Crydev member ‘qpffhtmxj’ has recreated in CRYENGINE the swamp level (or at least part of it) from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, giving us a glimpse at the differences between CRYENGINE and REDengine. While this fan-made map is being compared to a level created by a whole team (which doesn’t seem fair at all), it does show some differences in the lighting system of these two engines. In addition, you can find below a very early WIP map from ‘SahkanISR’ that shows what a modern-day remake of Doom 2 would look like in Unreal Engine 4. Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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this is retarded comparison. We can compare games when they are out. But comparing bullshot and old witcher screenshot is pretty bad in my opinion.
:v
I do not belive that this is the point of the comparison.
You can’t just pull together two different scenes, constructed by different artists, with a myriad of differing rendering configurations, and call it a “CRYENGINE vs REDengine Comparison”.
How is that an invalid comparison? You can judge the composition of the scene done by the artist, the amount of detail and general fidelity that the engine allows, and the atmosphere provided by the combination of both.
Frankly I like the cryengine one better. Feels more full, more swampy. Needs a little fog.
“You can judge the composition of the scene done by the artist”
The same scene could be composed in any number of ways using just the one engine, let alone across two different ones.
The author states that these screenshots give “… us a glimpse at the differences between CRYENGINE and REDengine”.
There are far too many assumptions one would have to make for an objective critique of both engine’s to be possible. I’m not talking about the look of either scene; I’m talking engine capabilities, because that ‘x versus y’ comparison is referring to the engines.
You can’t just look at two screenshots from two thematically similar scenes and confidently say anything objective about either engine’s capabilities. One can talk about subjective opinions regarding the aesthetics of either screenshot, yes, but that bares no relevance to a discussion on *actual* engine capabilities.
“You can judge… the amount of detail and general fidelity that the engine allows”
No, you can’t. Again, too many assumptions have to be made about so many different parts of the pipeline; from assets quality to rendering configurations, to material models, etc, etc.
I kinda see what you’re saying – TW3 looks worse because it’s made for a game that needs to run at a certain fps. The static image has no need to be optimized.
However, that’s not the point. The point is that an artist tried specifically to recreate that swamp vista in another engine.
I think people are just butt-hurt that their Golden Child game just got whipped. Truly, the Cryengine version is way better looking. However you feel about comparing things doesn’t matter – one looks better.
I prefer the redengine version. There are too many variables that need to be considered in this comparison or any similar case. I am only judging this particular instance but nonetheless,my preference still remains the original from Witcher 3.
Based on what we’re given in two still images, you can judge all of those things.
What does the water look like? How is the aliasing? How is the overall color of the scene handled? Does the environment look natural?
“The same scene could be composed in any number of ways..”
–but is isn’t. We have these two to look at.
Edit: redengine’s pool of water has a very stark edge. Despite the scene being mostly red/orange, the water lights up bluish grey. It comes across looking unnatural.
I do like the ambient fog in the air in redengine, but the natural blending of the terrain elements in cryengine is far superior. Whoever built the swamp in cryengine SDK could have added a slight red global illumination tint to make it look closer but eh.
You really, really can’t.
I’ll save us both time here and inform you that I’m a core systems engineer. I work with games tech every day. My life is this ‘stuff’. Take it from me, you really can’t judge “those things” by merely glaring at two screenshots.
If you disagree, that’s fine, but to that I’d gladly point you towards several programming and games development books that’ll do a far better job than I of enlightening you to the intricacies of games tech. I don’t have the want nor desire to attempt anything remotely along those lines in the comments section of some ‘gaming news’ site.
I don’t care if you’re a core systems engineer or a janitor. Anyone is able to look at two pictures and judge them by their aesthetic merits.
Denying that is just stupid. You could say “Well this water is gpu simulated and has real mental ray (which, it wouldn’t) reflections going on!” All that would be technically impressive, but if it’s too bright for the scene and has a stark edge like RedEngine’s, it doesn’t look very good.
Given that you’re “anon” I’m just going to assume you’re trolling, pretending to be unable to grasp the concept of aesthetic, or you’ve got aspergers and can’t let semantics go.
Either way, you’re obnoxious.
Haha.
You still want that reading list then?
A reading list of how to look at a screenshot? no, I think I’m good dude.
Not a list on “How to look at a screenshot”, but perhaps one that will let you actually deconstruct a screenshot without making wild assumptions.
I do a lot of 3d modeling work, so like yourself, I’m quite familiar with the various aspects of rendering, but that isn’t the point.
You don’t need to see the internal workings of the game engine to see if there is aliasing or not, or decent texture filtering, or if the designer has taken care to make sure that certain aspects of the environment blend well.
You don’t need to know how a scene is rendered to notice that foliage is comprised of flat sprites instead of real meshes, or that the water onscreen looks like a sticker.
And if you wanted the cryengine scene to be a 100% accurate object duplicate of the real witcher’s scene, there would be no point in comparing the designer’s choice of composition. The level design can be clearly seen from a screenshot. Certainly, if one were to play the Witcher 3, you would look at the area from different angles as you turned the camera, would you not?
Then the cryengine screenshot can be considered as a look from another angle. Obviously the scene isn’t identical. That isn’t the purpose. It’s to say “here’s how a swamp environment would be done in another engine”.
I don’t know why that’s so hard for you to understand.
– “I do a lot of 3d modeling work, so like yourself, I’m quite familiar
with the various aspects of rendering, but that isn’t the point.”
The screenshots are described as allowing us to compare one engine against the other. The context is an engine comparison in the context of graphics. That is exactly the point.
Article excerpt:
– “Crydev member ‘qpffhtmxj’ has recreated in CRYENGINE the swamp level (or at least part of it) from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, giving us a glimpse at the differences between CRYENGINE and REDengine.”
That directly implies we can infer something from the screenshots as to how the engines fare, technically, against each other. You mentioned “level design”, the “designer”, and the “designer’s choice”, but those do not not logically factor into a discussion on the technical capabilities of software – they should be removed as a factor in such a discussion. There is no correlation between the skill of the content creators and the technical capabilities of an engine, therefore this is not a suitable as an engine comparison.
– “Then the cryengine screenshot can be considered as a look from another angle. Obviously the scene isn’t identical. That isn’t the purpose. It’s to say, ‘here’s how a swamp environment COULD be done in another engine’.
I don’t know why that’s so hard for you to understand.”
First, that should be “could”, not “would”. A matter of semantics, yes, but it’s very relevant here. The former implies possibility, whilst the latter conditional certainty. One person may do it ‘this’ way, whilst another does it ‘that’ way. This is the crux of the issue and why it’s not adequate to compare engines in this fashion.
Listen, I understand your point and I would generally tend to agree with you *if* this article were a comparison of the content creators involved, their capabilities, the aesthetics, overall composition, and so on. That is not the direction taken by the article. You’re extrapolating that from somewhere, whereas I’m directly referring to the literary content of the article; nothing more and nothing less.
Both you and I clearly know the engine is a tool, it’s the medium through which we, as developers and as users present our ‘creative vision’. A good engine can be twisted and contorted into all kinds of shapes by the content creators. That is it’s purpose. If we are to compare two different tools on a technical level, remove any and all extraneous factors from the comparison, or risk having the results skew in a non-representative direction to reality. ‘Scientific method’?
The article states an engine comparison can be made from two
screenshots. As we’re looking at screenshots the implication is that this is clearly in the context of graphics. I find fault with that, because the thing that factors in most towards those screenshots comes from the users, not the engine.
I think you’re taking the wording of the article way too literally.
Aside from the motion performance and game mechanics of an engine, there is a lot that you can tell visually about a game through a still.
The two were never meant to be taken as identical, but rather “reimagined”. Obviously. The cryengine modder has no witcher assets available and recreating them would take a tremendous amount of time. The wording is bad, but the point you’re taking issue with is not the point of the article.
It actually couldn’t. You’re arguing technicality. IF you assume the light sources are as identical as possible, the engines clearly render differently. Regardless it’s a known fact cry3 is better.
Yeah Cryengine is probably dead anyway if Crytek is going down (and thus there goes any support). Tbh I won’t miss Crytek. Crysis & Warhead were good, but otherwise their games were mediocre at best.
Yeah, you dont miss that games, but you will miss some competition between game engines in the future. Don’t look over the games, look over the specs of the engines they have.
When you wake up, UE is everywhere dealing what they want, when they want, without a single blink.
Competition is great, but it sometimes means someone loses. Looks like Crytek lost.
Dude , Crytek was one of those devs who really pushed PC hardware and you could compare old PC games with even new gen console games .
Yes their games became worse after Warhead but Cry Engine is one of the best engines out there , even though it is difficult to get into .
CIG may replace Crytek , but then again they are also using Cry Engine and not their own engine .
Yes that’s right, Crytek is going to go bankrupt instead of getting a bailout &/or scaling back its operation with heavy cutbacks, & when they do, NOBODY is going to buy their greatest asset, one of THE most advanced (not to mention Licensable) Engines on the Market (bug-riddled features apart).
What? Seriously? Are you for real?
That might actually occur with the new frostbite and unreal engine 4 coming out. If no one is behind cryengine to continue to update it, it’ll immediately become obsolete.
Frostbite isn’t licensable though, EA is keeping it exclusive to their own Studios, same as Ubisoft, Activision, ZeniMax, Codemasters, Microsoft, Sony etc.
Aside from Unreal 3/4 & CryEngine, the only other “real” Engine available on the market for licensing is Unity. Unreal 4 has a massive lead on all of its competitors (licensable & not) for many different reasons, & CryEngine needs some work, but it has serious potential.
I can’t see Crytek going bankrupt just yet, though I can see them selling off more than half their Studios & refocusing on their already existing assets in order to generate REAL revenue, thus pretty much forcing them to improve CryEngine.
Perhaps even a new Crysis Game. Can’t speak for anyone else, but personally I’d love a Sandbox Nanosuit Stealth & Predator-focused Hunter vs Cell Game without pesky Aliens trying to crawl up my ass all the time. That, & a Crysis Trilogy HD update for PC & New-Gen Consoles would be easy ways to make some short-term money to keep them from going down completely.
Unreal 4 is out btw, it’s already on Update 4.2. You might be thinking of Unity 5?
I think most developers are willing to settle to provide their engine for other companies. Anvil 2 for assassin’s creed uses a majority of repurposed Cryengine code. Same with the engine that ubisoft has used for FarCry. Only Farcry 1 used purely cryengine SDK.
Frostbite was developed by DICE, but bioware and other EA published developers are using it.
If i walked up to square enix and told them i’d give them 200,000 dollars to license Glacier 2, I think they’d say yes.
You mean Dunia? Not exactly. The original Anvil Engine (Assassin’s Creed II-Brotherhood) is a re-named, heavily modified version of the old Scimitar Engine (Assassin’s Creed (1), Prince of Persia – Forgotten Sands, etc.). They re-designed Anvil for Assassin’s Creed III & beyond (AnvilNext), & now again to a large extent for Unity apparently, but none of those have anything to do with CryEngine (not directly anyway, some coding could have been inspired from Dunia, but there’s nothing public that hints towards that).
Dunia was born from the original (Modified) CryEngine that was altered by Crytek (Far Cry) & Ubisoft Montreal for Far Cry 2+, but Dunia only went on to become Dunia (Far Cry 2), & Dunia 2 (Far Cry 3). (I have no idea what they’re using for Far Cry 4). Far as we know Dunia hasn’t been used for any Non-Far Cry Game to date. I think there’s a Chart somewhere…. I’ll get back to that.
Frostbite was developed by DICE as a successor to their Refractor Engines, & then “seized” by EA & distributed throughout their Studios in order to cut down on Licensing & Development costs in General. It’s a lot easier to maintain one Engine than to have every Team using something different. It’s exclusive to EA-owned Studios however, not EA & Partners.
A flat fee would probably require more than 200K for an AAA Game (I think CryEngine was going for 1M flat fee, & sure major differences between the two, but still), regardless, maybe, maybe not.
Though really these Companies would be a lot more unwilling than you think, not only due to the Licensee’s expectations of extensive Documentation & Support, which most of them would be unwilling (if not unable) to provide. Epic has a large team working on constantly supporting the Unreal Engine & its Licensees, as does Crytek (to a lesser extent). EA has gone so far as to create an entirely separate Studio for Frostbite development, but all that does is give them a reason never to License another Engine again, it doesn’t give them any reason to give up one of their biggest advantages over their competitors.
The foliage and DoF systems for assassin’s creed are directly ported from cryengine. A cursory search should reveal that they acquired and still use this tech.
You may notice in AC: black flag that a lot of the palm fronds react to character movement, have their own physics, etc etc. This is because they use the same presets and may in fact be the same palm fronds (with varied texture?) from crysis 1.
A lot of companies will use speedtree and a lot of other middleware (havok physics is a huge one) in addition to their own engine or another to build their games. Some games use unreal purely as a renderer with havok physics. AC uses their own engine with other tech, including cryengine’s natural foliage and DoF tech.
So they ported CryEngine’s Foliage Tech to AnvilNext? Hm, interesting.
It makes sense. Especially with black flag having lush forests, they would need to be able to quickly create believable environments. Cryengine makes jungle islands very very quickly.
I meant UE4. There haven’t been any games released on it yet except Daylight.
Cry Engine 3+ sucks when it comes to open world games and requires alot of changes to be made in it . That’s one of the main reasons why Star Citizen is taking longer than what they had originally planned .
This engine is primarily made for FPS and despite being one of the best looking engines out there , it is still First Person centric engine for rendering smaller maps .
Red Engine 3 on other hand is built from ground up for open world games with 3rd person view , great visuals , dynamic weather , day and night cycles and so on . Comparing both doesn’t make much sense , in my opinion . You can compare one scene and make it look better than other but games like Witcher 3 can’t be done on Cry Engine until alot of new stuff is coded within the engine .
Whoa, I wonder how Star Citizen would be impacted by Crytek going out of business? They’d lose support for their engine, and would have to do any future tech updates (eg DX11 support) on their own.
That’s what I was thinking . They were planning to support the game for years to come , including visuals of the engine .
The Star Citizen folks own the full source code and have their own programming team. As it stands right now they’ve already had to do some pretty extensive modifications to the engine, so CiG are pretty comfortable with it I’d say. The primary downside would be that CiG have to take on responsibility for the maintaining of all systems within the engine without updates from Crytek and their R&D dept., for example.
Here’s a comment from Chris Roberts’ brother, Erin:-
https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/comment/2895381/#Comment_2895381
Indeed, the Kingdom Come: Deliverance Team documented this issue extensively, explaining how they spent most of their first few months re-doing the Engine to suit their own needs.
except thats completely false. Cryengine ALREADY has open world games that look better than the Witcher 3 such as the original Crysis, and that came out in 2009…
Let The Witcher use its own great engine and let Cryengine be what it is…another great engine.
I’m not sure if I am the only one still waiting for Kingdom Come Deliverance, made with Cryengine which to me looks quite good.
At the end of the day is not if the engine is better for “this or that”, artists are the ones who can make great worlds talking about not just the environment but also the characters/animations and features in it. If the right hands are using it, the end result should be great.
Cryengine was good for Open world and still is good for it.
Just in case, two pictures of the swamp in The Witcher (the first one that I’m currently playing…yeah I played the 2nd game first…lol)
http://i.imgur.com/KqlQRvs.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/xRxdgkI.jpg