I can't help but im interested in seeing what you can do...
Bumped

Maybe it's cheaper or easier to code? It seems even lower tier games use Unreal so it must be something in it.

I'll look into making my own machine then, definitely preferable to getting a dell!

I think there's a bunch of reasons Unreal is more commonly used, although if you look at the list of Cryengine titles it's bigger than I expected.

I'm on a train so I can't check, but i think Unreal runs on more platforms, including mobiles. Unreal has a longer history and a more established name.

Crucially many, many people got into games making Unreal mods and have done so for a very long time, Cryengine is less commonly used for mods hence less people enter the industry with Cryengine experience. Unreal had a better price structure for small teams sooner than Cryengine. Unreal is more adaptable to games other than FPS.

Without checking I could be mistaken about some of those but that's my feeling.

From what I've seen, it looks like I'd be able to get a credible prototype FPS of some sort up and running far more quickly in Cryengine than Unreal, so I'm interested in having a mess about. More as a learning process than anything else.

Just a shame my MBP dropped to about 3 fps as soon as I generated the basic world terrain ahaha.

I've run through some of the Unity tutorials and it is a totally different take on making games than Unreal and Cryengine, I really liked it.  I use Unreal at work and there is no way I would attempt to do a prototype without code support.  Not even a mod.  However Unity and Cryengine I feel I could.

You sound like you're enjoying unity Cuckoo, are you happy with it so far?  And what machine (gfx card/cpu/ram) are you running it on?

The fee for Unity does start to mount up when you do those other formats, just as it does for other engines.

if you go for the 'Pro' version the entry fee is -

Unity Pro $1500
Add Android for $1500
Add iOS for $1500
Add team functionality (version control) for $500.
They don't list console prices.  An old post on their forum quotes "XBox and PS3 pricing is set at $80K per XBox or PS3 title, and $40K per XBLA or PSN title. > Unity XBox should become available in late 2010 and PS3 early next year."

Which sounds about right, licensing Unreal for consoles is much more expensive.

UDK however is pretty reasonable if you're not going for consoles, Cryengine too.

Example from UDK FAQ "A team creates a game with UDK that they intend to sell. After six months of development, they release the game through digital distribution and they earn US$60,000 in the first calendar quarter after release. Their use of UDK during development requires no fee. At some point prior to the UDK Application’s release they will need to secure a royalty-bearing commercial UDK license with its US$99 license fee.  After earning US$60,000, they would be required to pay Epic US$2,500 (US$0 on the first US$50,000 in revenue, and US$2,500 on the next US$10,000 in revenue). On subsequent revenue, they are required to pay the 25% royalty. "

Crytek do a %20 royalties license for indie games not on consoles.

But anyway, that's not what we're interesting in, THIS is what we're interested in!!!

http://youtu.be/butBqfE_lnY?hd=1&t=49s
This vid shows someone creating a new map and putting some basic terrain in. 

Now that is fast!  His grasp of English might not be wonderful but i've watched a bunch of his videos and it's amazing how quickly he has things going.

Totally depends on what you are doing with it, screen tearing is not inherently an issue with one engine or another.  I've seen Unreal games with tearing too.  Some during the gameplay and not cutscenes and vice versa.  So it really depends on how people choose/are forced/just happen to set up their game to playback.  Not to say that one engine is perfect or another is poor, it's just what you do with it.

Thanks Cuckoo, glad you're enjoying it

I managed to get a small amount of stuff built in cryengine last night by keeping textures at a really low res and turning everything unnecessary off.  Still not really workable though!

XP partition of a core 2 duo 2.33ghz MBP, 256mb graphics.

Not really a surprise it isn't working out, it is about 5 years old!

acemuzzy wrote:

I'm another Unity fan, at least for easy of prototyping / actually getting stuff done.  (Just starting my second project - go me!)  Haven't yet got it onto a phone - need someone to lend me an android (!) - but that's definitely a pro, and the money side is obviously appealing though I won't be getting any cash any time too soon. I'm kind of curious to try CryEngine myself, as it's obviously funky stuff.  I may do at some stage, but focussing on smaller / non-FPS projects at the mo, so don't really have the time to muck about as much as I'd like. Unity stuff I've gone has all been pretty smooth, but nothing very high-flying.  I'm a bit confused about my PC spec though - windows is listing 8 2.8GHz cores, and I really didn't think I had that many!  I thought maybe two, it may be splitting them in four for some reason.  Intel i7.  Can't tell you anything useful about CryEngine performance yet though I'm afraid!

Billy that comp would be perfectly fine for most average Unity projects, especially if you're aiming towards a recent smartphone sort of specification, but even for anything pc,its really quite capable

muzzy i'm surprised you've spent so much on a computer and are quite together with your game making but don't know much regarding the i7 aha, the i7 has 4 physical cores but due to fancy technology called hyperthreading each core can maintain 2 threads efficiently - so it's a bit like having a machine with 8 cores, ta dA

I'll also go along with muzzys statement about actually getting things done with unity, for a solo or small team you can get something up and running very very quickly

Billy, if you take to Unity remotely, have a look in the asset store (Windows menu) and see if there's any boxes of tricks that take your fancy, also the asset store subforum of the unity forums

The asset store is a huge strength of Unity and theres some such great stuff there thats too specific to be integrated into an engine by its developers (Mesh deformation, Fluid dynamics, so on) but still super cool. I can prob help out also if contacted in private

LazyGunn wrote:

muzzy i'm surprised you've spent so much on a computer and are quite together with your game making but don't know much regarding the i7 aha, the i7 has 4 physical cores but due to fancy technology called hyperthreading each core can maintain 2 threads efficiently - so it's a bit like having a machine with 8 cores, ta dA

Cunning.  Yes, the programming I do at work is not for "PCs", we have our own bespoke hardware shizzle knocking about, some I'm pretty clueless about the ins and outs of the various processor types.  I think my PC purchase was predominantly based on 7 being a higher number than 5 or 3!!  Hyperthreading seems kind of interesting, but I guess the four cores is full of win!

Back on CryEngine - had a quick skim of http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/cat_cryengine_3_sdk.php as I was pondering downloading tonight - how easy is it to do non-FPS stuff, or is it very much focussed on that?  How different a model is it to Unity?  Are there e.g. scripts / character controllers / what not, or is it a completely different paradigm? 

Aha, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10197076/udk-march-2012-vs-cryengine-3-for-a-job-in-the-future has some stuff.  Lua in CryEngine?  Hmm.  Has to be about the only language I've never used before - oh well, no harm adding it to the list!

I've decided I don't like CryEngine.  Going back to Unity forthwith.  I want cubes not terrain maps thank you.

Do we know what you're working on? Or I'd it a big surprise? DragonnyThing 2.0?

I followed some tutorials and got a basic FPS camera/movement setup with mouselook.  Started doing some tutorials on weapon raycasting, but really I would prefer to get this stuff as tweakable prefabs.

Can you guys recommend any competent FPS prefabs?  I would like to have just the basics in place which I can tweak, so I can concentrate on creating stuff.

Suspect that's plenty of time for learning and coding - the bigger constraint will be content (and ideas/tuning) for which timescales will be as per what your used to, except prototyping etc being quicker

Cheers guys, I shall let you know how I get on. I have grand ambitions of what I want to do, but I can see it being rather what time will allow.