The last version of Crytek's Cryengine that was freely available was 3.4.0, which was released back in April. Since then the company has made a lot of changes to its game creation tools, but none of them have been usable by those without a paid license. Now though, it's updated the free SDK, bringing it to 3.43, with all its tweaks in tow.
According to the Crytek announcement, there are over 1,000 changes with this new release, with such additions as:
- Dedicated Server
- Revamped Launcher menu
- Sandbox Welcome screen, link to docs & smart open
- Terrain precision/smoothing improved
- Many tweaks/fixes/cleanups to the Sandbox UI
- SSAO improvements
- Improved SSR
- Terrain shadow casting support
- Box projected cubemaps
- Improved DX9 support for Environment Probe
And this barely scratches the surface of the pages and pages of updates that Crytek have announced as part of this release. If you want to take a peek at the exhaustive list, head over here. However if you want to jump in and begin crafting your own game, you can download the new SDK here.
As well as being on the cutting edge graphically, one of the big changes production tools like the Cryengine SDK have allowed, is real time level editing where compiling effects aren't necessary, you can simply make a change and watch it appear in-game. It also helped pioneer multi-platform simultaneous development, making cross platform titles much more plausible for developers.
KitGuru Says: Any budding game designers out there want to give this a try? The last time I made anything for a game was a couple of invasion maps with UnrealEd 3.0.