•Breakable Buildings allowing more tactical preplanning on the player's side
•Breakable Vegetation enabling players and enemy AI to level entire forests as a tactical maneuver or other purposes
•Advanced Rope Physics showcasing bendable vegetation responding to wind, rain or character movement and realistically interactive rope bridges
•Component Vehicle Damage giving vehicles different destroyable parts, such as tires on jeeps or helicopter blades
•HDR lighting
•Fully interactive and destructible environments
•Advanced particle system with fire or rain being affected by forces such as wind
•Time of Day Lighting, with sunrise, and sunset effects ensuring realistic transition between daytime and nighttime
•Lightbeams and Shafts when light intersects with solid or highly detailed geometry, and can generate "Godray" effects underwater
•Parallax Occlusion Mapping giving a greater sense of depth to a surface texture, realistically emphasizing the relief surface structure of objects
Long Range View Distance of up to 16km from ingame measurements
•Parametric Skeletal Animation System
•Procedural Motion Warping
oAs well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0 (DirectX 9) and 4.0 (DirectX 10), the engine will be multi-threaded to take advantage of SMP or hyper-threading capable systems. The game will also come in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Crytek claims that running the 64-bit version will give a performance increase of up to 10-15% per thread.[2] Crytek does not intend to support any sort of Physics Processor such as the AGEIA PhysX.[3] Instead, Crytek have developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics.

Other features include...

•Integrated CryENGINE Sandbox2 Editor: Run time engine is fully integrated into the CryENGINE Sandbox2 editor to give designers “What you see is what you play” functionality
•Renderer: integrates indoor and outdoor technology seamlessly. Offers rendering support for DirectX 8/9/10, Xbox 360, PS3[citation needed]
•Physics System: supports vehicles, rigid bodies, liquid, rag doll, cloth and soft body effects. The system is integrated with the game and tools.
•Animation System: Playback and blending between motion data (captured or key framed) combined with inverse kinematics (using biomechanical hints) and physical simulations. Special attention was applied to realistic human animation (e.g. adapting to uneven terrain, eye tracking, facial animation, leaning when running around corners, natural motion transitions).
•AI System: Enables team based AI and AI behaviors defined by scripts. Ability to create custom enemies and behaviors without touching the C++ code.
•Data-driven Sound System: Complex sounds can be easily created and offer innovative use and impression in studio quality in any available surround configuration. Multi-platform compatibility is guaranteed by FMOD’s sound library.
•Interactive Dynamic Music System: Improved playback of music tracks by an arbitrarily logic that can react on any game events and support the player to experience a movie-like sound track.
•Environmental Audio: Achieve a dense sound impression by accurately reproduce sounds from nature with seamless blending between environments and their effects from interior/exterior locations.
•Network Client and Server System: Manages all network connections for the multiplayer mode. It is a low-latency network system based on client/server architecture. The module was completely rewritten to accomplish the demands of next-generation multiplayer games.
•Shaders: A script system used to combine textures in different ways to produce visual effects. Supports real time per-pixel lighting, bumpy reflections, refractions, volumetric glow effects, animated textures, transparent computer displays, windows, bullet holes, and shiny surfaces.
Terrain: Uses an advanced heightmap system and polygon reduction to create massive, realistic environments. The view distance can be up to 16km when converted from game units.
•Voxel Object: Allows creating geometry a heightmap system wouldn’t support to create cliffs, caves, canyons and alien shapes. Voxel editing is as easy as heightmap editing and fast in rendering.
•Lighting and Shadows: A combination of precalculated properties with high quality real time shadows to produce a dynamic environment. Includes high-resolution, correct perspective, and volumetric smooth-shadow implementations for dramatic and realistic indoor shadowing. Supports advanced particles technology and any kind of volumetric lighting effects on particles.
•Fog: Includes volumetric, layer and view distance fogging even with non homogeneous media to enhance atmosphere and tension.
•Resource Compiler: Assets become compiled in the platform dependent format by the resource compiler. This allows to do global changes (e.g. mipmap computation, mesh stripification) depending on presets and platforms without scarifying loading time.
•Polybump™ 2: Standalone or fully integrated with other tools including 3ds max™. Creates a high quality surface description that allows very quick extraction of surface features normal maps in tangent-space or object-space, displacement maps, unoccluded area direction, accessibility and other properties.
•Scripting system: Based on the popular LUA language. This easy to use system allows the setup and tweaking of weapons/game parameters, playing of sounds and loading of graphics without touching the C++ code.
•Flow graph: The flow graph system allows the designers to code game logic without touching a line of code. Coding basically becomes connecting boxes and defining properties.
•Modularity: Entirely written in modular C++, with comments, documentation and subdivisions into multiple DLLs.
•Multi-threading: Support for multithreaded, multicored, or multiprocessor CPU(s), which improves many aspects of the game such as AI and physics by speeding up CPU computations. One huge advantage to the CryEngine2 is that it will detect the number of threads the CPU(s) have and will then equally distribute code out across all of the threads.
•64Bit: Support 32bit and 64bit OS to allow more memory being utilized.

Unreal Engine 3

Rendering Features
• Multi-threaded rendering system – Gemini.
• 64-bit color High Dynamic Range rendering pipeline. The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post processing effects such as light blooms, lenticular halos, and depth-of-field.
• Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, parameterized Phong lighting; custom artist controlled per material lighting models including anisotropic effects; virtual displacement mapping; light attenuation functions; pre-computed shadow masks; directional light maps; and pre-computed bump-granularity self-shadowing using spherical harmonic maps.
• Advanced Dynamic Shadowing. Unreal Engine 3 provides full support for four shadowing techniques:
o Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.
o Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows on the scene using shadow buffers. Shadow buffer filtering takes samples on a jittered disc that are rotated per-pixel to detect shadow penumbras. Dynamic branching is then used to refine shadow coverage in penumbra regions.
o Ultra high quality and high performance pre-computed shadow masks allow offline processing of static light interactions, while retaining fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections.
o Directional Light Mapping enables the static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting of an unlimited number of lights to be precomputed and stored into a single set of texture maps, enabling very large light counts in high-performance scenes.
• All of the supported shadow techniques are visually compatible and may be mixed freely at the artist's discretion, and may be combined with colored attenuation functions enabling properly shadowed directional, spotlight, and projector lighting effects.
• Volumetric environmental effects including height fog.
• Full support for seamlessly interconnected indoor and outdoor environments with dynamic per-pixel lighting and shadowing supported everywhere.
• Split-screen rendering.
• High-resolution screenshot support.
• Post-processing effects: motion blur, depth of field, and bloom.
• Artists can build terrain using a dynamically-deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly-blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation, and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes. Further, the terrain system supports artist-controlled layers of procedural weathering, for example, grass and vegetation on the flat areas of terrain, rock on high slopes, and snow at the peaks.
• Powerful material system, enabling artists to create arbitrarily complex realtime shaders on-the-fly in a visual interface that is comparable in power to the non-realtime functionality provided by XSI and Maya.
• The material framework is modular, so programmers can add not just new shader programs, but shader components which artists can connect with other components on-the-fly, resulting in dynamic composition and compilation of shader code.
• Extensible particle system with visual editor – UnrealCascade – supporting particle physics and environmental effects.

Distributed Computing Normal Map Generation Tool
• Most of our characters are built from two meshes: a realtime mesh with thousands of triangles, and a detail mesh with millions of triangles. We provide a distributed-computing application which raytraces the detail mesh and, from its high-polygon geometry, generates a normal map that is applied to the realtime mesh when rendering. The result is in-game objects with all of the lighting detail of the high poly mesh, but that are still easily rendered in real time.
Physics
• Powered by Ageia PhysX.
• Rigid body physics system supporting player interaction with physical game object, ragdoll character animation, complex vehicles, and dismemberable objects.
• All renderable materials have physical properties such as friction.
• Physics-driven sound.
• Fully integrated support for physics-based vehicles, including player control, AI, and networking.
• Gameplay-driven physical animation – capable of playing animations while being influenced by physics.
• Cloth simulation.
• UnrealPhAT, the Visual physics modeling tool built into UnrealEd that supports creation of optimized collision primitives for models and skeletal animated meshes; constraint editing; and interactive physics simulation and tweaking in-editor.
Animation
• Skeletal animation system supporting up to 4 bone influences per vertex and very complex skeletons.
• Full mesh and bone LOD support.
• AnimSet Viewer tool for browsing and organizing animations and meshes:
o Ability to add game-specific notifications at specific points in the animation.
o Tool for graphically placing ‘Sockets’ on bones to be used for attaching objects to the skeleton in the game, complete with preview.
o Ability to preview ‘overlay’ meshes based on the same skeleton (e.g. armor).

• Animation is driven by an “AnimTree” - a tree of animation nodes including:
o Blend controllers, performing an n-way blend between nested animation objects.
o Data-driven controllers, encapsulating motion capture or hand animation data.
o Physics controllers, tying into the rigid body dynamics engine for ragdoll player and NPC animation and physical response to impulses.
o Procedural skeletal controllers, for game features such as having an NPC's head and eyes track a player walking through the level.
o Inverse Kinematics solver for calculating limb pose based on a goal location (e.g. for foot placement).
• AnimTree Editor allows programmers or animators to create complex blends and controller setups and preview them in realtime in the editor.

• New node and controller types can be easily added for game specific control.
• Export tools for 3D Studio Max, Maya and XSI for bringing weighted meshes, skeletons, and animation sequences into the engine.

I'd hit it.

[Kayden]

For me its the Cry 2 engine, because of the demos I have seen such as when they are shooting a tree and it breaks apart where they shoot it! Haven't seen anything like that for UT3 engine and I also mainly voted on graphics from the screen shots......my opinion may change when it comes to preformance down the road but heres hopin cry2 keeps its end up when there released

[WeReWoLf]

I voted for cryengine 2, mainly because it has alot more promise to it.

[slaWter]

Honestly I don't really care which engine is better as long as we get lots of good games using one of these engines.

[Delbert]

I have seen the vids of Crysis and the game (engine ?) looks epic.
Can someone link me to example vids of the U3 engine in full flow ?

[Kayden]

Originally Posted by Delbert

I have seen the vids of Crysis and the game (engine ?) looks epic.
Can someone link me to example vids of the U3 engine in full flow ?

try Gears of war, Rainbow Six Vegas....but ut2k7 I haven't seen any yet

[LordJuanlo]

It's a really hard decision, I have voted for CryEngine2 but I think it's a 51-49 percent, almost a tie. I think I have voted CryEngine2 because the U3 games I have seen so far (on PC) are a bit dissapointing. And every Crysis video makes me drool.

[KasuCode]

UE3 already has a big guanra of games.

The Agency — (TBA) Sony Online Entertainment
Aliens — (2009) Gearbox Software
America's Army 3.0 — (2008) US Army
APB — (2008) Webzen
Black Powder Red Earth - (2007) Echelon Studios
Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway — (2007) Gearbox Software[34]
BioShock - (2007) Irrational Games
BlackSite: Area 51 — (2007) Midway Austin
DC Comics MMO — (TBA) Sony Online Entertainment
Earth No More — (2009) Recoil Games / 3D Realms
Elveon — (2007) 10tacle Studios[35]
Fatal Inertia — (2007) Koei[36]
Frontlines: Fuel of War — (2008) Kaos Studios
Fury — (2007) Auran[37]
Gears of War — (2006) Epic Games
Huxley — (2007) Webzen Games[38]
The Last Remnant — (2008) Square Enix
Lineage III — (TBA) NCsoft[39]
Lost Odyssey — (2007) Mistwalker[40]
Mass Effect — (2007) BioWare[41]
Medal of Honor: Airborne — (2007) Electronic Arts[42]
Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia — (2007) Artificial Studios[43]
RoboBlitz — (2006) Naked Sky Entertainment[44]
Rogue Warrior: Black Razor - (2007) Bethesda Softworks
Stargate Worlds — (2007) Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment[45]
Stranglehold — (2007) Midway Chicago[46]
To End All Wars — (2008) Kuju Entertainment [47] [48]
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas — (2006) Ubisoft
Too Human — (2007) Silicon Knights[49]
Turok — (2007) Propaganda Games
Tom Clancy's EndWar — (2008) Ubisoft
Unreal Tournament 3 — (2007) Epic Games
Upcoming Mortal Kombat Game — (Unknown) Midway Games
The Wheelman — (2007) Midway Games
HEI$T — (2007) InXile Entertainment

FPS, RTS, MORPG, Car games, Fighting Games. Would Cry2 be able to do stuff like this? I do not doubt it at all. I’m sure it could but I’m saying think more outside of Crisis.

[nekrosoft13]

Fury is UT3? i played the beta, what a horrible game

[KasuCode]

Originally Posted by nekrosoft13

Fury is UT3? i played the beta, what a horrible game

I wouldnt call it horrible but it was full of bugs and had big performance issues. It was a beta. The controls were pretty cool. It had a good feel to it. But the game itsself was lacking.

[rudedog]

I'm holding off purchasing a DX10 card because I want to see how each of these engines handles DX10

So far, I'm in no rush to purchase said DX10 card(s)........


The real engine winner is the one who can deliver on all those DX10 promises we heard, what a year or two ago.

[nekrosoft13]

maybe i'm not good with MMO, but i had very hard time to figure out how to control that character.