CryEngine 5.5 released

I found this in the 2007 annual report:

http://cdn.entropiaplanets.com/w/images/d/d3/Annual_report_2007.pdf - Page 26

2008 Annual report:

I checked a number of other 2007 and 2008 reports (primarily intermediate financial results), but did not find any reference to any custom work being done. The 2009 financial report also has no reference to CryEngine or CryTek. It does have a section detailing that due to falling participation, following implementation of CE2, less revenue was achieved in that year.

Now our financial documentation archive might not be complete, but to the best of my knowledge if any financial reports were published on the MA Website, we grabbed it for archiving reasons. I haven't seen any hint towards any customization in the ones I went through (which doesn't mean there was never such a thing; i just haven't found any).

 

Most companies allow you yo pay them to remove the copyright notice. That's usually not cheap, though (but probably cheaper than having them build custom stuff with exclusive use).

The Swedish standard of excellence? But yeah, it's not typically an engine used for MMOs. Then again, the ma goblins that did the engine selection back in the days wouldn't know the first thing about that, as they are more interested in marketability, than technicalities.

It's not a bad engine, really, but out of the main engines out there, it seems to be losing the battle. When I was still at Unity, that was the first engine to go subscription. Unreal followed a year later, with a major price drop. CryEngine followed suit almost immediately, undercutting Unreal. To me at the time it seemed like a desperate move, and not something very well thought-through.

CryTek at some point laid off a lot of people, and I can't help but shake the feeling the company might not be around that much longer (that means jack shit, as I've felt the exact same way about MA for 15 years, and they refuse to die for some reason).

Out of the three mentioned engines, price shouldn't really make a big difference when it comes to choosing. Unity offers a free version for anyone earning <100k (or 200k, I can't remember, and can't be arsed to look it up right now). Once you pass that mark, you'll need to upgrade to a higher tier (35 USD). Once you reach the next revenue milestone, you'll have to go pro (75 USD/month).

Unity has some key advantages Unity offers is the integration of its services. Automated builds, integrated analytics, and monetization by means of a few lines of code make it incredibly easy to pick if you're half serious about releasing a commercial project. It also has an immense community, is currently pretty much the de-facto engine for VR and AR, offers the Asset Store (no blockchain needed), and offers the advantage of being able to use C# (which has a lower entry-level barrier than C++).

Unreal has a free version, too, I think. Their subscription costs 19 USD/month, +5% of everything you make over a certain amount in revenue (including merch). Again, my knowledge is probably outdated. Unreal used to be extremely ahead of Unity when it came to graphics, but I strongly feel that gap has been more than covered by Unity. Unreal offers Blueprint, though, which basically is the ability to create a game without writing code. Think of a visual interface of creating a game. I saw a demo of it several years ago, and while that sort of masked that there's still a ton of work to do, it worked quite well. (Unity has an Asset on the store available that pretty much offers the same thing, though, and might have released something similar in the meantime).

What I gathered from CryEngine pretty much is the same as what you described. It looks neat, but is difficult to work with, and a ton of people who start with it end up abandoning it prematurely.


10 years after the switch, I cannot help but feel MA bet on the wrong horse, engine-wise, and while the armour still looks neat, the graphics nowadays feel outdated. They can probably only polish so much, using CE2 no longer is a marketing gimmick, and unless they manage to figure out a way to upgrade to a newer version of CE, they might have to face facts and will have to port everything to another engine. Let's hope this time it won't mean they disable all systems for years and let people who invested a ton of money in those systems rot as they did last time.

 

I'm not sure I agree that CE ever was "the shit" amongst the engines. If it had been, surely there'd be a crapload more games made on it? CE1 had 2 games run on it (2 windows, and some ports/spinoffs of 1 of those for other platforms). CE2 had 6. If it was "the shit", I'd expect there to be more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CryEngine_games

Compare that with Unreal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games

Graphics-wise, I think engines are just jumping ahead of one another on a cyclical basis, showing new stuff in very finely tuned demoes that are not representative for how stuff runs for an actual game. Typically, a lot of tricks are performed to handle certain weaknesses in the engine, while highlighting stronger points. (The same thing happens with benchmark tests for databases. Microsoft and Oracle pretty much play tag running operations on specialised hardware that ensures maximum throughput of transactions for the very very specific build of the database engine they use for the test. In real life, you'd not have that hardware, nor the build, nor would you be able to generate that many transactions (real life transactions are drastically different from the tailor-crafted transactions used for these tests).

With regards to maintaining code, it completely depends on what the engine makers did or changed in their code. You're right in that a string will be a string, and an int will be an int. However, the way to reflect lights or generate shadows might have been completely rewritten, which could mean the way to have your code call it could also have been completely made redundant. Sometimes it remains backwards compatible, but typically newer versions of the engine simply would call for a whole new way of handling things.

If MA really wants to make some changes, why not focus on something like the MOB AI? I cannot help but shake the feeling that hasn't changed much in the 15+ years I played the game. Trapping is no longer possible due to the mob getting stuck, and granted, a mob won't barge off to another player in the area, as they used to 15 years ago, but still. I don't think anything else really changed.

In the meantime, there's tons of games where MOBs interact with other mobs. It'd be awesome seeing some mobs attempt to flee rather than attack (Exarosaurs always struck me as a mob that would attempt to run, rather than fight), mobs perhaps show a herd-like behaviour (imagine engaging an Armax young, which also draws the mother towards you), and have mobs lose interest if they chase you too far (most MMOs employ the use of "leashes" for that).

Heck, the society functionality could offer so many cool extras. Like allow for official alliances to exist in-game, and rivalry, too, where for instance any soc where the members have a reputation below a certain score would qualify as rogues/pirates, and thus be engaged when they head into a town. How about bounty-systems based on that?

Why the fuck is the maximum team size still limited? With the additions of big ass bosses like Husks and Sand kings, why on earth is it still only possible to have 16 people in a team, while those kind of MOBs would take dozens if not hundreds of players to take down?