Tuesday 8 January 2013

War of the engines

So I've started looking into game engines to see which one is the best one for our needs. The 3 I've been looking at are:

UDK
CryEngine
Unity 4

I've played with a couple of versions of UDK and Unity, but CryEngine is new to me. Examples of UDK and CryEngine in games are easy enough to get a hold of (any Unreal Tournament game or the Batman Arkham series for UDK, and Far Cry and Crysis for CryEngine). Both engines are beautiful to look at and have a pile of features and both are the full version of the engine. UDK for professional game development studios like Rock Steady Studios (the Batman Arkham series developers) is at version 4, while the free UDK is version 3.

The CryEngine is so pretty :) This is the default level when you run CryLauncher


Unfortunately Unity is an up-and-coming engine so there aren't examples of AAA titles that have built using it. Version 4 has just been released and the way it handles animation is fantastic. You can create your animations in Unity and then map them to your 3D characters, etc. The beauty of this is that you are reproducing the same animations for each of your 3D characters in your 3D modelling tool, and them importing them: you are creating them in once place and applying them to the characters you need. Cool, right? Also, check out The Butterfly Effect demo reel and you'll know that Unity really is up-and-coming.

Unity 4 running the Angry Bots demo. The demo game plays right in the editor so no need to launch a separate utility like the examples for UDK and CryEngine.


I'm trying to dig up a full list of features so I can compare the 3 (I had heard that Unity 3.x did not have cloth or rag-doll physics support so it'll be nice to find out if Unity 4 addresses this), but all I've come across so far (and I haven't looked too deep yet) are just the sales level feature list rather than a full technical list. As soon as I get that comparison, I will post it here.

Unreal Development Kit looks good too. The default level when you run UDK Game.


If you want to know more about the engines mentioned above, then use the following links:

Unity 4
http://www.unity3d.com

CryEngine 3
http://mycryengine.com/

UDK 3
http://www.unrealengine.com/en/udk/

The good news is that all 3 engines are free to download, so you can download them and learn all about them without having to hand over a penny! Once you reach the stage where you are ready to deploy a game to market, then you'll have to look at paying the engine owners.

Side rant: it would be nice if 3D engine companies would do the same thing (let you use their software for free until you actual release something with it). I don't know about you, but a 30-day trial of 3DS Max is not enough to learn a product, and $3,675 is a steep price to pay for software!! Think I'm going to have to decide between Blender or Daz3D as they are both free. However, I think I still have the installers for TrueSpace and GameSpace that were awesome products from Caligari ... *sigh*

No comments:

Post a Comment