It's interesting that Unreal releases end up always on the front page, but when Crytek released the source code of Cryengine 5 for free ~3 weeks ago [1] (with DX12, official C# bindings, volumetric clouds, no royalties, even better renderer, VR support for all major VR headsets, Python scriptable editor based on QT, a humble bundle including Ryse assets etc.) it didn't even scratch the front page.<p>I know most people prefer Unreal for ease of use, documentation etc. but I also read often that they like the technology of Cryengine better (real time GI (SVOTI), better performance, better skin and eye shader for example), so I would have thought that the free source code release would stir things up.<p>Yes, Unreal released the full source code long ago, so they (Crytek) are late to the party, and the marketing of Crytek is... not the best (to put it kindly), but why is it that the Cryengine 5 release was not really discussed on HN?<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294763" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294763</a> [1 comment --> I myself]<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300017" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300017</a> [0 comments]<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313695" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313695</a> [0 comments]<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295419" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295419</a> [0 comments]<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11297215" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11297215</a> [0 comments]
Holy crap, the "New Realistic Eye Shading" is insane:<p><pre><code> The shading model approximates subsurface scattering
through the sclera, caustics on the iris and specular on
the wet layer. To be used in conjunction with the
provided eye material and eyeball geometry. Together
these additionally model the refraction through the
cornea, darkening of the limbal ring, with controls for
dilating the pupils.
</code></pre>
In realtime 3d games. This is pushing up against the limits of what offline renderers could do not so very long ago.
Unreal has Unity beat in my mind simply because the Unreal developers are actually building games with their engine (Paragon), which really puts the code through it's paces and makes for a far better testing environment than an artificial demo or two from Unity, that doesn't represent what a full game really uses resource wise per frame.<p>This can definitely be seen in the usability of the software alone, where Unity suffers some poor interface issues alongside poor performance problems.
Another great example of positive impact of open sourcing. They open sourced unreal engine some time ago, thanks to that we see 92 changes from community alone in this release.
If anyone told me 10 years ago that Unreal and CryEngine would be, for all practical purposes, free... It's wonderful time to be a gamedev (tech-wise), I presume.<p>Writing your own graphics engine now seems to be more in line if you really enjoy writing your engine more than the game itself - or if you really want to do something you can't do easily with engines available.
Capsule shadows are a <i>huge</i> step toward a broader photorealism in games.<p>You've probably played a number of games (this is especially true in open-world environments) where direct sunlight looks amazing: Everything casts shadows realistically, giving the scene a very believable sense of illumination and depth. But walk into the shadows, and all that vanishes: Even if the environment has some approximation of global illumination, no shadows are calculated (since there would be far too many secondary light sources versus the single sun).<p>Screen-space ambient occlusion helps somewhat, but it's a hack that looks good sometimes and weird other times. Capsule shadows, if calculated from the top one or two secondary light sources, can approximate the shadows resulting from that complex network of bouncing light in a much more realistic and believable way.
The depth of these notes, both in verbosity and sheer number of line items, are of a scale i'd expect from a major OS release. The fact that UE is managing these "minor" releases on a regular (and relatively rapid) cadence leaves me baffled about the process they have in place.<p>A bit of perspective:<p><pre><code> bullet points in patch notes: 2625
weekdays since last "minor" release: 100
bullets per day: 26
</code></pre>
I don't know how big their team is, but there are days when i don't code 26 lines. The prospect of releasing that many bug fixes and large features is simply astounding.
Has anybody tested this version on a late 2012 iMac with 3.4 GHz i7?<p>I've tried the previous versions and the CPU temperature is rising very quickly.<p>A 2012 iMac is ancient. Are current systems getting hot as well?
Same link as <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400124" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11400124</a> but with now 11 points? How is this possible?<p>EDIT: I'm asking because the dupe check seems to be broken.