For the last year I've piddled about with making a game. That game in question is a port/update/tribute to 2001's Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer. I've taught myself to model, rig and animate. To do level design and even some coding. However, what took most of my time was the so called "engine evaluation" phase. I've tried nearly every engine under the sun, from idTech 3 to Neoaxis. All of them (with perhaps the exception of OpenWolf) fall short in some fashion of being able to easily reproduce RtCW in a modern context.
I have this mantra now where I say to myself over and over: "I will not use CryEngine, I will not use CryEngine," because when it comes down to it I *really* want to use CryEngine. It's truly a beautiful thing. Realtime global illumination is amazing. The things you can do with physics are awesome. Also, the experience feels "tight" and robust in a way that previous engines, such as Unreal Engine 3, just don't. The animations are more fluid, the visual grammar more engaging, and the sense of "realness" more palpable in CryEngine games. Crytek has clearly done a huge amount of work delivering to the world the first real next-gen engine. Experiencing Crysis 2's opening scene (the submarine flood) in DirectX 11 mode with ultra textures makes UE3 cutscenes feel like puppet theater.
The problem is, of course, when you actually try to make a game on it. This is not a thing for mere mortals. I have at my disposal no less than three programming books on C++ and Lua for reference. I've had about 6 months of experience programming C and Python and have a basic idea of what is happening when I look at normal game code (i.e. not rendering code). The actual code in the CryEngine is great. Things are logically organized and, as far as other people have told me, internally consistent. The problem is there is absolutely no documentation. The constituent parts are there. You could script an entire game type using just the extant Lua scripts. The problem is that nobody knows what most of them do. Nobody knows on the forum, the documentation is missing the most important files (for me) and the only recent book that discusses CryEngine has exactly 3 chapters devoted to programming. I could figure it out, sure, if *all* I did was CryEngine for 6 months. But I have to rig, I have to model, and most importantly, I need to make a game. I've learned the hard way that nobody else seriously wants to do this except for me, so I soldier on.
So sure, UDK may be clunky and smell like Icy Hot and Werther's Original on account of its advanced age, but every line of code I've looked at so far has had some sort of documentation. Because of the mountain of tutorials available I can visualize what and how I'm going to do this in UDK. In CryEngine I'd be better off with a Ouji Board and the ghost of Dennis Ritchie.
Please Crytek, hire someone to write documentation and tutorials. Seriously, it took 250 people to make Crysis 2, which was about the most mediocre title gameplay wise I've played in the last 5 years. Maybe you could devote 2 or 3 to documentation, so someone could use your beautiful engine for something else than heavily scripted monotony.
