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CryEngine 2 Vs Source 07 Engine Vs Unreal 3 Engine

Which Engine is better?

  • Crysis's CryEngine 2.

    Votes: 160 46.4%

  • Half Life 2's Source 07 Engine.

    Votes: 93 27.0%

  • Unreal Tournament 3's Unreal 3 Engine.

    Votes: 49 14.2%

  • I dont really care.

    Votes: 43 12.5%
  • Total voters
    345
It was really close for me. I can run Source games at 1680x1050 on medium settings and it looks great. Source Engine really does the best job of scaling to your hardware.

I voted Cry Engine 2 though. I run Crysis demo at 1280x768 w/ everything set to low except physics and am still amazed. The devs kept their word and said that you can play the game on hardware ~3 years old. Mine is approaching 5! It looks really good and is stable at ~40FPS. The physics and the destructable environments are what impress me the most though.

I tried the UT3 demo and it looks like garbage at low-medium on my PC. I'll have to stick to UT2K4 till I build a new system.
 
I had to vote for source because it runs so well and is very easy to mod, but I of course admit crysis puts source's aesthetics to shame
 
Don't forget that the Source engine is ultimately based on the Quake engine if you trace it back far enough!
 
The only thing i don't like about the source engine is that all the bullet holes and little effects are the same in every source game. The bullet holes are the same in cssource and dodsource and all them. Overall i think its pretty good but mostly i think the crysis engine has more positives than the other engines so ;)
 
Source engine is incredible. If it weren't for the loading between maps it would be perfect! But it's infrequent enough that it isn't too big of a deal. On contrast I was just playing through HL1 again and holy crap the game loads every 5 steps you take!

I friggin love Valve, they really know exactly what they're doing. They delay their games so much but it's obviously for good reason, because look how polished they are! I wish I could work for them!

UT3 while it looks great is more of an unrealistic look than HL2. It's much more "plastic coated" and "glowing" if you ask me.

Crysis I didn't play yet, but it's obvious that it has excellent graphics, though the jungle setting is pretty generic.

HL2 just stands out to me, even today. So that gets my vote.
 
I vote EA's bf2 engine

:) kidding :p

source for me, without a doubt, but cry engine is not far behind if at all

it runs so well, looks great, amazing physics...etc

not to take away from the other 2, but thats my pick
 
The Null said:
actually, it does still have bits of the old goldsource code with it.
Click to expand...

Actually no it doesn't. :rolleyes:

The leaked Source engine only had a few files-names and copyright notices from iD (no actual quake code). Claiming "Source engine is ultimately based on the Quake engine" because it contained a few copyright notices is a stretch, at best.

What people get confused with is that during development of the Source engine Valve used pieces of the GoldSrc engine to test certain portions of the Source engine. Eventually all GoldSrc parts of the Source engine were replaced with new code. Valve was probably too lazy to delete the insignificant copyright notices found in the leaked version of the Source engine (and perhaps they even did delete those files for the final version).
 
I voted source, I'm pretty sure that the engine is graphically capable of everything the others are, but that they have consciously decided not to push it that far as a trade off for lower system requirements and with them a bigger install footprint.

Regardless, I think the Alan Wake engine will make them all look silly :p
 
I'm going with the Source. It runs well and it looks realistic. I still think that only Crysis has the same realism that HL2 does, and it takes twice the horsepower to run it.
UE3 runs really well, but the textures look muddy and everything has a look and feel that looks like an odd drawing. It looks good, but there's no sense of "this looks REAL." None of the licensed games look realistic either, so I just think it's not capable of outputting the look and feel I want without more modification.
CryEngine 2 is probably the best overall, but right now it's a system hog that none of us can truly fully experience. Hold this poll again next fall and I bet you'll see it winning easily.
For now, the Source engine looks wonderful and will run perfectly on hardware from 3 years ago. The physics, textures, facial expressions, sound, controls, etc. are all perfectly tuned for current hardware and have been since its release. There's something to be said for getting a flawless running/looking game that everyone can play.
With Crysis, you're pretty much stuck using a DX10-level card unless you want everything to be a low-detailed mess or slideshow.
 
I can't believe so many people are voting cryengine...
I didn't know good engines ran like shit.
 
Oomps said:
I can't believe so many people are voting cryengine...
I didn't know good engines ran like shit.
Click to expand...

your a troll, and yes they do when they first come out.

the crytech 2 engine is freaking amazing, I still haven't seen a good usage of the new unreal engine, though i'm willing to bet that there will be some very nice visuals from it. source has mainly been held up through first good texture work when it first came out(not to say it isn't impressive) & later updates to it. and the net code is shit unless your all pinging the same.
 
talley said:
your a troll, and yes they do when they first come out.
the crytech 2 engine is freaking amazing, I still haven't seen a good usage of the new unreal engine, though i'm willing to bet that there will be some very nice visuals from it.
Click to expand...

Whatever you say...
I had also been disappointed with the unreal 3 engine until I tried the COD4 demo. Hopefully the full game lives up to the intensity that is displayed in the demo.
 
Oomps said:
Whatever you say...
I had also been disappointed with the unreal 3 engine until I tried the COD4 demo. Hopefully the full game lives up to the intensity that is displayed in the demo.
Click to expand...

Call of Duty 4 doesn't use the Unreal 3 engine...

Anyways my vote has to be the Cryengine, unreal tournament looks good and runs great but it does have the plastic feel to it and the Source engine runs great but doesn't have the level of detail that the Crysis engine has.

Either way I like all 3 engines but the Crysis one was the only one that I found truly amazing.

Crysis> Unreal = Source, at least from what I've seen.
 
I voted I don't care. Because if the game sucks the best engine in the world won't save it.

Crysis COD4 and UT3 are good games. But I could care less what engine is used to make them tick.
 
The Unreal 3 engine is or will be in at least 60 games so far. If you want destructible terrain check out Mass Effect.

For everyone who voted for Source or the Cryengine 2, what do you know that the game developers who are programming these games don't know?
 
BladeVenom said:
The Unreal 3 engine is or will be in at least 60 games so far. If you want destructible terrain check out Mass Effect.

For everyone who voted for Source or the Cryengine 2, what do you know that the game developers who are programming these games don't know?
Click to expand...

We don't care about the cost of the engine license or the ease of programming for any of them. I'd suspect those are motivational factors we don't care about...rather than us knowing something they don't. They know something that affects their bottom line that we don't.
 
Domingo said:
We don't care about the cost of the engine license or the ease of programming for any of them.
Click to expand...
Yet those are two vital aspects that differentiate one licenseable engine from another. We were asked to vote which engine we think is best. A lot of people here are, for whatever reason, using only what graphics have been demonstrated with the engines so far as some sort of metric for how good an engine is. That's abusrd -- no developer gives a shit what the trees in Crysis look like when they look at CryEngine, they care about the feature set, the toolset, the engine's efficiency, licensing costs and support services. Does it support seamless loading? Does it support animation blending? Does it support soft terrain maps? How good is the memory management? What's the net code like, if any? Is there an artist-oriented shader designer? How difficult is it to rig particle systems? How complex is the scripting system, and what does it support out of the box? How much does it cost? Who do we talk to when we encounter an issue, and are they going to be the programmers themselves or some sort of generic support staff?
 
The only excuse i see anyone using any older engine is because its cheaper and they would make more money at the end or just to experience on a new thing so they wouldn't have too much lose if it didn't sell well. I think the big three all have pretty good tools most likely if they gone to this kind of effort to bring all types of new things into the engine. Not completely sure but what it comes down to i think is how much is the license going to cost :)
 
phide said:
Yet those are two vital aspects that differentiate one licenseable engine from another. We were asked to vote which engine we think is best. A lot of people here are, for whatever reason, using only what graphics have been demonstrated with the engines so far as some sort of metric for how good an engine is. That's abusrd -- no developer gives a shit what the trees in Crysis look like when they look at CryEngine, they care about the feature set, the toolset, the engine's efficiency, licensing costs and support services. Does it support seamless loading? Does it support animation blending? Does it support soft terrain maps? How good is the memory management? What's the net code like, if any? Is there an artist-oriented shader designer? How difficult is it to rig particle systems? How complex is the scripting system, and what does it support out of the box? How much does it cost? Who do we talk to when we encounter an issue, and are they going to be the programmers themselves or some sort of generic support staff?
Click to expand...

Presumably the poll was asking the question from a gamer's perspective rather than a developer's, in which case all the details that you mentioned are irrelevant when we can just compare the final product, which is probably what people are doing anyway.
 
netcode= Source right now. U3 perhaps will get the nod when their game actually ships, if the netcode improves some from the demo's. If the Crysis MP demo is any indication, they are not even in the same time zone as the other two in this area.

graphics= CryEngine2 Duh! Was not impressed with Bioshocks or the U3 demo's graphics when compared to the SP Crysis demo.

scalability= Source Duh! The engine is old, many of the newer integrated solutions can actually play those games reasonably well.

physics= I believe it is third party in all cases. No winner there.

editors= I have yet to use or even look at the editors for U3 or Cryengine. But Unreal Edit will prolly take the honors here, if the past iterations of UE are any indication.

Just my opinions.
 
The Null said:
which is the better engine?

discuss.

-EDIT- almost forgot to cast my own vote: i vote Source, why? great engine, looks good, great physics, great net code, perfectly optimised, it is the end result of a lot people people who share the same thought about gaming.
Click to expand...

Can you Define "better"?

Technically better?
Currently better performer on current hardware?.
Future proof better?
 
I'd rather play a game built on the Source Engine than any other engine right now. Honestly, it just plays great. I'd rather have a smooth/fun game experience, than one that "looks so amazing, I CAN SHOOT THAT TREE DOWN, WATCH ME DO IT!"

TF2 is a flat-out work of art. Voice acting in Portal and TF2 are the best I've heard in any game out. It adds sooo much to the experience.

Source > * Farcry ran like shit when it came out too, for some reason the graphics made up for the mediocre scalability and shitty netcode. I tried playing Farcry a while ago but apparently my valid CD-Key I paid $50 for is no longer valid... :(

I doubt I'll touch UT3 / Crysis unless some really nice mods come out for them, I hated the Crysis MP beta and SP Demo... UT3 Demo was fun, but it felt like Gears of War - the Unreal Tournament Mod...
 
CryEngine 2>Unreal Engine 3>Source Engine

Though it is way to early to judge on it since we've only just got our hands on the CryEngine2 and there are not that many games that use the Unreal Engine 3 to its full extent, only reason why the Source Engine runs so great today is because its an 3-4 year old engine (though it was great when it first came out, its just Valve needs to starting working on Source Engine 2 after HL2:Episode Three comes out!).
 
CryEngine 2 wins hands down

I played Crysis demo 1024 everything low except for a few settings on med and physics on high
avg 25-35 fps absolutely playable

My rigs is poor at best (A64 s754 2800+, 1 GB DDR400 & XFX 7600GT AGP8x)

Game still looks awsome, maybe not as crisp as Source but better none the less
 
jimmyb said:
The Source engine is a fork of of the Gold Source engine which is a fork the quake engine. This makes it based on it.

Having seen the leaked HL2 source, I would say it was substantially more than copyright notices.
Click to expand...

Then can you please prove it (and using ambiguous arguments like "it was substantially more than copyright notices" doesn't count)? It seems Wikipedia says otherwise.
 
Moofasa~ said:
Then can you please prove it (and using ambiguous arguments like "it was substantially more than copyright notices" doesn't count)? It seems Wikipedia says otherwise.
Click to expand...

The most I can offer at this point is a direct quote of John Carmack stating that HL2 contains some early quake code. I linked to this in my post a couple up.

It's possible he might be lying, or incorrect, but I have no reason to believe this. Even if his statement is no longer true, it still effectively points out that the Source engine is based on the Quake engine, which was my claim.

Having just looked at the wikipedia article you mentioned, it says "The amount of Quake code remaining in Source is point of contention", which hardly supports either of our points of view.
 
It's possible he might be lying, or incorrect, but I have no reason to believe this. Even if his statement is no longer true, it still effectively points out that the Source engine is based on the Quake engine, which was my claim.
Click to expand...

Moofasa~ said:
What people get confused with is that during development of the Source engine Valve used pieces of the GoldSrc engine to test certain portions of the Source engine. Eventually all GoldSrc parts of the Source engine were replaced with new code. Valve was probably too lazy to delete the insignificant copyright notices found in the leaked version of the Source engine (and perhaps they even did delete those files for the final version).
Click to expand...

Having just looked at the wikipedia article you mentioned, it says "The amount of Quake code remaining in Source is point of contention", which hardly supports either of our points of view.
Click to expand...

I took that to mean it's not clear if Valve removed the copyright notices from the final version of the Source engine.
 
Well in any case, seeing as how there is a clear development path forking directly from the Quake engine (and good reason to believe there have been and may still be pieces of original quake code in it), I think stating that Source is ultimately based on the Quake engine is a very reasonable claim.
 
Ok, let me try and be more clear then.

Erik Johnson said:
When we were getting very close to releasing Half-Life (less than a week or so), we found there were already some projects that we needed to start working on, but we couldn't risk checking in code to the shipping version of the game. At that point we forked off the code in VSS to be both $/Goldsrc and /$Src.
Click to expand...
Considering that the HL engine was a fork of the Quake engine, and a Valve developer states that Source is a fork of the HL engine, is it still not "clear to you" how there is a "development path forking directly from the Quake engine"?
 
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