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Illusionstar Games on why UE4 worse than CRYENGINE;feels cartoonish,lacks features
- Thread starter Poetic.Injustice
- Start date
Glass Rebel
Member
After a generation of grey'n'brown it's cartoonish. Epic just can't win.
I'm surprised though, this makes it sound like Crytek's multiplat tools are much better than Epic's.
I'm surprised though, this makes it sound like Crytek's multiplat tools are much better than Epic's.
Dictator93
Member
He seems to be mentioning UE3 and not UE4... unless I read incorrectly.
UE4 and CE are actually extremely similar in a lot of ways in terms of feature set (with me giving the edge on average to the latest revision of CE in Ryse though).
Faster, hassle-free developement I guess. More time to focus on gameplay/story.
BrokenIcarus
Member
How can an engine feel cartoonish?
Isn't that part of the art style?
Isn't that part of the art style?
He's saying historically, Unreal Engine in general has brought out great games they like, but they're not satisfied with how UE4 has kept up.
BibiMaghoo
Member
This. They are saying some crazy things.
Edit: What lol? Unreal Engine doesn't allow cross platform development? What?
An engine comes with rendering elements, presumably he means UE falls short of CE when attempting 'photo-realism', which wouldn't be surprising, Spec Ops is probably the most realistic looking UE3 game, and it's pretty awful.
shaders and tessellation. From what I've seen UE4 tessellation makes everything look doughy, and shaders seem to give it a plastic sheen.
You work on textures and 3D models in other programs. But when you import them to render in engine with lighting and all that, they end up look quite different. You can instantly see differences between UE3, Source, and CryEngine. UE4 is probably putting of it's own distinct qualities which are not complimentary towards the desired art direction.
Nervous Sausage
Member
I dunno about all brown and grey. Mirror's Edge, Bioshock Infinite, Enslaved and many, many more look bright, colorful and amazing. Even the later Gears games incorporated a lot more color than the original. I think many of the best looking of the generation were on Unreal Engine 3. This actually makes me more excited for Unreal Engine 4, because I think more bright, cartoony looking games would look amazing on it.
here you can see them:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OHGjSm_RMo
theres a video that shows it better, but i cant find it.
Darth Kupi
Banned
What game are they making?
Dictator93
Member
Are you sure he references UE4 at all?
I mean... unless I am missing something about UE4s development, it has Physically based rendering just like Cryengine does. Perhaps it is not as realistic and advanced in other areas that are not publically able to be critiqued?
It has an impact on storytelling, potentially. The engine also handles scripted events and things like facial expressions, lip-sync and all that stuff.
Honey Bunny
Member
Cartoonish isn't quite the right way to phrase it but I know what he's talking about.
BibiMaghoo
Member
Really? These are seven hundred and twenty P's. I thought the game looks pretty good, even on a shitty rig with medium settings.
ambientmystic
Member
Gonna miss the widespread usage of the UE3 engine in many games ported to the PC.
UE3 games always ran better than their CE counterparts when similar resolutions and settings are used on the same machine. Especially on lower end machines. My laptop would've missed out on a heck of a lot of games if CE was more widely used.
UE3 games always ran better than their CE counterparts when similar resolutions and settings are used on the same machine. Especially on lower end machines. My laptop would've missed out on a heck of a lot of games if CE was more widely used.
Dictator93
Member
They also used archaic graphical techniques from the mid 90s (light and shadow baking, spherical harmoics shading, only 3 light sources max in any scene, etc...).
It makes sense why they scale lower.
Yeah. I'd imagine these things make it easier to integrate your story conveying set pieces in the game.
I like the way it looks, but in terms of presenting a realistic image, it's not even comparable.
It's difficult to know how much it's a technological issue, rather than the focus of the teams working on the respective engines, but certainly, CE games tend to have far more realistic presentations.
Coming from the perspective of a 3D graphics designer, I know rather well what they mean. It's conveyed somewhat poorly though.
UE almost always had this problem with relying on lots of effects work without actually putting out a good lighting model. That's seen in uncounted UE3 games, you get bloom here, rimlights there, overblown HDRI here and once all is said and done, your game looks like a blurry mess. Disabling all those however, strips away a lot of the glitz the engine has, and the result would look rather barren.
It simply is different in CE, where at least the sunlight provides a measure of actual global illumination, which is noticeable ingame. I can see how they prefer the way it's more akin to real life, what with just placing your geometry and being done with it.
Now you can very well achieve great results in UE3 - Unreal Tournament III was a flagship title to present the leap from UE2, and it showed. Cranked to high settings, it did a damn good job, although the effects work still weighed heavily. The blur effects and colour grading especially I found rather grating. I imagine UE4 is much more capable, though I'll reserve judgement until some actual titles ship.
Back to CE though, it's a horrible, *horrible* thing if you want to input custom assets. I am currently working with their Sandbox SDK on a private project myself, and it is mindboggling how needlessly difficult they make it to bring your assets into the engine. Utterly unnecessary hoops and roadblocks everywhere. I expect there's a great deal more support for actual licensees, but using the SDK you'll be frustrated at every turn.
UE almost always had this problem with relying on lots of effects work without actually putting out a good lighting model. That's seen in uncounted UE3 games, you get bloom here, rimlights there, overblown HDRI here and once all is said and done, your game looks like a blurry mess. Disabling all those however, strips away a lot of the glitz the engine has, and the result would look rather barren.
It simply is different in CE, where at least the sunlight provides a measure of actual global illumination, which is noticeable ingame. I can see how they prefer the way it's more akin to real life, what with just placing your geometry and being done with it.
Now you can very well achieve great results in UE3 - Unreal Tournament III was a flagship title to present the leap from UE2, and it showed. Cranked to high settings, it did a damn good job, although the effects work still weighed heavily. The blur effects and colour grading especially I found rather grating. I imagine UE4 is much more capable, though I'll reserve judgement until some actual titles ship.
Back to CE though, it's a horrible, *horrible* thing if you want to input custom assets. I am currently working with their Sandbox SDK on a private project myself, and it is mindboggling how needlessly difficult they make it to bring your assets into the engine. Utterly unnecessary hoops and roadblocks everywhere. I expect there's a great deal more support for actual licensees, but using the SDK you'll be frustrated at every turn.
BibiMaghoo
Member
These shots certainly do look better, you've confused me with that last sentence though. You meant to say that CE games have more realistic presentations?
Oh yeah, moronic typo there.
It'd be great to have developers really open up about all these competing technologies, for example, Respawn have talked about picking Source because of being able to prototype quickly, but why is that? What about that tool set makes that the case? That kind of thing is pretty fascinating.
BibiMaghoo
Member
It's cool, I've seen much, much worse
Well, if you know what you are doing, some of these engines can be just downloaded and played about with (legit downloaded to be clear) . Unreal is one of them, I'm not sure about CE but think you can. Same with Source I think.
eot
Banned
Those engines do more than graphics, there are scripting tools you need for the narrative, cutscene editors etc. The story isn't just done on paper, it has to be built in the game using the development tools.
Poetic.Injustice
Member
Unannounced.
KidGalactus
Member
I'm sorry, how the hell can an engine be cartoonish?
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
X-Man
eot
Banned
Of course they both have it, but maybe this developer thinks CE3's implementation is superior.
I'd love to see more CryEngine games. Really nice engine. I'm looking forward to eventually seeing what it can do on PS4.
LOL
My exact reaction
...What? So graphics don't matter that's why they choose one graphics engine over another. Because it can achieve great storylines.
LOL
My exact reaction
It makes complete sense.
UE3 games all have a certain identifiable "sheen" to them that I would definitely describe as cartoonish. You can pretty much immediately tell if a game is running UE3. If UE4 has the same type of look, then it's not hard to understand what they're saiyng.
CryEngine has a certain look to it too, but it leans more towards photorealism. If they want to create a game with a realistic atmosphere, then CryEngine would be the way to go.
NaughtyCalibur
Member
Were they drunk when they said these things? Maybe Cryengine will indeed be a better fit for them, but their explanation is bonkers.
I was looking at a developer breakdown of the unreal engine 4 infiltrator tech demo. And after playing games lime killzone, ryse, and tomb raider on next gen platforms. It does look a lot more plastic. And is missing a lot of the lighting effects of those games. And overall looks a lot like UE3 games.
Also after seeing what a small development team can do with cryengine in games like kingdom of fire. Compared to what entire AAA development teams did with unreal engine this comparison makes sense.
Also after seeing what a small development team can do with cryengine in games like kingdom of fire. Compared to what entire AAA development teams did with unreal engine this comparison makes sense.
TheHollowNight
Member
They are still probably polishing up the tools before a proper public release. But there are definitely a lot of developers already working with them & the engine to iron out the bugs & strengthen the features, from what I've heard
Also UE4 definitely doesn't have a cartoony feel to it, so I'm not sure where he's basing that assumption off. One of it's strongest features is it's physically based lighting & materials capabilities, which makes for super realistic visuals.
ThoseDeafMutes
Member
An engine handles more than just graphics.
GameAddict411
Member
How does this tie in with choosing a graphics engine for a game? While i don't have any experience in developing games, i am not dumb enough to not know that gameplay and story telling is something irrelevant to this.