I fucking hate it! D=<

School is consuming me yet again. I'm looking for internship as a leveldesigner at a company basically anywhere in the world. I got my portfolio site up and running two days ago ([link]), I know it doesn't look quite proffessional, but I'm no webdesigner and I was running out of time. With the site done, a fairly large load has been let off my shoulders and I should be able to return to social life and the actual homework again. Speaking of homework, I'm currently working along with 2 other people to create a short singleplayer adventure in Unreal Tournament 3. It's going to be puzzle based in a fucked up alternative reality. No guns, no enemies, just puzzles. If it turns out well I'll upload some screenshots and maybe a video playthrough.

Yesterday I went and saw Terminator Salvations. I'm a huge Terminator fan and have been dying to see this movie. It's worth seeing alright, better than T3 but it's nothing grand. The special effects look great and there's an interesting twist in the plot. It's just too bad they actually reveal it in the trailer. =/

On the other hand, some characters don't really feel that important. All Bale does is basically shout at people which felt kinda lame to me. The focus throughout the entire movie is on Marcus, no exception. There's also a few wierd cuts/scene changes in the movie that throw the viewer off-guard which is a bit annoying.

There's also a rather huge plot hole in the story unless I've overlooked something major, which is a possibility considering I was drunk while watching it.

Now I gotta go grab something to eat.

There seems to be some kind of universal force at work, doing it's best to push me over the edge. At least that's how I feel.

I guess this journal could be labeled under the "Aww, poor me" category so you might just want to skip it altogether. I just needed to pass some time. >.>

I'm still recovering from that cold I caught in Birmingham. It's basically gone now, but I'm still coughing and sneezing a lot. I noticed one of my eyes was slightly red last wednesday, but I thought it'd be gone in a day. It turned out to be an eye infection however and now both eyes are red and gooey (eww). However, I'm washing them a couple of few times a day with some kind of sterilized water and they're getting better... But (Takes deep breath) yesterday I was feeling slightly dizzy the entire day, and after dinner I had to spend some time by the toilet due to feeling heavily nausiated (spelling?) and shaking. I haven't thrown up in over ten years, I feel like I've forgotten how to do it. It seems my body still wants to try every now and then however... After a while I fell asleep and went to bed as soon as I woke up. Today I've been feeling slightly dizzy and nausious the entire day and couldn't really squeeze down much food during the dinner. I might be doomed to the horrible fate of feasting on salad for a few days. >.>

On top of everything I haven't been able to sleep for more than 5 hours/night this last week. It's getting pretty bothersome, but at least it's moments like these that make you appriciate good health all the more.

So, I visited the front page of Beyond Unreal a few moments ago and stumbled upon the following link. [link]

They are comparing Unreal Engine 3, a three (or more?) year old engine with the yet unreleased CryEngine 3. Now, I believe it's fairly obvious that that CryEngine would be the victor here (Unless the developers really manage to screw it UP). UE3 is three years old and CE3 isn't even released yet.

But how are they comparing the engines? Well, certainly not very acurately.

The first screenshot shown is probably the "most" acurate as they are both jungle settings. But still, the textures and materials are different, the lighting is different etc... The only way to truly compare engines with screenshots would be to render the EXACT SAME SCENE with either engine once. That would require the same models, materials, light setting etc which isn't done here at all. Some of the scenes compared with one another aren't even comparable!

I mean, in one screenshot there's a scene rendered in CE3 showing a fortress on a cliff above an ocean. It is night and rainy. The UE3 screenshot compared with this one is a bridge built from completely different material, different color, dawn and no rain. What made them compare these two? There's nothing to compare! The worst is probably the last picture where they compare the paralax mapping material (Which is a 2d-shader applied to a plain surface, made to look 3-dimensional). UE3 has this feature too, but instead they choose to compare it with a friggin' machine gun, and the ground isn't even paralax mapped! Those small pebbles are all modelled, they're polygons! They're actually comparing a 2d-material with a 3d-model? The hell?

The article doesn't bring up any specs either, so unless you've used both engines you won't really know what they each excell at or what their downsides are!

What I've gathered so far about CryEngine 2 (Yes, the OLD engine) is that it renders most things realtime. Of-course that also makes it a lot heavier for the CPU/GPU. UE3 on the other hand uses static lighting for the most part which means it can cast beautiful shadows with almost no performance loss. Static lightmaps however can't be used to create dynamic shadows which means that things like dynamic day/night cycle is a no go unless the developers can find a workaround (which usually can be found with a little creativity. Still it's more time consuming than letting the engine handle it for you instantly.).

However, full dynamic features will eat away your FPS and the engine will have to compensate that in some other way unless you want that FPS hit. Sometimes that means less detail in the environment, level of detail scaling (LOD) or a maximum render distance for objects. These can also be worked around depending on what kind of game and levels you are making.

What I'm saying is that whether you want your engine to look as good and realistic as possible or run as optimized as possible, you're going to run into different sorts of problems. All engines have their ups and downs after all and the article doesn't bring any of it UP.

It's frightening how ignorant some people commenting to that article are. Seriously, if you don't know anything about game development, DON'T OPEN YOUR MOUTH!
Someone even said he prefered CE3 because the TEXTURES in UE3 didn't look as crisp.
...
If you import those very same textures into UE3 they'd look IDENTICAL. If you however wanted to create materials (shaders) I wouldn't be surprised if there'd be differences. I remember some really impressive paralax mapping in one of the levels in Crysis, questions is, would they look as impressive in UE3?
The same guy even took character design into question when comparing the engines. That's art design and has NOTHING to do with the engine.

The third image in the article compares a large building rendered in CE3 with an old temple with some slight vegetation, rendered in UE3. Here the UE3 image looks a LOT better than the CE3 image. This doesn't have anything to do with the engines specificly, but rather the scene that has been set up poorly. Had the same scene been rendered with UE3 I doubt it would have looked any better.

So where did I want to go with all this? Well, don't open your mouth unless what you know what you're talking about (I half expect someone to tell me I'm wrong now! XD ).

Also, I've been sick this last week and just feel bored out of my mind. Probably wouldn't have bothered writing all this otherwise. >.>

Anyways, that's enough of my silly ranting. Why the hell are you readint this anyway?

Me and two friends of mine will be paying London and Birmingham a brief visit next week. Metallica will be playing in Birmingham and we thought we'd swing by London as well. We've obviously got some stuff planned, but if you happen to know of a nice bar or pub I'd be happy to hear about it.

Who knows, maybe we'll even run into an UP'er or two?