Well Eu still use old direct x 9 as long windows xp is supported we wont see any changes ,maybe in 5 years we see upgrade. at dx11
There was a problem with participant drop off back in 2009 when the Unreal engine was introduced. I'm betting there is a major concern with upgrading to DX11.
Unreal Engine has always been, and still is, my favorite engine. Don't get me wrong, EU looks amazing with Crytek - but EU with Unreal.... that would be something!
well back 2009 very few ppl had dx 11 graf, now 6 year after most ppl have it ( on steam over 77% players got dx 11 graf card )
Plus Unreal Engine 4 just went free forever... so there's that... MindArk guys...
The only payment left now is the 5% royalty fee on revenue, which big game studios can still negotiate.
Would you like to know more?
Free or not free engine, UE4, or some thing other... it always looks what the devs make with it! So the engine not make it look better, when the content is bad developped.
But with a good engine they have half the work done... CryEngine looks good but it's awful inside.
Whatever, if the game lasts long enough we will see another engine migration for sure.
Re: DX9, 10 and 11
It's one thing to move to DX11, but CE2 supports DX10 and it's required for support of dual GPU options and more efficient in many things than DX9, so it's a no-brainer to enable/support DX10. Doing so doesn't require deprecating DX9/WinXP (although it would be a good idea to do so given that it's increasingly insecure).
It's too bad they went with an engine that doesn't support OpenGL. That would have made a lot more options possible for the present and the future, regardless of whether linux or any other non-MS PC OS ever has a significant market share. DX is married to Microsoft products and that brings certain limitations.
I use Torque engine to make my own games, and there where i work, we use also Torque engine, but im sure our game looks better as EU, and Torque engine is not a AAA engine like cryengine is.
UE4 is a beast to learn.. not sure i realy like it.
example: make a nice water, with sub water and so that the player swim in UE4. You will have a day to implement this, if you be skilled with ue4, about you have to make everything from scratch.
In t3d you only drag and drop the water block, or plain or river, and voila, you have a nice working water with everything it needs.. take some minute to make a nice water. Near same in cry engine.
Also it is a time eater to make nice terrains in Ue4 with all the materials you have to set up.
Ue4 is verry flexible, but far away to be userfriendly and intuitive to learn.
Ue4 is nice for coder, about the blueprints, thats realy cool!
But for level designers it is a time killer.
PS: we changed from t3d to ue4, but i hate to move our game to Ue4 as lead level designer.
We will have ages to redesign our game. It remember me at eu, as it changed to cry2. It is a pain to change from one to an other engine.
Similair to my experience but with UDK haven't tried UE4 yet but id imagine its similair, its really a great engine but it feels like it was built for a team of 20-100 people and below that the workload tends to be very harsh.
We had a similair discussions on a project im working on but we decided to stay with T3D due to what you describe.
Good luck with UE4, hopefully it works out!
Zweshi