StarEngine
- Thread starter Shadow Reaper
- Start date
I watched this one a day ago and it was rather disappointing, it's basically a summary of RSI's history with CryEngine, and a very shallow reasoning of "they shouldn't switch now" which was obvious to anyone with a functioning braincell...
TLDW is:
CR chose CryEngine cos he knew a guy.
CryEngine couldn't do anything that SC needed, through the last 10 years they made it their own.
Crytek was struggling so they could syphon devs easily during development.
Forked to Lumberyard, Crytek sued, blah blah irrelevant...
Unreal 5 can't do open world. (neither could CryEngine, they both do traditional closed bordered maps out of the box, moot point)
Unreal 5 can't do the things SC needs so they'd have to spend time/money years to rebuild it again. (just like with every single engine out there)
RSI is adding stuff to StarEngine that makes it on par with todays other engines so it's not outdated. (And no they haven't done anything the others haven't already done in some form. The special sauce is that it's all integrated in a fully open seamless world in multiplayer.)
SC is being moved over to Vulkan api, which will be able to improve performance significantly by parallel processing. (This has nothing to do with the choice of engine, but its good. Since a couple of patches ago I've been using that and it is waaay faster already and fully stable).
CR was right to not move to UE5 after so many years. (yeah that's kinda pretty obvious)
That is all the content in that 20 minute video.
Switching to UE5 wouldn't have made SC better, just even more delayed.
TLDW is:
CR chose CryEngine cos he knew a guy.
CryEngine couldn't do anything that SC needed, through the last 10 years they made it their own.
Crytek was struggling so they could syphon devs easily during development.
Forked to Lumberyard, Crytek sued, blah blah irrelevant...
Unreal 5 can't do open world. (neither could CryEngine, they both do traditional closed bordered maps out of the box, moot point)
Unreal 5 can't do the things SC needs so they'd have to spend time/money years to rebuild it again. (just like with every single engine out there)
RSI is adding stuff to StarEngine that makes it on par with todays other engines so it's not outdated. (And no they haven't done anything the others haven't already done in some form. The special sauce is that it's all integrated in a fully open seamless world in multiplayer.)
SC is being moved over to Vulkan api, which will be able to improve performance significantly by parallel processing. (This has nothing to do with the choice of engine, but its good. Since a couple of patches ago I've been using that and it is waaay faster already and fully stable).
CR was right to not move to UE5 after so many years. (yeah that's kinda pretty obvious)
That is all the content in that 20 minute video.
My take is that CR was right to stick with whatever he started with. He could have went with UE4, or anything else that was available at the time. And no, when UE5 came out they couldn't have just moved over everything because the engine would have benn modified already to such extent that it would have been the same task as it would be moving SC over to the latest CryEngine or UE5...
No engine can support SC out of the box better than any other.
Having to fight with Nanite messing up meshes with all their different states, having to get the GI to work with rotating planets with their highly custom tricks with no traditional skyboxes and such... Nah man, that's just not worth it.
If SC started development today, where you have at least some devs that delivered something decent using UE5, yeah it would be an option. It would still take 10 years to get anywhere and need updateing just like StarEngine needs it to keep up with current tech...
So far UE5 has pretty much failed to deliver on it's promise of much higher quality at better performance. It did deliver on ease of use though, hence the thousands of indy titles (99.999% trash) using it.
From recent releases I found that Indiana Jones (not UE), KCD2 (and 1) using Cryengine, and AC Shadows using its own engine, looks better and RUNS waaaay better than UE5 AAA titles.
Stalker 2, the poster child for all the top-notch raytracing and nanite and crap UE5 is supposed to do so much better and faster than anything ever, is Visual Vomit, a disaster barely in motion. The picture is such a noisy mess, that it would have been embarrassing 5 years ago let alone today. The draw distance is abysmal, climb any tower and see views barely any better than Stalker 1 had...
KCD1, from yeeeears ago has better , denser, and cleaner environments and vegetation. Cyberpunk on redengine performs much better even with everything on ultra including RTX and DLSS OFF and has higher quality clutter, skin shaders, paint shaders, reflections, shadows and so on...
Youtube is full of "photoreal" Cyberpunk vids that look uncannily real, KCD1 and I'm guessing 2 also has it's fans modding it's environment to be insanely photoreal, to such an extent it can easily trick you into thinking that ride through a forest is just a video captured in real life.
I haven't seen the same for UE5 games yet... I've seen it done in peoples personal projects that were built to showcase this, but not in any game.
It will come, but it's just way too fresh and still too messy.
Another thing that cannot be forgotten is that visually cohesive, well art directed games look better than just "photoreal GI RTX UTRA 8K" stuff.
Look at Helldivers 2. It's running on a dead engine from 17 years ago. It looks fucking amazing! When you look at assets on their own, it's not all the highest bestest quality ever, but man when all the explosions are going off, lasers flying, snow blowing around among a million flying chunks of terminators... yeah that's something else. It's cohesion makes it much more than it's parts.
Then take a look at some modded GTA5 or Skyrim, using ENB filters and 16K texture packs claiming to be the ultimate realistic visuals... Those SHOULD look better but they just look weird and outright bad. The cohesion is broken, and no amount of pixels on your rocks or pavement can save it from looking out of place and messy.
SC so far, for most of it's world, has this cohesion. It will still look good in 5 years, despite not having the superGI UltraRT Nanite bullshit.
Having all the fancy buzzwords is nothing when your game runs like shit because it and has to resort to messy noisy generated frames...
No engine can support SC out of the box better than any other.
Having to fight with Nanite messing up meshes with all their different states, having to get the GI to work with rotating planets with their highly custom tricks with no traditional skyboxes and such... Nah man, that's just not worth it.
If SC started development today, where you have at least some devs that delivered something decent using UE5, yeah it would be an option. It would still take 10 years to get anywhere and need updateing just like StarEngine needs it to keep up with current tech...
So far UE5 has pretty much failed to deliver on it's promise of much higher quality at better performance. It did deliver on ease of use though, hence the thousands of indy titles (99.999% trash) using it.
From recent releases I found that Indiana Jones (not UE), KCD2 (and 1) using Cryengine, and AC Shadows using its own engine, looks better and RUNS waaaay better than UE5 AAA titles.
Stalker 2, the poster child for all the top-notch raytracing and nanite and crap UE5 is supposed to do so much better and faster than anything ever, is Visual Vomit, a disaster barely in motion. The picture is such a noisy mess, that it would have been embarrassing 5 years ago let alone today. The draw distance is abysmal, climb any tower and see views barely any better than Stalker 1 had...
KCD1, from yeeeears ago has better , denser, and cleaner environments and vegetation. Cyberpunk on redengine performs much better even with everything on ultra including RTX and DLSS OFF and has higher quality clutter, skin shaders, paint shaders, reflections, shadows and so on...
Youtube is full of "photoreal" Cyberpunk vids that look uncannily real, KCD1 and I'm guessing 2 also has it's fans modding it's environment to be insanely photoreal, to such an extent it can easily trick you into thinking that ride through a forest is just a video captured in real life.
I haven't seen the same for UE5 games yet... I've seen it done in peoples personal projects that were built to showcase this, but not in any game.
It will come, but it's just way too fresh and still too messy.
Another thing that cannot be forgotten is that visually cohesive, well art directed games look better than just "photoreal GI RTX UTRA 8K" stuff.
Look at Helldivers 2. It's running on a dead engine from 17 years ago. It looks fucking amazing! When you look at assets on their own, it's not all the highest bestest quality ever, but man when all the explosions are going off, lasers flying, snow blowing around among a million flying chunks of terminators... yeah that's something else. It's cohesion makes it much more than it's parts.
Then take a look at some modded GTA5 or Skyrim, using ENB filters and 16K texture packs claiming to be the ultimate realistic visuals... Those SHOULD look better but they just look weird and outright bad. The cohesion is broken, and no amount of pixels on your rocks or pavement can save it from looking out of place and messy.
SC so far, for most of it's world, has this cohesion. It will still look good in 5 years, despite not having the superGI UltraRT Nanite bullshit.
Having all the fancy buzzwords is nothing when your game runs like shit because it and has to resort to messy noisy generated frames...
Switching to UE5 wouldn't have made SC better, just even more delayed.