I can't believe I stayed up reading this entire thread... Hell I registered just to post this. I think that there is a very large amount of confusion here about what exactly the engine does. It's not just the pretty. Yes CE3 and UE4 are probably the most beautiful engines available for development on right now. They have impressive graphics capabilities and built in optimization that are able to leverage the most out of your graphics hardware. I don't think anyone will argue that point. The art assets, however, can look any way you want them to. CE3 and UE4 can both look almost identical to ArmA2 (but without the stupid graphical problems like bad lighting, fake DoF, clipping issues, etc...) Building on CE3 or UE4 does not require building a game that looks like crysis or any other game that exists for that matter. In fact, I would be willing to bet that there are a lot of games built on CE and UE engines that you don't even realize because they don't look like crysis/far cry/unreal. I think that graphically the arma engine is decent, but certainly lacking, and what I've seen of ArmA3, I'm not holding my breath for massively good looking content, though that may just be their poor art department at work. What everyone seems to be missing here is that the engine is also physics calculations, world control, input control, network code, ai, etc... This is where a vast majority of my issues with ArmA come from. Items clipping through the world into oblivion is all too common. Massive clipping and hit box issues abound. The very poorly optimized network code leads to glitchy players/enemy ai movement. The controls are, quite frankly terrible when they start to behave in unexpected and undocumented ways. I'm sure that veterans of the game have gotten used to them, but getting used to bugs does not make them any less buggy. To be honest, the entire control scheme is overly complex. As far as physics, I'm pretty sure source had better phsyics about 5 years ago. Overall, the engine is very sub-par, but playable. I love DayZ, despite the many issues brought about by the terrible platform it is built on. I also think that most of the people commenting in this thread don't have any real working knowledge of CE3 or UE and are under some fairly mistaken assumptions about these engines and game development with these engines. It will take forever to move to a new engine - The longest part of the process would be creating new art assets, which is something that will have to happen regardless of the engine chosen eventually for a standalone version of DayZ. CE3 and UE both have just about the most impressive workflow tools that are available. They have been designed from the ground up to be fast to work with. Code changes can be implemented and tested from within the game engine itself. Heck, with UE you can have a live version of the game running on an xbox while you are editing code on a PC, make a change and see it happen in real time on the xbox. The scripting language for UE is incredibly natural for anyone who has coding experience, so other than some syntax adjustments and the like, adjusting to these other engines should not take long for any coder who is worth their salt. Further, the scripting in these systems is far far superior to any other engine available. Almost everything about the engine is adjustable and usable through scripting. This all means that the development cycle for CE3 and UE3/4 are insanely fast. Entire games have been built form the ground up on these platforms in a matter of months. If you want to get really down to earth, Notch built an entire 3d game from the ground up without an existing engine in a weekend. Granted it was not very impressive, but a skilled coder can do it. Oh noes, my computer will melt under the weight of CE3/UE! - False. Both of these engines run on the XboX and PS3, both machines are quite far behind anything remotely recent on a PC. Further, Crytek has actually dumbed down cry engine 2 and 3 to be less graphically intense. In fact ce2/ were developed specifically to be good performers on the lower powered consoles. I can't speak to UE4, but then, no one can since the first game on taht platform has yet to even get any real game play footage outside of what is most likely scripted events (fortnite, which conceptually looks quite interesting) UE3 is so well optimized that before the PS3 was released epic was demoing some absolutely amazing tech on the PS3 hardware that is almost archaic by today's standards. Oh yeah, I almost forgot... UE3 runs on your cell phone... If your computer can't handle that then this topic doesn't concern you anyways. It wont FEEL like DayZ - If Rocket went CE3 or UE3/4 and that happened, then you can blame Rocket, not the engine. Try looking for other games built on these engines other than the standard run n gun quake style shooters and tell me if you think they feel like crysis or UT. They don, because the people developing the game on top of the engine wanted it to feel a specific way so they coded that way. In fact, it is very likely you could create a game that felt a lot like Quake or UT or Crysis on the ArmA engine if you wanted to. The feel of the game is at the code level of the game, not the engine, unless the engine is worthless and limiting. Here's a list of games on UE3 that you might not have guessed; Borderlands Batman: Arkham City The Night World Hawken XCOM: Enemy Unknown (this one has procedurally generated structures and items on the map and is a turn based) Q.U.B.E Jazz Jackrabbit Dungeon Defense Moonbase Alpha (hows that for slow and lumbering?) Zero Hour: America's Medic (this only only looks slightly better than ArmA... and well, isn't really a game, it's a simulator, so it's also uber realistic... Okay, I know nothing about it aside from the fact that it uses the Unreal Engine) Oh yeah, maybe you've heard of Lazy Town, the Kid's Show? Yeah they use Unreal Engine in the show. So do realize that the look and feel of how a game plays has about 10% to do with which engine you are using and 90% to do with the guys building the game Rocket couldn't afford it - I call B.S. on that one. big name companies are probably throwing cocaine and hookers through his window trying to get in on the hype. If anything he would make out like a bandit! Imagine having the backing of a AAA studio providing things like art assets and coding. As long as Rocket stayed in control of the project, I think it would be quite awesome and quite profitable for him. Even if he DOESN'T hook up with a big studio working in UE is very very easy to do without spending any real money. I haven't read up on Epic's crowdsourcing policies, but they have them, so it wouldn't even be new territory. Epic wants everyone using UE because the more games with their name on them, the more money they get. Crytek is actually the bigger problem here. Their SDK version is very limited and any real commercial project would need to go through their actual licensing process which is somewhat painful. UDK is a much more open system and Epic seems to be a lot more focused on smaller developers and supporting the community than Crytek is, but modifying the engine itself, if necessary requires a fulll license with both. This would most likely not be necessary for something like DayZ though. It would take so much work for the developers to finish - This goes back to how easy it is to work with CE/UE. The only real issue is art assets, but since both CE and UE can import from just about any modeler, it becomes a lot less of an issue, particularly since the indie dev community is so massive. There are TONS of incredibly talented people out there, at least in the UDK community. I'm quite sure that a lot of them play or have at least been intrigued by DayZ and would be willing to work with Rocket. He seems like a nice enough, level headed guy, I'm sure art assets would be pretty easy to come by and look gorgeous. Terrain, like has been posted in this thread is very easy to create within the engine itself that just about anyone can create something decent, and someone with some skill can produce something awesome. CE/UE can't handle a MASSIVE map like 225 sq km - This is quite honestly an ignorant statement. 225 sq km is only about 60 sq miles. That's about the size of vanilla WoW and probably smaller than the city you live in. DCUO is built on UE3, runs on the PS3 brilliantly as well as my two year old laptop and handled thousands of players in a single phase (how they refer to servers since all players can switch phases on the fly). Both CE and UE have streaming technology where a series of smaller maps are essentially stitched together into zones. As a zone is needed it loads, if it is not needed it is not loaded. If the ArmA engine indeed does load the entire map, that is likely one of the biggest places where problems can show up since it has to load everything on the entire map, regardless of whether it has any pertinence to the player. After playing it, however, I am not sure I think that it is. I have seen enough evidence that there is at least some area specific data that is not being sent to the render engine. Having discrete zones has a lot of advantages as well. In a map the size of chernarus on a server with 40 players max you are not going to have players in all regions of the map, that would be basically impossible. At this point, the engine is tracking this massive single map and everything that is happening on it, even though most of what is happening is irrelevant to the players. Now given the massive amount of bandwidth that a DayZ server requires I am guessing that there is a TON of superfluous data being sent to each player. In contrast, a minecraft server with 50 players, where the map size is capable of being orders of magnitude larger and literally every voxel has to be tracked for changes by the server does not require this kind of bandwidth. To bring that into perspective the standard recommended view distance on a MC server is 10 chunks. That's a 10 chunk radius around each player that could potentially get loaded. Each chunk is 16x16x256, for a total of 65k voxels per chunk. In just the single row of chunks un front of the player you have more than half a million voxels to track for just one player. If the server had to send data about everything on the entire server, even if the map were only 225 sq km it would probably crash the internet ;) and likely the server as well. The biggest hurdle for a large map size with these engines is not the end user's machine but the server needing to know where the players are and where they are going in order to pre-cache the necessary data for any changes in the next zone. This is something that UE3 does very well of late and I am willing to bet UE4 does amazingly given the massive desire in the UDK community to create utterly massive worlds with the engine. Ultimately it is his choice whether he sticks with the new ArmA3 engine or decides to switch to another. Personally I think that moving to a different engine, while most likely would cause a lot of hurt ArmA 1337 butts, would be better for the game in the end. I also think that if he is going to switch to a different engine, UE3 is probably the best option since that is what the current UDK is at which means starting development on it is easy and free. Yes there are going to be a ton of DayZ copycats cropping up in not long, especially since it seems to have received a massive bump in popularity lately. Will those games be any good? I'm sure some will be stellar and some will be horrible. Do I think that DayZ could still be the best? Yes. DayZ is a game that I've developed in my head for years, longing for a real survival situation. It fills a niche that no other game has managed to fill. I think that the design and concept are almost spot on with what I want out of a zombie game. I also wish that it had some elements just not possible with the current engine. What ever direction he decides to go, I am in absolute love with this game and will gladly plunk down my cash. Hell, I spent $200 during the steam summer sale in the last week and I'm absorbed by this free, alpha mod on top of what is, essentially, one of the most clunky engines out there right now... He's done something right, so I am right there. It would certainly be easier to plunk down my cash if I knew the engine was going to be a robust and power engine from a company whose primary puspose in life is building the best game engine possible.
