Open Discussion : Unreal Engine & Cry Engine

[Soganatsu-Julien]

Hello guys !

I know you already know that Epic Games and CryTek released their engines as services for only 19$/Month + 5$Royalties and 9.90$/Months for CryEngine.
What do you think about these news ?

I know they did it to (also ?) kill Unity3D that takes too much clients (+500 000 pro licences !). An article spoke about that but I forgot to save it -_-"

A "friend" took the unreal engine 4 and said "Oh god, it's too easy to create a video game !!" but since 2 weeks I know he is in front of his PC and don't advances in his game ! I think BluePrint isn't as easy as they say... Anyone on this forum bought it to test the fourth version of the engine ?

Nevertheless, the graphics look AMZING !

[hendu]

Lower fees are still fees, restrictions are still restrictions, no source is still no source. Also none of them support Linux in their editors and other support structure, only as a deployment target.

Sure I did read that UE4 will allow source access, which is an improvement, but still far from what open source allows.

[Granyte]

These pre built game engines are only good if you wanna go into the mainstream type of games as soon as you will try something esoteric they will be a useles pile of data standing in your hdd

[mongoose7]

Aren't they all data driven? As long as you provide good data, they provide the experience? Probably two weeks at the PC and no results would be standard. After all, many users of Irrlicht just want to be able to load Quake maps, that is, not invest any time at all. Easy to get results if you're not the one doing the work!

[Soganatsu-Julien]

I'm ok with you hendu for open-source.
And if your goal is to make a hight level video game, what do you recommend ? Using a commercial game engine or Irrlicht is enough useful ? (I imagine Irrlicht has an editor associated to build your environments)
I also noticed something, Open-Source communities are more active, am I wrong ?

[kklouzal]

The Irrlicht community is quite active, you can quickly help/find someone to help you on the forums or in the IRC chatroom. As far as using a commercial engine over Irrlicht it's honestly ultimately your decision. I would much rather go with Irrlicht for a few reasons. Great community which will support you with whatever you need. It's open source so if you need to tweak something about the engine to get your desired results you have that ability and finally what you put in is what you get out which is the main reason really. The more you put into your work the more you'll get out of your project!

[CuteAlien]

There are commercial games with Irrlicht, but we don't have the kind of editors which commercial engines come with. The main difference between open-source and proprietary engines is that you have access to the source in one case. Everything else depends on the community, programmers, invested time and so on. There are certainly commercial engines which have way more features than Irrlicht. If those features are important for your game, then buy such an engine. If access to the source is more important to you then go with an open source engine and code the features it's missing yourself. And yeah - I think we have a nice community where people help each other out a lot.

If you're evaluating engines the first step should always be figuring out which features you actually need. I just met some guys from a game company last week who showed me some incredible looking stuff they do with their (rather expensive) engine. But .... it still would be the wrong engine for my projects, because they also need so many texture layers for each model that an independent team would never have the manpower to create those art assets.

[Soganatsu-Julien]

Convinced to continue using Irrlicht ^^
I noticed a multiplication of threads on unreal engine forum, they got a lot of users ! I hope we will find method snippets to create effects etc