Why are there no other games based on the CryEngine?

jtvang125

Diamond Member
Nov 10, 2004
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I always thought Far Cry based on the CryEngine was very impressive for its time yet there are no other games based on it. Any reason why? I hope this won't be the same faith with the CryEngine 2 because I definitely want to see more games based on it after seeing Crysis.
 

themisfit610

Golden Member
Apr 16, 2006
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I too always wondered about this. It seemed like such a great engine, with its innovative real time editor! It looked like a developer's dream! Maybe Crytek wants a lot of $ for a license? Who knows...

~MiSfit
 

pontifex

Lifer
Dec 5, 2000
43,806
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would it be possible that other developers don't want to put out such demanding games? i'm just throwing out guesses.
 

Piuc2020

Golden Member
Nov 4, 2005
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Well Crysis was selling pretty well and last time I checked, system requirements rarely fend of customers, Doom 3 sold pretty well on release and it required a 6800 card (which were pretty new and expensive) to play at resolutions higher than 1280x1024 (like Crysis).

Plus it's not like Crysis runs bad... it's just way ahead of it's time, the engine on Medium looks comparable to other engines (if not better) and runs just as well, high runs well too and looks absolutely stunning. Stop with the Crysis bitching.

Now to get back on topic, I think the problem with CryEngine was the fact that only a few months later the Doom engine and the Source engine debuted... for a developer it was pretty tough to choose CryEngine when Doom3 engine and Source engine were much more impressive and run pretty great (especially Source).

This time around however, CryEngine2 is the most advanced engine out there, UE3 looks like it's a generation behind so it's more likely develoers will jump on the CryEngine 2 this time around, it has a lot of great features and it scales well, it's accessible to many computers at Crysis-medium like graphics and unmatched in visual quality with Crysis-vhigh like graphics.

I have much faith in the CryEngine 2, it's a shame people are so retarded and can't see what CryTek's purpose with the engine (and Crysis) is...
 

40sTheme

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2006
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Originally posted by: Piuc2020
Plus it's not like Crysis runs bad... it's just way ahead of it's time, the engine on Medium looks comparable to other engines (if not better) and runs just as well, high runs well too and looks absolutely stunning. Stop with the Crysis bitching.
Really? Medium looks barely passable by todays standards. TF2, Oblivion, etc all look better than Crysis on medium. The difference is, I can run TF2 with 3x3 Supersampling and Oblivion with 16xQ CSAA faster than Crysis on medium with no AA. Rig in sig.
 

hooflung

Golden Member
Dec 31, 2004
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I think it boils down to completeness of the engine features. Historically you licensed out an engine and you could modify things the way you wanted if it didn't offer feature x. Crytek is too complete and you can see the entire package run. And while it looks impressive, its not exactly A quality title material. People are just not making FPS like they used to and they don't want their titles to be compared to the first title that used it. Look at what happened to the id Tech 4 engine that powers doom 3/quake 4/prey/Quake Wars... they all look and feel similar and their is only what.. one more title left in development using it? Maybe 2 or 3. One thing Epic has done right is make an engine that isn't FPS only. Alien Swarm mod is a good example for UE2/2.5. Fury Unleashed is another example of UE 3.

I think that is why Carmack is moving away from FPS to tech preview the id Tech 5 engine. Its a race game... in iD flavor but an race engine none the less. They will sell the shit out of that engine for the PS3 unless the earth undergoes a zombie apocalypse. Epic knows this first hand as they baited more people with the Unreal 3 engine because it wasn't just for FPSs. Crysis seems to be nothing more than an FPS game engine with vehicle play tossed in for status quoe. Thats my take on it anyway.
 

MikeyLSU

Platinum Member
Dec 21, 2005
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Originally posted by: 40sTheme
Originally posted by: Piuc2020
Plus it's not like Crysis runs bad... it's just way ahead of it's time, the engine on Medium looks comparable to other engines (if not better) and runs just as well, high runs well too and looks absolutely stunning. Stop with the Crysis bitching.
Really? Medium looks barely passable by todays standards. TF2, Oblivion, etc all look better than Crysis on medium. The difference is, I can run TF2 with 3x3 Supersampling and Oblivion with 16xQ CSAA faster than Crysis on medium with no AA. Rig in sig.

I disagree. I played through HL Ep 2 and TF2 all at high settings but have to play Crysis at medium and feel that Crysis is still better looking.
 

Canai

Diamond Member
Oct 4, 2006
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Originally posted by: 40sTheme
Originally posted by: Piuc2020
Plus it's not like Crysis runs bad... it's just way ahead of it's time, the engine on Medium looks comparable to other engines (if not better) and runs just as well, high runs well too and looks absolutely stunning. Stop with the Crysis bitching.
Really? Medium looks barely passable by todays standards. TF2, Oblivion, etc all look better than Crysis on medium. The difference is, I can run TF2 with 3x3 Supersampling and Oblivion with 16xQ CSAA faster than Crysis on medium with no AA. Rig in sig.

You've got to be kidding... TF2 looks like crap compared to Crysis.

As for Oblivion, go into the forest in Oblivion, take a screen, then go into the forest in Crysis and take a screen. You'll see a huge difference. Now, if you were to take Oblivion at all max settings, and then find a config in Crysis that ran the same (roughly same average FPS), Crysis will put Oblivion to shame, no questions asked.

As far as you being able to run Oblivion and Source on max details, that's because they were designed around the DX9 era cards, eg. 8800/7900/x1900. Crysis is the next step. When some serious DX10 cards start coming out (I consider the 8800 series to be the pinnacle of DX9), then Crysis will finally be playable at very high settings.

The last point I want to make is that the Source engine is how many years old? Three, four? Oblivion engine is almost two years old, and the Crysis engine is just a few months old. Of course they're not going to run the same.
 

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
82,854
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I have often wondered such things myself.
Why is it developers complain about the rising costs of development, yet still choose to make a brand new engine when they wanna put out a game?
Valve seems to be the only company not falling into this trap.

We have the latest version of the LithTech engine looking quite nice and is more than enough to make a good game.
Same with Source even if its been around for a whole 4 years (I wont go into how ridiculous the though of something being 4 years old considered "OLD" is).
Actually, the Doom 3 engine is quite nice too, now that it gets decent performance on an average system. Quake 4 and Prey showed us that someone concerned with actual gameplay can make good use of it.
What else? The old and new CryTech engines.
Bethesda's new engine. I think the HDR was a little overdone in Oblivion, but that was more of an artistic choice.
Unreal 3. If UT 3 is any indication, the engine is great even though folks may make poor artistic decisions when they use it.

Crap, thats a lot right there. Why would anybody make a new one from scratch when we have plenty of good engines to be licensed? Does anybody remember how many games we got our of the Quake 3 engine? And it only cost about a quarter million when it was new (which is a good deal if you think about it).

I would be very happy if Lucas Arts made a KOTOR 3 or another Jedi Knight game using relatively old technology, put some real effort into the game itself, and actually got the product out in a reasonable amount of time (without pushing so hard the storyline suffers).
As opposed to most companies who drag game development out for years and keep coming up with the excuse of dev issues.
 

brandonb

Diamond Member
Oct 17, 2006
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Originally posted by: shortylickens

Crap, thats a lot right there. Why would anybody make a new one from scratch when we have plenty of good engines to be licensed?

If CryEngine is $1mil. Thats 10 programmers for a year to pay for the engine. In 1 year, 10 programmers can write their own engine which would be suited directly towards a specific game. Also when using 3rd party engines, theres always something that comes up it can't do but you need it to do. So you have to hack in a work around, and doing that usually takes up more time, and gives you more headaches than it would be just to make the engine yourself.

Take for example. Vanguard Saga of Hero's video game. They bought the Unreal Tech from Epic. They tried to make an MMORPG with it. However, it wasn't designed for it, and they wasted so much time and effort trying to make it work and in the end, the engine just sucked and was barely functional and the game bombed, mostly due to steep PC requirements and bugs/crashes. They would have been better off just making their own engine.

Reinventing the wheel is usually a bad idea in software development, as it duplicates effort, but the most time consuming job in software engineering is creating the low level libraries (loading .tga pictures for a texture line by line, and I've done it) rather than the engine itself. If someone came out with a set of libraries to do basic operations such as loading textures, profiles, animations, meshes, that had really nothing to do with an engine, then sell that, I think there would be a market. Let the game developers take that, build an engine suited to their needs with the help of other's libraries, and that would be a good thing.
 

Canai

Diamond Member
Oct 4, 2006
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Originally posted by: apoppin
Perhaps the CryTek Devs didn't provide a good level of support compared to the other engines. :p

They've actually been working with several independent mod teams for over six months now. They gave out a few early SDK kits and worked closely. I don't remember which mods off the top of my head, though :(
 

apoppin

Lifer
Mar 9, 2000
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Originally posted by: Canai
Originally posted by: apoppin
Perhaps the CryTek Devs didn't provide a good level of support compared to the other engines. :p

They've actually been working with several independent mod teams for over six months now. They gave out a few early SDK kits and worked closely. I don't remember which mods off the top of my head, though :(

Not now :p ... it is pretty clear they are working with them now - there is a pretty nicely functional sandbox with Crysis ... i'm replying to the OP - before - when no one bought their engine ;)
- if i remember correctly, there were a lot of complaints about the original FC and its sandbox editor that took quite a long time to resolve.

They are patching Crysis much more quickly then they did FarCry. FC was pretty hopeless for most of us ooB ... not just its graphical demands.
 

40sTheme

Golden Member
Sep 24, 2006
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Originally posted by: Canai
Originally posted by: 40sTheme
Originally posted by: Piuc2020
Plus it's not like Crysis runs bad... it's just way ahead of it's time, the engine on Medium looks comparable to other engines (if not better) and runs just as well, high runs well too and looks absolutely stunning. Stop with the Crysis bitching.
Really? Medium looks barely passable by todays standards. TF2, Oblivion, etc all look better than Crysis on medium. The difference is, I can run TF2 with 3x3 Supersampling and Oblivion with 16xQ CSAA faster than Crysis on medium with no AA. Rig in sig.

You've got to be kidding... TF2 looks like crap compared to Crysis.

As for Oblivion, go into the forest in Oblivion, take a screen, then go into the forest in Crysis and take a screen. You'll see a huge difference. Now, if you were to take Oblivion at all max settings, and then find a config in Crysis that ran the same (roughly same average FPS), Crysis will put Oblivion to shame, no questions asked.

As far as you being able to run Oblivion and Source on max details, that's because they were designed around the DX9 era cards, eg. 8800/7900/x1900. Crysis is the next step. When some serious DX10 cards start coming out (I consider the 8800 series to be the pinnacle of DX9), then Crysis will finally be playable at very high settings.

The last point I want to make is that the Source engine is how many years old? Three, four? Oblivion engine is almost two years old, and the Crysis engine is just a few months old. Of course they're not going to run the same.

But you pointed out Crysis' weakness right there. Crysis at medium with no AA BARELY runs better than Oblvion at max with TONS of AA. Also, Crysis' trees do not benefit from SSTrAA, which sucks. Also, the reason I think medium in Crysis looks so bad is the way the ground looks on medium shaders. It's overbright and nasty.
 

skace

Lifer
Jan 23, 2001
14,488
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I think a STALKER sequel using the Crysis engine would be a fucking phenomenal game. Argh, I need to get that idea out of my head because I doubt it will ever happen.
 

kirilus

Member
Feb 7, 2008
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Originally posted by: jtvang125
I always thought Far Cry based on the CryEngine was very impressive for its time yet there are no other games based on it. Any reason why?


Because the games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. make it obsolete. Crysis looks like a cartoon. Its a joke - mediocre game with a terrible combat system and ridiculous storyline. FarCry was bad, Crysis is even worse.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is coming out soon and that would be a real shooter for people who enjoy realism in the game.
 

Canai

Diamond Member
Oct 4, 2006
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Originally posted by: kirilus
Originally posted by: jtvang125
I always thought Far Cry based on the CryEngine was very impressive for its time yet there are no other games based on it. Any reason why?


Because the games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. make it obsolete. Crysis looks like a cartoon. Its a joke - mediocre game with a terrible combat system and ridiculous storyline. FarCry was bad, Crysis is even worse.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is coming out soon and that would be a real shooter for people who enjoy realism in the game.

I loved both Stalker and Crysis, and I think a Stalker mod for Crysis would be awesome. That said, Stalker doesn't run much better than Crysis :(
 

apoppin

Lifer
Mar 9, 2000
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STALKER ran pretty well on my X1950p/512M ... 'playable' with all in-game settings completely maxed at 14x9 ... of course it *flies* now with 2900 X-Fire at 16x10.
... but Crysis is a PIG on 'very high' :p
 

Xavier434

Lifer
Oct 14, 2002
10,377
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Things like this need to be considered when making a decision like developing a game using the Cry engine:

1. First and foremost, will using that engine bring in more profit as opposed to using a different engine? The remaining points here revolve around this point.

2. Are the developers familiar with the Engine? Will the increased development time due to a learning curve (hence, increased cost to develop and decreased profits) be noticable? Please note that cost to make a game revolves around development costs by far.

3. What exactly will the Cry engine do for my game that the other engines do not? Again, will that additional quality/features make my game sell more?

4. How much does the development software to use the Cry Engine cost? Is it worth that expense considering we already have other engines that we already purchased. If we have not purchased an engine yet, is the Cry engine cheaper or more expensive than others?

5. In terms of marketing, will the use of the Cry engine steer more consumers away from the game or bring more in? Will that matter at all in the end?


I am sure there are more.
 

pontifex

Lifer
Dec 5, 2000
43,806
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91
Originally posted by: skace
I think a STALKER sequel using the Crysis engine would be a fucking phenomenal game. Argh, I need to get that idea out of my head because I doubt it will ever happen.

STALKER on the beach?
 

Modelworks

Lifer
Feb 22, 2007
16,240
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A good part of it is what your development team is.
If your development team consist of peole that are fluent in idtech or source engines then that is what the project will use.

It takes too much development time to re-train your artists, coders, to work with a new engine unless that engine is going to pay off 200% of the one you already understand.

A good example is TV3D engine.
It has all the features of current engines and can be purchased for 150.00
http://www.truevision3d.com/page-15-tv3d-features

Why isn't it in use in more games ?
Because its not in the mainstream development community and it takes time to train all those people to use it.
Time=money.

If you look at all the job sites for developers you will see almost all are looking for people with experience in idtech/Unreal/Source .

Not because the other engines aren't good or reasonably priced, but because its where the knowledge tree is .