I come from UE4 community , Its a great and powerful engine , very easy to learn and use and you could build nearly any type of game with it quite easily. Its main strong points are complete set of mature tools , a very strong architecture and large community support.

Last year Cryengine went free in the form of lumberyard, later it itself became free to use releasing as cryengine 5.

So I decided to take a peek into both, the latest I see of lumberyard is its going the same route as Unreal engine in its architecture (components,reflection,events etc etc) and improving tools and usability overall (might end up as UE4 clone with lua and forward renderer in a few years :P )

While I don't know much about cryengine 5 but it seems to be going more towards graphical enhancement route rather than improving usability and docs.

I wish to know about things that community thinks is different in CE5/Lumberyard that is something a UE4 user would desire but cannot get in UE4. Something positive that is exclusive to CE and has no proper alternative on UE4.

I think your lack of replies kind of shows the problem =) I's new. That's great, but new means it doesn't have the userbase. Whether that means Yet or Ever, remains to be seen.

Its still a bit new but a quick peek at it showed me that it supports both batching and instancing on the same level.

This is interesting because Unity is more batch focused and Unreal is more instancing focused, with Cryengine adopting both, on more or less the same level. Batching is better for unique 3D, making it a good choice for indie games and instancing is better for a modular workflow as used by most large games.

Creating assets to take advantage of both batching and instancing is a pain, the easiest is plants. Things like foliage is hard for the player to remember the exact details, if it changes it wont be noticed as often as other assets.

Considering this I think we will be seeing even more large open world games with lots of good looking vegetation from Cryengine.

But with its bulky interface and with how difficult it is to make assets of that level, I don't think it will be such a large contender in the indie market.

Cry and Lumberyard are both free, whereas Unreal is actually still quite expensive (for a business; it's free for a hobbyist)... So they've got that going for them.

On using Lumberyard you need to read the license agreements carefully because Amazon made some restrictive parts in it for example you are not allowed to use an other than Amazon's or partnered cloud services and so on

On using Lumberyard you need to read the license agreements carefully because Amazon made some restrictive parts in it for example you are not allowed to use an other than Amazon's or partnered cloud services and so on

So what the hell is the point of using Lumberyard.

Anyways... in my experience. Cryengine's Editor has a lot of problems. It's incredibly prone to crashing. it has some bad performance issues. And even some weird non-sensible glitches. It's also awkward to use at times, and tries too be too close to home with old Autodesk software.

Unreal is more modernized. I wouldn't say it's streamlined as everything is in one place. But you can easily find the most commonly used tools. And there's very little that's condoluded about using it.

So what the hell is the point of using Lumberyard.

Lots of people are happy being tied to Amazon's cloud services.

So what the hell is the point of using Lumberyard.

Lots of people are happy being tied to Amazon's cloud services.

yeah I don't think its a severe limiting factor or anything , also I wanted to discuss pros and not cons.

Like is there a special advantage for lumberyard renderer when compared to UE4 which can justify anyone using it instead of UE4. Or any other quality

Like is there a special advantage for lumberyard renderer when compared to UE4 which can justify anyone using it instead of UE4.

Lumberyard should be better for large static scenes, allowing for some stunning screenshots. It is also build with networking in mind so maybe it would be better for MMO games.

The license is maybe worth it, however that can be argued. At 5% royalty for unreal you would pay $50 for every $1000 you make, and its per product, that is less than the price of a single game.

If you consider that the average indie developer earns less than $750 per month, normally from more than one game, then most indie developers should be able to use any of the engines for free. Also Unity, Unreal, Cryengine/Lumberyard are all such complicated engines that no matter which of the licenses you pay for, it would be vastly cheaper than making your own engine of that level.

For the license to be part of the justification for using Lumberyard you must be able to guarantee you will make more than $3000, for example if you did some crowdfunding.

At 5% royalty for unreal you would pay $50 for every $1000 you make

Note that the Unreal percentage is on the retail price, not your own profits.

Digital retailers typically take about 30%, and the tax man typically takes about 30% in income tax.

So (ignoring the $3k threshold) if you sell $1000 worth at retail, Steam keeps $300, the tax man takes $210, Unreal take $50, and you get to keep $440.

For a more interesting example, say you want a decent gamedev salary of $3k per month. That means you need to sell about $6200 per month at retail, meaning Steam keep $1860, tax man takes $1302 and you keep $3038.

Per quarter, you make $9114... but your per quarter retail revenue is $18600, so subtract the $3k threshold, and Unreal want 5% of $15600, which is $780 (or $260 per month).

So your final per month income drops back down to $2778 - below our target salary of $3k.

If I go back and adjust my estimate to set a retail sales target of $6800, then you end up keeping $3042/mo and Unreal costs you $290/mo.

In comparison, Unity Pro is less than half that, at only $125/mo, and Lumber/Cry are free :)

So tl;dr, if you're planning to pay yourself a full time gamedev wage, the difference between Lumberyard and Unreal is ~$300/month :lol: