Engines

[Faille]

Figures we might as well have a thread discussing engines, their pros and cons, etc. Seems like there's a few new ones out and about.

[Screamfeeder]

I just so happen to be in a rather unique position to give some basic thoughts on both the CRYENGINE2 Sandbox editor and the Unreal 3.0 engine.

I am currently doing modeling work on the Mechwarrior:Living Legends full conversion mod which is using the Cry2 engine, and I also work at a school that uses the Unreal 3.0 engine.

So far my general thoughts are that the Cry2 engine is incredibly more deep in terms of where you can take the technology, whereas Unreal 3 just built upon the very excellent and versatile Unreal2.5 core and added a few bonuses (per-pixel lighting, HDR support).

What really swings the contest in favor of the Cryengine is the liberal use of voxels.

For those that have no idea what I am talking about, a voxel is basically a 3D pixel that generates volumes based on it's relation to other voxels in a 3D space. If that went over your head, just think of an ice-cream scoop taking a chunk out of space. The ice-cream scoop is a voxel(or made up of many voxels).

Why is this so cool?

In the past, if you wanted to create an interior environment through any sort of generated terrain, you need to create a mesh in a 3D program and use that shape to cut out your interior from the terrain.

With voxels, you can simply designate two spots, and using a multitude of variables in the engine itself, create your interior environment on the fly. In the Cry2 engine, this generates all the needed height-maps and texture splitting with no need to modify the terrain after the fact.

Very handy.

One of the other bonuses from the Cry2 engine is support for advanced lighting techniques like subsurface scattering. Think light through a semi-transparent glass and the shadows/highlights it generates. As far as I know, the only way this can be done in Unreal3 is using the old shadow map fakery.

If you got any questions about the work flow or anything else let me know. If I don't have the answer right away I have tons of people working with both engines that will.

[Faille]

excellent, thanks!

Those are the 2 engines I was thinking of playing with next, though they seem to be purely graphical engines, so there's definitely room for other options depending on needs.

One of the things I look at is what sort of art libraries do they come with. Not being a great artist myself I tend to just play with what they come with to create stuff.

[Screamfeeder]

Originally Posted by Faille

One of the things I look at is what sort of art libraries do they come with. Not being a great artist myself I tend to just play with what they come with to create stuff.

In that case, both engines come with everything that is in the games, both single player and multiplayer.

Tons of models, textures (advanced shaders and particles as well) and all the support files.

I was thinking about doing a "how to model simple game assets" thread here as soon as I get some time.

[kollos]

voxel bring back good memories. anyone remember outcast or comanche?
those games were so advanced for their time:

outcast, 1999


comanche: maximum overkill, 1992



enough with the derail. that mechwarrior mod looks pretty promising, would be nice if you could give some updates on the progress
would love to join a mod like this, but i should probably get a machine that can run crysis first:P

[Screamfeeder]

I would like to give updates here but I need to check with the leads first. NDA and all that.

There is a monthly newsletter that gives a good indication however.

[Faille]

Seems like XNA 2.0 has been released
- XNA -

Anyone had much experience creating anything with it? Seems like making a console friendly is the cool thing to do these days.

[slitz]

For Java developers there is Home - jmonkeyengine.com which is a SceneGraph API for Java.
Tried it myself some, and while I can't compare to the crysis/unreal monsters, it's pretty good.

[Faille]

This is off topic, but I thought I'd suggest something for those who might want to do more in the future...

Panda3D Manual

Panda3D is an actual game engine that's been used to create games. It's freely available and it allows one to skip some of the lower level stuff, if you really want to get more advanced. Obviously, it requires more knowledge and it uses Python, but just something to consider in the future, perhaps.

[Noah EQ2]

HeroEngine >> The Ultimate MMO Platform

I have no experiance with this engine, hope to soon, but "real time" editing while on a live server is pretty awesome. I noticed some other engines require you to patch the entire server to make any adjustments. Not to mention most of the tools seem pretty friendly to a "beginner".

I'll post more info later once I get into it deeper.

[Cloud9_]

Originally Posted by Noah EQ2

HeroEngine >> The Ultimate MMO Platform

I have no experiance with this engine, hope to soon, but "real time" editing while on a live server is pretty awesome. I noticed some other engines require you to patch the entire server to make any adjustments. Not to mention most of the tools seem pretty friendly to a "beginner".

I'll post more info later once I get into it deeper.

I've been a fan of this engine since I heard about it a LOOOOOOOONG time ago when Heros Journey was announced. I really like Simu and their stuff looks pretty good.

Would be interested to see what Bioware does with it with their new MMO

[Jenison]

I love reading developer blogs of engines. This one has lots of potential.

Unigine - 3D engine of virtual worlds (games and virtual reality systems)

[Ninajrr]

There was a tech demo for some MMO engine in development back at 2006 or 2007 E3 (I forget which), in it they had a really cool system for server management where they'd have other servers ready to act as fail safes if one went down, etc. The demo was of some high fantasy world, anyone happen to know the name of it?

[WillzZz]

Well, I have some NDA's to be wary of, but I'll give what little info I feel I can.

Originally Posted by Ninajrr

There was a tech demo for some MMO engine in development back at 2006 or 2007 E3 (I forget which), in it they had a really cool system for server management where they'd have other servers ready to act as fail safes if one went down, etc. The demo was of some high fantasy world, anyone happen to know the name of it?

BigWorld. It's fairly impressive technology. They know their visuals are a step behind, and they're honest about it. I think the sky is the limit with enough money behind developing using this engine.

Originally Posted by Screamfeeder

What really swings the contest in favor of the Cryengine is the liberal use of voxels.

Voxels give umm interesting results. Since it's just Sandbox stuff I think I'm in the clear by saying it's just not worth using in development yet. There are texturing issues within voxels using some video card setups (using their configs) which make them too iffy. It happens on multiple setups, and doesn't happen at all on others. Very dicey, but I love the concept. Hopefully a newer version will fix some of those problems. It's also very rough and the engine itself doesn't like running very many of them. Oh wells.

edit: also on the voxels thing, it requires a ton of reproducing the ground textures. A simple problem but during the editing phase you'll get very aliased chunky edges unless you save them out repeatedly. Ugly if you don't know how to handle it, and just time consuming and frustrating if you do.

Originally Posted by Noah EQ2

HeroEngine >> The Ultimate MMO Platform

I have no experiance with this engine, hope to soon, but "real time" editing while on a live server is pretty awesome. I noticed some other engines require you to patch the entire server to make any adjustments. Not to mention most of the tools seem pretty friendly to a "beginner".

I'll post more info later once I get into it deeper.

Well.. I'm going to be careful here. I'll just say that I <3<3love<3<3 the tools and some of the things it can do are very easy and simplified (which is great!). There's an old adage I like to follow, though. Anything that sounds too good to be true...

[Yago]

Have you guys taken a look at the Abyssal game engine?

Abyssal Engine and Tools ~ Professional game development software

They also have several downloadable demos, as well as an environment demo allowing you to see it in real time. The demo tools are available as a trial download but you will have to contact the developer.