Remember TimeSplitters Rewind? You know, that fan standalone multiplayer game that was meant to feature characters, maps, and weapons from all three TimeSplitters games? Well it appears that the game is currently facing development issues due to CRYENGINE; the engine powering it.
As Cinder Interactive Arts stated, development has gone stagnant and the team is completely unable to work with CryEngine with any momentum at this point.
“We have been waiting for a new release from Crytek that changes a lot of the core systems of the engine and includes new documentation. The problem is this engine update was supposed to release over four months ago and the delays continue.”
An engine switch sounds like the most logical thing as the team has experimented with Unreal Engine 4, however it won’t be able to use the TimeSplitters IP if its switches engines. As such, the team will have to re-brand the game, and… well… this isn’t what TimeSplitters fans have been expecting.
“This is something we have talked about internally and we have a clear idea the direction we would take with it. If this is to happen, we would likely do our own interpretation of what we think TimeSplitters 4 could have been.”
So yeah, things are not looking good for TimeSplitters Rewind!
Thanks PCGamesN
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They are referring to Cryengine 5.4 which was sadly delayed 4 times because of Vulkan.
What the TimeSplitter’s Rewind team is doing is honestly REALLY bad practice. You should never wait on an Engine update to start/continue development because of situations exactly like these.
If it’s any consolation to the dev’s the new engine documentation is getting released independently of the 5.4 engine release and will be launched as soon as Collin (the guy at Crytek in charge of the doc’s) is done with them. Hopefully that should help them out.
Cryengine 5.4 is completely revamping the renderer to have full, low-level support for Vulkan which is why it’s taking so long.
Indeed. Just stick to the engine version you started on & then upgrade to the latest version once you’re done developing. You’ll break a bunch of things that you’ll have to spend time fixing of course, but you’ll be better off for it in the end. It’s just common sense, really >.>
On the other hand, even if it is “just” because of Vulkan, that’s still one hell of a delay. Exactly how many people did they cut, ffs.
Also;
In a recent statement on Facebook, the voluntary team – which consists entirely of fans of the series – admitted they were “completely unable to work with CryEngine with any momentum,” stating that what used to take “a few minutes in another engine” takes “up to four days in CryEngine.”
What the f*ck?
Regarding the quote you posted: With no extra detail it’s really hard to guess what they were trying to do. Again, these people seem to show every sign of being amateurs.
Very true.
why dont they just use whatever version that they been working on??
Never heard of the rewind team. With fan content I would never expect them to release on time anyways. Here I thought Time splitters only had two games. Lol.
Honestly, looking at the timesplitter dev’s quality standards, it looks like these guys are amateurs. It’s really not hard to optimize Cryengine, you just have to use the proper tools to optimize (RenderDoc, Statoscope, Profiler) and all the necessary tools are shipped with the engine.
Also why Prey devs would use that engine if it`s hard to maintain?
Cry Engine is among the worse engines in the market today, it is demanding for the visuals it offers.
Most engines in the market have surpassed Cry Engine in terms of visuals and performance, Frostbite being on top with the highest ratio (performance/visuals).
Unreal Engine 4 is capable of great things, but due to poor developers we still haven’t seen what is truly capable off (but only crap ports with poor performance).
frostbite isn’t open to the public so that’s out of the question. Ryse looks better than almost any game of 2014-2015 and it came out in 2013. On top of that it runs far better than most games.
Ryse has V-Sync issues and Stuttering on PC, and barely maintains 30FPS on the Xbox One.
So it’s hardly a good example.
I have never experienced stuttering on Ryse. What specs?
https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Ryse:_Son_of_Rome
That site gives no evidence of stuttering or any data on anything. It literally gave a potential fix for any possible VSync issues.
VSync can also simply be disabled and then you can cap your framerate with Riva Stat Tuner or NVIDIA control panel.
Given that both the stuttering and VSync issues are tied together I’d say that’s an invalid criticism because it doesn’t affect performance as a whole and is entirely optional.
“That site gives no evidence of stuttering”, “It literally gave a potential fix for any possible VSync issues” make up your mind.
“potential fix”
“possible issues”
“evidence”
Those words don’t go together.
Good looking 3rd party game runs like wonk on a sh*tty low-grade box.
Must be Tuesday.
We’ve seen some pretty bad results from Frostbite, like Mass Effect Andromeda and Need for Speed. It’s a great engine, but it only truly shines as much as it does because DICE is so talented in using it.
Both Mass Effect and Need for Speed run fine for me.
Frostbite wasn’t designed for RPGs, racing games, etc. being the problem there. Both Dragon Age III & Mass Effect developers have detailed how they had to code in everything from the most rudimentary RPG systems to whatever-the-f*ck else you can imagine, because DICE never bothered to.
CryEngine also faces similar problems which is why the Kingdom Come team had to spend quite some time making it RPG-compatible.
Not designed for racing games? Come to think of it, it is. It is designed around Battlefield and every Battlefield has large maps with buildings and fast vehicles and needs to support high framerates throughout. If you’re racing around in a fast buggy or flying a helicopter you pretty much have the engine doing what it would do in a racing game as well. Load in assets fast and with the smoothest possible transitions between LODs, offer responsive controls etc. Racing games should work great in Frostbite.
Arguably DICE coded in most of the components a racing game engine would need, sure, so I guess that was more down to the team/s being inexperienced with Frostbite (which EA forced down everyone’s throats from one day to the next, way back when), rather than the engine itself, why not.
Though either way, EA seems more concerned with making campaign games featuring vehicles rather than actual car games, these days……
CryEngine still has the potential to be one of the best looking game engines on the market, the problem being nobody uses it & Crytek themselves are too busy doing sh*ts & giggles with their resources instead of actually proving the engine’s capabilities through a Crysis remaster, or some such.
Frostbite has the best performance/visuals ratio, absolutely, but even Frostbite doesn’t compare to CryEngine’s lighting systems, for one thing. That is to say, visually DICE is definitely on to something in regards to environmental & cloth texture work, but whatever it is, they’re not quite there yet when it comes time for certain materials to interact with the lighting system, etc.
Also, there isn’t a single technology that’s yet to beat CryEngine’s vegetation tech, for that matter & as I recall, CryEngine’s had a very good (native) environmental destruction system dating back to CE3, capable of registering small-scale & wide-scale destruction both, on a very accurate scale.
Sadly however, it seems more & more like CryEngine’s future will end up being its Lumberyard spinoff, rather than CryEngine itself, in which case all we can do is hope Amazon either buys out Crytek completely & integrates their tech team into their Lumberyard team (since Lumberyard is based on CryEngine 3.8, rather than the latest iteration), or they get their hands on the CryEngine IP at the seemingly inevitable bankruptcy auction.
Unreal 4 is decent, but it’s not the end-all thing with the epic capabilities people make it out to be. It’s great for semi-experienced &/or low-budget projects, but in the end there’s a reason why everything produced by it looks identical, as was the case with Unreal 3 before it.
It is sad to hear about this never-ending slew of issues originating from Crytek, however. It makes me wonder when the next slew of layoffs will be, if they really are 4+ months behind schedule in regards to engine development.
Extremely well put. I’d actually say that CryEngine is pretty much the best engine on the market right now in terms of visuals, particularly outdoors and vegetation.
I love how Lumberyard is coming along, and the CryTek folks seem to be trying their best to get CryEngine up to speed too, but in a perfect world, Amazon would have bought the company, and gone in with a renewed focus.
As for Unreal Engine, I really dislike how it handles lighting, particularly how it makes everything look plastic and fake. The name checks out, I guess. Sad thing is that companies are flocking towards it, like it’s the only solution on the market. Small and medium developers I can understand, but even big name publishers are going that route.
Case in point Tekken 7, just take a look at its lighting and backgrounds, the dim and muddy environments, and plastic trees. It’s as if someone went overboard with the smudge filter in Photoshop.
Cheers for the CryEngine Mountain Lodge videos, too, loved them!
For now there aren`t poorly optimised games on that engine. Ofc we have to wait for Kingdom Come: Deliverance to maintain that opinion.
Why is a free fan game for a dead IP tied to their choice of engine?
Probably part of the deal when they got permission to make this.
Crytek owns the TimeSplitters IP so it was probably in the contract between Crytek and the developer of Rewind
Got to love people who don’t read the article they comment on.