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Crytek Plans Free Version of CryENGINE 3
Develop reports that Crytek, makers of the Far Cry series, the Crysis series, and the game engines behind them, have plans to release a free-to-use version of CryENGINE 3, the software's latest iteration. Quoting:
"Unreal vendor Epic Games and Unity have both seen their user-bases mushroom overnight since launching versions of their own engines that, while tied to different royalty rates, are completely free to download and operate. Now the CryEngine 3 group has revealed it wants to tap into this thriving market. The firm's CEO Cevat Yerli told Develop that Crytek already gives away a CryEngine 2 editor to the mod community, but explained that Crytek's expansion strategy stretches beyond. 'We have a very vivid community of users and modders and content creators, and usually that's a great way of unlocking the engine,' he said. ... 'So far that's what we've been offering for free, and it's easy entry into the production environment. [But] we do want to make a standalone free platform that people can run independent of CryEngine that will also be up to speed with the latest engine.'"
Wonder how long would it take to develop OpenSource engines of this complexity? Why are there none? Ogre and Irrlitch are far, far away...
That's great news for indy-gamemakers.. Unreal Engine 3 was already cool, but now also CryEngine3, it's a good day to be a 'modder'.. hehe.. But I wonder what the price will be if you want to sell your game.. Well, at least you've got choices now which suit your financialsituation..
Now I'm just a simple country hyperchicken, but it seems to me that 3d engines tend to age relatively quickly and FOSS tends to be less than cutting edge.
We are talking about Crytek of yes-but-does-it-run-crysis fame.
On the other hand, the top state of the art real-time fully dynamic global illumination is implemented _only_ in an open source engine. Paper & free code for the GI solution: http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/papers/PhotonHPG09/ The engine it's implemented in: http://g3d.sourceforge.net/ One cannot say that closed-source leads the pack across the scape of graphical features. Another example besides this level of RT GI is spherical-blend skinning, which was in open source first as well. I'm sure others can point out other advances that come from the open source world.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
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First one to open-source an older version wins!
In the near future, the stabilization of display and physics engines will create a large spike in original game design, as the separation between megaproductions and indie experiments gets thinner.
What I wonder now is: will the gaming world reach this point sooner than the movies? Will indie game designers master the large engines before film making becomes affordable enough to eliminate the dependence on the grand public?
Epic Games has been doing that since Unreal in 1998. So it's not that special. Giving away an editor to mod a game isn't the same as providing a relatively cheap fork of the engine that people can use to create commercial applications, or even free for non-commercial applications.
I wonder what this kind of competition will result in. Will Epic and Crytek shift more towards developing these engine forks, or will they simple keep it as a "small" side project.
So does this mean it could be ported to Linux say ?....or could people port whole games to Linux ?...or could they get bits of the engine and develop better linux native engines?
I just think seeing something like Crysis as a linux native app would rock.
I"m not a coder..I dunno...I'm just asking the question.
cheers!
Do not confuse the quality of the art with the quality of the engine.
Wonder how long would it take to develop OpenSource engines of this complexity?
Why are there none?
Probably because it takes a long time and a lot of investment to develop an engine like this. And commercial business models for open source games tend to be problematic.
Making a graphics engine is hard and costs a lot of man hours (thus lots of $$$). There's not many people who can just start contributing to them (compared to other OS projects). The Open Source engines will always be at least a generation behind, simply because they're always going to be slowly implementing what's already been done in the commercial engines, while companies like Crytek are busy working on their next-gen stuff.
On the plus side, the Open Source engines (Ogre and CrystalSpace anyway) are good enough for people to make decent looking games if they wish to do so. Gameplay is what counts right? I'll take TES: Oblivion quality graphics (hell, Morrowind even) if the game play is great. Unfortunately making games is as hard as making the engines that they run on...
Id Software did the open source thing, and now lots of games use the engine.
Unreal never did that, It was midly succesfull.
Unity opened (as in beer) the engine to attract dev's, soon after that Unreal opened his sdk too (almost like in beer, but no).
Seems Crytek (that have a amazing good engine) want to do the same thing: create a population of cheap workers that have experience on his engine.
Theres a formula to make AAA games that is:
Students + Middleware + lots of money = AAA game.
It only make sense if you have very good middleware, and these unskilled labor (the students) already have some experience with these middleware so are somewhat proficient.
These AAA games are generic blockbusters, but since the marketing budget will be also huge, its a "hit" and get your money back, and more. And I don't think everyone can pull a game with this formula.
-Woof woof woof!
Vivid? Does he mean avid?
They age quickly, yes, but it doesn't really matter much as far as game play, or popularity is concerned. A lot of very popular games still use graphics that will run happily with Dx7 on a GeForce 4.
But for some reason, the free software community has managed to produce more 3d engines than 3d games, and generally these engines are not really that helpful in writing a game anyway.
Putting polys on the screen, writing a scene graph and stuff, really isn't *that* hard. Focus needs to shift from engine making to game making.
Ogre I believe is strictly graphics (maybe stretching out a bit more than that, but definitely far from a complete engine)
There is a difference between game engines and graphics engines. Ogre is definitely not a complete game engine, but it does not aspire to be one. In my opinion it is a complete graphics engine. Why wouldn't it be?
Speech or beer? I do hope it's speech...
Making a top flight game engine takes a lot of effort and talent. It also takes quite focused effort. You have to get the thing developed in fairly short order. Reason being is technology is a moving target. So if you are developing for today's tech, but you don't release for 10 years, you are horribly dated when you come out. Well OSS has two major things that work against that:
1) Lack of organization. OSS projects are like herding cats to an extent. While there may be a central authority that decides what is and is not in the project, they have no ability to force people to work on specific things. So development can run off in non-useful directions or stall or what not. That sort of decentralized, disorganized thing doesn't work so well here. In a commercial environment, you'll do what your boss tells you to. So the things that need working on, get worked on.
2) Lack of commitment. When people are doing something for free it is by definition a hobby. That means they spend as much time as they want on it. Generally, hobby time is somewhat limited, often it is very limited. You can't get people to commit to 40+ hours a week on something they don't get any money for for long stretched of time. However when it is your job, no problem. You get paid, you've got the time to do it.
As such you only see these things when there's a profit motive. Crytek can afford to pay their developers because Electronic Arts pays them for the rights to publish their games and other companies pay them to license their engine for their projects. If they shifted their business model to just releasing their engine for free, well then they'd no longer get any many and be unable to pay for the development.
The only real way you'd see a top flight OSS game engine is if you got a foundation backing it. If some organization said "We are going to hire people to write this and release it for free," then it could happen. However you aren't likely to see it just as a bunch of people working on their own on it.
Putting polys on the screen, writing a scene graph and stuff, really isn't *that* hard. Focus needs to shift from engine making to game making.
Yes, but that requires crossing disciplines. Any good coder can make a game engine, but few have talents outside their field; namely the artistic and creative writing abilities.
So you either end up with very simple games or games that never get finished.
Too bad it cant be used on the iPhone, due to the new draconian restrictions invented by the dark lord Sauron
Even if a game engine is not the most recent one, it doesn't mean the game it runs is crap
-Unreal and UT are still played, Unreal being one of the best games ever IMHO
-Half Life was built upon a modified Quake engine, still one of the best games (second to Unreal)
-Quake 2.
-DS9 The Fallen (based on the Unreal engine)
-Elite Force (based on Q3)
Sure, compared to modern engines, Unreal lacks the lightning, and sound, and textures, and graphics. But it has substance, something that modern stuff lacks, like Hollywood movies...
I ran the original Tie Fighter on a 486/66 with a SB16 card. Now running it on a 5x86@160 with an AWE64 card. Graphics suck, but the MIDI interactive soundtrack is *way* better than listening to looping redbook audio in newer versions (CD)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Because it is not worth it.
... but not enough people care.
...
You may like it
Just because it is profitable, does not mean it is also useful.
How likely is it that we will see shuttle launch code or software akin to medical devices ?
On the other hand, MS has pored billions into Windows family as well as office,
and it is not as comfortable as it would like to be
Not only that but Linux is taking on multiple competitors from mobiles to mainframes at the same time
How so ?
Yes, that means you, Mr. Indie Game Developer, can make your own Running Through Well-Rendered Trees simulators, and even skip the monotonous shooting parts that Crytek seems to stick in between your times of admiring the trees!
By design. Ogre is creeping in fits and starts in the direction of being a game engine, but Irrlicht (if you can't spell it, how much do you know about it?) is explicitly a lightweight 3D engine, targeted at bulk hardware rather than cutting edge gaming systems.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Say it ain't so Joe!
You could have been a contender!
Is it on par with Crytek and Unreal with post processing, shaders, motion blur, anisotropic filtering, AA etc? (Honestly curious, don't know the answer). If so, what's the major difference between a game and a graphics engine?
meep
This is where indie developers could step in. Need a cheap engine? You can select from many.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
The big dilemma I see in FOSS world is when it comes to games. Projects like Linux or OpenOffice get support from the corporate world because it is profitable to use them for business. By support I mean both cash and workforce. For games, your only market is individuals, who hardly pay unless they are forced to. Lacking a steady income, nobody can organise enough people to work on a game engine. There is the Sauerbraten folk, trying to earn money with their cube2 engine but I do not know how business is going for them. At this point, our only hope becomes someone with money develops and releases their engine with a free licence but they are not likely to do that(Thanks ID, for being kind of an exception).
what's the major difference between a game and a graphics engine?
A game engine has one or more of the following: physics, AI, a tool chain for content generation, a scripting language or similar for game rules, etc.
A graphics engine only displays the graphics.
You're misunderstanding that phrase. Whether something ran crysis was a potshot at how badly crysis was coded, not how advanced it was.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Game engines tend not to fall in the latter category. Not many people make money from the existence of a game engine, unlike, for example, an operating system, office suite, or a web server. A number of game studios could, hypothetically, fund development of an open source game engine and then all release proprietary content for it, but then they'd have to compete with other studios who also released content but didn't have to fund the initial development.
The other alternative is more common. Writing game engines is fun (mind you, I think writing compilers is fun, so I might not be the best person to comment on this), but people writing code for fun don't generally devote as much time to it as people who are paid to work on it full time. This means that a proprietary engine gets more developer attention than an open one. There are several good open source FPS engines, but they tend to lag a generation or two behind the latest proprietary engines.
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Crysis ran poorly on all but the best machines but I don't think that was because of the crytek engine.
Far Cry used the same engine and would run very nicely on my e4300 and X1650 on 1 gig ram. That same machine didn't meet the basic requirements for Crysis, so it must have been something other than the engine.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They would spend a year arguing over what the font on the website should be before getting anything done.
Best to have a talent for hiring people with abilities you lack.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
Is it on par with Crytek and Unreal with post processing, shaders, motion blur, anisotropic filtering, AA etc? (Honestly curious, don't know the answer)
I suggest that you take a look at their feature list and find out. It has many features, many good tutorials, is free software and cross platform (Linux/OpenGL, Windows/Direct3D, Mac OS X/OpenGL).
If so, what's the major difference between a game and a graphics engine?
A graphics engine takes care of rendering graphics, nothing else. It could be something as simple as a 2D sprite library, to a full-featured 3D graphics engine.
But to write games, you need many other parts that are not provided by a pure graphics engine, such as input handling, AI, network access, physics, sound/music, etc, etc. If you combine a graphics engine with one or more such libraries/frameworks and/or tools, you get a game engine.
Blender has a decent engine in there, though admittedly the main attractions there are different than what Cry / UE and to some extent Unity's focus on:
- Fast prototyping, modular logic.
- Toolchain taken care of (stay in the same app for everything).
- Open source.
Unity is arguably as good on the first point, has a wider scripting language choice, and has play-in-browser functionality on top. Add in the fact that it plays very nicely with Blender, that means that there's a free toolchain as least as good as Blender's.
But if you're adamant about using an OSS engine, Blender, or Panda, are viable choices with "easy" scripting support. If you don't mind compiling, there's also CrystalSpace, Irrlicht, Cube, and many Quake-derivatives to choose from, such as DarkPlaces. Frankly, if your open game project is pushing what you can do with Blender graphically and gameplay-wise, it's one of the rare ones that actually has the talent times manpower to make a decent game. In the case of the commercial engines, you run into a steep wall of required assets to actually utilise the graphical edge they have on the open choices.
Far Cry used the same engine [as Crysis]
No it didn't. Crysis was Cryengine 2.
Thank you. It's ridiculous when several years after its release, a brand new high-end system will still not run this game at 60fps consistently.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
A great engine is actually quite doable in Open Source -- it's all about tools and assets. Developers first need to make a choice: use existing formats, or create their own next-gen one. Usually the former wins because they would rather focus on the engine and game than on a map editor and export plugins for model editors. And the existing formats they can pick from are usually a bit older because the current-gen ones aren't always documented.
Then you have trouble of finding people that can make good models and textures -- they tend to be pretty rare and, in my experience, resistant to creating Open Source assets.
Mod parent up. Crysis's sole selling point seems to be that some trees are segmentable. Woohoo!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Half Life was built upon a modified Quake engine, still one of the best games (second to Unreal)
Second t... to "Unreal?"
Sir, this indignity will not stand. I demand satisfaction. Headcrabs at 20 paces. Harrumph!
Who cares about newer cryengines unless they can run similar or better graphics on same old hardware FarCry happily used to run smoothly?
It probably won't happen, at least not in this decade.
1. Most OSS communities don't have the time, the resources, the organization, or the requisite skill to make something that even begins to approach the quality of a commercial program of this size. OSS applications are best kept small and simple, because that's the target project size that fits best with a community of pro bono programmers, most of whom won't actually be authoring the program.
2. OSS communities aren't good at writing new software. They're good at finding bugs and polishing software to a high gloss finish - with enough motivation anyway - but when it comes to actually creating new software, they're passable at best. Most OSS projects are primarily authored by an extremely small fraction of their respective communities, and bug-tested and tweaked by the remainder. This is great when your project falls into the size range that the community can manage, because you wind up with a mediocre program that's been stonewashed, which occasionally makes up for the mediocrity. Larger projects creep along like molasses, or a procession of well-shined turds.
3. Related to the above; With the past decade as my witness: The OSS community can only imitate. They have no ideas of their own. They don't create programs, they reverse engineer or imitate other programs. They don't create interfaces, they copy others. Amusingly enough, now that there's a free version of CryENGINE 3 on the horizon, we just might see an OSS version of it some time around 2030. No, it probably won't work on your operating system, it probably won't compile right for you, and even getting the program to run will require a small phonebook full of hand-typed commands. Maybe by 2030 we'll have exocortical 'frustrated-grunt-to-command-line' interpreters or something to ease that along.
For the vast majority of serious applications and projects, OSS is a joke. Unless a commercial shop develops a comparable engine and then opens it up (like iD Software does from time to time) you're not going to see an OSS game engine with anything resembling the modern amenities. We don't even have 2002-2004's amenities. Cue people who apologize for the OSS clusterfuck by saying that they don't need all those fancy bells and whistles, garbage like Ogre is just fine, commercial software is the devil, and so forth. I don't care.
Indie good. OSS bad. Support game developers who actually have jobs.
Wish I had mod points. This is pretty much the key skill for any ambitious dream project in any discipline. You don't have to be a Renaissance Man, you don't need to be a modern day Da Vinci. You just need to find the right people and the ability to make them love you, laugh at your jokes and consider your great idea awesome.