CryEngine
A game engine designed by Crytek, used in Far Cry, Crysis, and many third-party titles.
CryEngine (stylized as CRYENGINE) is a game engine designed by the German game developer Crytek. It has been used in all of their titles with the initial version being used in Far Cry, and continues to be updated to support new consoles and hardware for their games. It has also been used for many third-party games under Crytek's licensing scheme, including Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 and SNOW. Warhorse Studios uses a modified version of the engine for their medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Ubisoft maintains an in-house, heavily modified version of CryEngine from the original Far Cry called Dunia, which is used in their later iterations of the Far Cry series. The Dunia engine would in turn be further modified and used in games such as The Crew 2. According to various anonymous reports in April 2015, CryEngine was licensed to Amazon for $50–70 million. Consequently, in February 2016, Amazon released its own reworked and extended version of CryEngine under the name of Amazon Lumberyard. In June 2021, through Amazon Lumberyard, the open-source Open 3D Engine is based on CryEngine.
Quick Facts
- Developer
- Crytek
- First showcased in
- Crysis (2007)
- Studio headquarters
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Engine type
- Real-time 3D rendering and game engine
- Signature feature
- Photorealistic lighting
- water
- and foliage rendering
- Availability
- Licensed to third parties; later versions offered free
Lore & Background
CryEngine 1 was first developed by Crytek as a technology demo for Nvidia. Recognizing the demo's potential, Crytek expanded it into the full first-person shooter Far Cry, rather than retroactively converting the demo into a game. When video cards with support for 3.0 pixel and vertex shaders were released, Crytek released version 1.2 of the engine which used some of the capabilities for better graphics. Later the company developed CryEngine version 1.3, which added support for HDR lighting. The engine has been licensed to NCsoft for their MMORPG, Aion: The Tower of Eternity. On March 30, 2006, Ubisoft acquired all intellectual property rights to the Far Cry franchise and a perpetual license to use the original CryEngine from Far Cry. Ubisoft later developed a heavily modified version of this engine, known internally as the Dunia Engine, for their subsequent Far Cry titles. CryEngine 2 is used in Crytek's game Crysis, and an updated version in Crysis Warhead, a side story of Crysis. It was first licensed out to French company IMAGTP who specializes in architectural and urban-planning communication. The purpose of licensing the engine was to create a program to allow clients to see exactly what a building or other structure would look like before any actual construction was started. On May 11, 2007, Crytek announced that they would be using the engine to create a game based on their new intellectual property. It is also confirmed that it would not be a part of Crysis and in fact may not even be a first-person shooter. On September 17, 2007, Ringling College of Art & Design became the first higher education institution in the world to license CryEngine 2 for educational purposes. Crytek introduced CryEngine 3 at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, held from March 25 to March 27 and demonstrated it on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles. The new engine was being developed for use on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii U.
Reader's Guide
The CryEngine software development kit (SDK), originally called Sandbox Editor, is the current version of the level editor used to create levels for CryEngine by Crytek. Tools are also provided within the software to facilitate scripting, animation, and object creation. It has been included with various Crytek games (including, but not limited to, Crysis and Far Cry), and is used extensively for modding purposes. The editing style is that of the sandbox concept, with the emphasis on large terrains and a free style of mission programming. The editor can also construct indoor settings. As opposed to editors like UnrealEd (Used in Unreal Engine 1, and Unreal Engine 2), which use a 'subtractive' editing style that takes away areas from a filled world space, the Sandbox has an 'additive' style (like Quake II). Objects are added to an overall empty space. The Sandbox's concentration on potentially huge (in theory, hundreds of square kilometers) terrain, means that it uses an algorithmic form of painting textures and objects onto the landscape. This uses various parameters to define the distribution of textures or types of vegetation. This is intended to save time and make the editing of such large terrains feasible while maintaining the overall 'real world' sandbox-free roaming style. This is different from some editing styles that often use 'fake backdrops' to give the illusion of large terrains. In a fashion somewhat comparable to the 3D Renderer Blender, which can be used for game design, the Sandbox editor has the ability, with a single key press, for the editor to jump straight into the current design (WYSIWYP, 'What You See Is What You Play' Feature). This is facilitated without loading the game as the game engine is already running within the editor. The 'player' view is shown within the 3D portion of the Editor. The Editor also supports all the CryEngine features such as vehicles and physics, scripting, advanced lighting (including real time, moving shadows), Polybump technology, shaders, 3D audio, character inverse kinematics and animation blending, dynamic music, Real Time Soft Particle System and Integrated FX Editor, Deferred Lighting, Normal Maps & Parallax Occlusion Maps, and Advanced Modular AI System.
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