Taradipa Blog

CryENGINE®3 is the first PC, Playstation®3, and Xbox 360™ all-in-one game development solution that is Next-Gen ready with scalable computation and graphics technologies.

Using the CryENGINE®3, you can start the development of your next generation games today. CryENGINE®3 is the only game engine that provides multi-award winning graphics, state-of-the art lighting, physics and AI, out of the box.

The famous CryENGINE®3 Sandbox™ editor is a production proven, third-generation real-time tool suite designed and built by AAA developers. CryENGINE®’s powerful real-time renderer is now even better! DirectX 11 (DX11) support significantly enhances the capabilities of the renderer within CryENGINE®3, allowing for some of the best visuals ever seen.

Below, you'll find just a fraction of the features available in CryENGINE®3!

CryENGINE®3 now supports DX11 hardware accelerated tessellation on all meshes, including animated characters. Artists can now enable tessellation in real-time! CryENGINE®3 features support for three different types of tessellation, all of which can be mixed so as to significantly increase the quality of
asset rendering in-game. With displacement mapping CryENGINE®3 can now represent silhouettes and complex geometric shapes, previously impossible with current generation bump mapping, through displacement mapping.

The other two tessellation methods are designed for mesh refinement, taking a coarse, or low-poly model and using tessellation to create an higher-fidelity and much smoother mesh. As these methods are all editable in real-time in CryENGINE®3 SandboxTM, artists can easily decide which assets should use such features, finding an ideal compromise between visual fidelity and performance.

Reflections are one of the biggest challenges in real-time rendering, particularly for deferred rendering and lighting engines. Before DX11, only reflections for surfaces such as water; or  environment probe reflections have been possible. CryENGINE®3 now introduces a new method: Real-time Local Reflections (RLR). RLR approximates ray-traced HDR reflections local to objects. This  technique allows for any kind of curved surface in the scene to reflect the nearby surroundings  efficiently in real time. This includes immensely complex objects with self-reflections, which are not  feasible with cube-map or planar reflections.

Parallax Occlusion Mapping (POM) returns in CryENGINE®3, optimized for all platforms and can now be used to add self-shadowing and the appearance of depth on all surfaces. CryENGINE®3’s POM efficiently approximates surface displacement in tangent space. Due to it’s low cost on all platforms,  self-shadowing support and simulation of macro details, POM grants a viable alternative to tessellation  on all surfaces.

The CryENGINE® tone-mapper is improved and updated to give users S-Shaped curve color control,  which better mimics the exact behavior of film tone reproduction. This allows for a wider tonal range, improved definition on the dark tones, giving a richer color space for CryENGINE®3 games.

CryENGINE®3’s trademark, benchmark setting water rendering just got better! All water volumes can  now use DX11 hardware tessellation. Mesh geometry is dynamically tessellated, varying by the  distance from the camera. This allows for a very high amount of geometry details close to the camera and eliminates geometry aliasing. Shading has also been updated: now supporting sub-surface  scattering and wave crest foam approximation. CryENGINE®3 water also offers a more accurate  surface normal computation, even allowing shader based ripples to interact with the CryENGINE®  physics system.

CryENGINE®3 features near-reality natural lighting at a low cost on multiple platforms, and creates  soft shadows that dynamically respond to natural movements in real-time. High-resolution,  perspective-correct and volumetric smooth-shadow implementations are also included in  CryENGINE®3.

The unique CryENGINE®3 deferred lighting solution allows the efficient rendering of a vast number of  light sources with per-pixel shading. It can also considerably simplify engine performance tuning  across multiple platforms.

Crytek introduced SSAO in real-time gaming and now enhances it with the new technique of Screen  Space Directional Occlusion (SSDO). SSDO allows any number of lights to be included in the  calculation of Ambient Occlusion (AO); and for the color of all lights to be taken into account. SSDO improves physical lighting accuracy and provides dynamic contact shadows, even from the efficient CryENGINE®3 deferred ambient lights. The new CryENGINE®3 DX11 renderer allows contact shadows
to be cast from every single light source in the game environment!

CryENGINE®3 Sandbox™ gives developers full control over their multi-platform creations in realtime. It features many improved efficiency tools that enable the fastest development of game worlds and  game-play available on PlayStation®3, Xbox 360™ and PC. All features of CryENGINE®3 games can be  produced, edited and played immediately with the “What You See Is What You Play” (WYSIWYP)  system.

Below, you'll find just a fraction of the features available in CryENGINE®3 Sandbox™!

CryENGINE®3’s simple yet powerful visual editing system in gives designers intuitive interfaces to create and control events, triggers and game logic. This lets them build game play systems and  complex levels without needing to write a single script.

The Track View is the embedded Sandbox cut scene editing tool for making interactive movie sequences with time-dependent control over objects and events in CryENGINE®3. Creating cinematic cut scenes and scripted events are both possible, allowing you to sequence objects, animations, and  sounds in a scene that can be triggered in the game, and played either as a detached cutscene from  the third person view, or from the first person perspective of the player in-game.

The time of day can dynamically change during a game mission to reflect the position of the sun and moon, as well as lighting and atmospheric conditions over any predefined day/night cycle, from a  foggy morning sunrise to a fiery sunset or a clear moonlit night. Create visually rich time-of-day  simulation for your game world or its locations and achieve the most realistic or surreal settings.

CryENGINE®3 features the only real-time terrain tool-set that enables the creation of stunning concave environmental features. This lets designers place over-hanging cliffs, caves or tunnels  seamlessly in each level.

The Multi-Layer Navigation Mesh (MNM), is an enhanced dynamic navigation data structure used by AI Agents to path-find through levels. This system is integrated in CryENGINE®3 SandboxTM; designers can simply use the tools to define areas where the navigation mesh should be generated and let the CryENGINE®3 MNM do the rest of the work! MNM also supports real-time dynamic updates in game, so that when an area changes, the navigation mesh updates without delay.

To get the most out of modern multi-core processor architectures, CPU-intensive sub-systems of CryENGINE®3 such as graphics, physics, AI, networking and sound, have been optimized to support multiple processors, including innovative support for PlayStation®3 SPU.

CryENGINE®3 shaders are written once in a high-level language, then compiled automatically to each platform. The shader output is optimized based on the artists’ settings and the 3D environment in which the shader is used. This creates unique, high-performance effects, such as “cloaking” or wet, muddy and frozen surfaces, which can be layered together and combined with other shaders such as metal, glass and a full range of similar visual effects. CryENGINE®3 supports real-time per-pixel lighting, bumpy reflections, refractions, volumetric glow effects and animated textures to simulate effects including windows, bullet holes and shiny surfaces. It also takes advantage of the unified shader architecture of current and next-gen hardware. The combination of deferred lighting and this technology lets CryENGINE®3 avoid the traditional shortcomings of solely using uber shaders.

All environments in CryENGINE®3 can be dynamically physicalized, regardless of their nature (wood, steel, concrete, natural vegetation, cloth and soft body physics). This allows procedural destruction and deformation of as much of the environment as the game requires. All broken objects and parts can be interactive, with realistic properties such as mass or buoyancy applied to all kinds of debris.