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CryENGINE 3.4 released, brings enhanced DX11 support

by Alistair Lowe on 16 April 2012, 11:20

Tags: Crytek

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Since the release of the UDK (Unreal Developer Kit) by Epic back in 2009, for the first time a AAA game engine had been opened up, allowing for the creation of completely new, high-end game content, going beyond the previous trend that only allowed for modding of pre-existing game titles. Later, Epic allowed the commercialisation of UDK titles, enabling inde developers to make full use of the engine, without the need for scores of money exceeding £80k for licensing.

Whilst we all know of many games which utilise Epic's Unreal technology, we know of far less when it comes to Crytek's CryENGINE, though with one or two exceptional titles such as Crysis 2 popping into mind. This unbalanced situation could change in the future, however, as more recently, Crytek followed Epic's lead and opened up its AAA game engine to inde developers with the CryENGINE 3 SDK, again, applying a reasonable licensing model for commercial use, which, has helped to spread word of the Unreal alternative.

Recently, Crytek announced its first major update to the SDK, version 3.4, bringing with it a heap of new features and enhancements, taking it beyond the technology witnessed in the Crysis 2 DX11 patch. Among the new features are:

  • Revamped DirectX 11 Tessellation
    • Phong, PN triangles, displacement maps, with no need for pre-tessellated assets.
  • Multi-layer Navigation Mesh
    • Easy to use multi-layer path finding system for AI.
  • Improved Skin Rendering and Eye Shader
    • New approach to sub-surface scattering offers more realistic rendering, more fine control over elements such as oiliness, iris control, colours, pupil dilation, tessellation and parallax support.
  • Advanced/Improved/Extended Glass Shader
    • Support for dirt layer, differential fog and refraction blur.
  • Other minor enhancements
    • Improved glass rendering.
    • Geometric light beams.
    • Point light shafts.
    • Time of day based filmic HDR tone mapping.
    • Curves and key tangents for time of day.
    • User controlled per cascade shadow bias through time of day.
    • Improved transitions between levels of detail.
    • Volumetric fog features extended and improved.
    • Improved distance cloud shading.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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And we all know that people with too much spare time often do way better work than those who get paid to do the same job (ie. cracking, piracy etc.), all we need to do is find some bored coders, match them with the thousands of amazing artists out there, combine with some comic writers and we could have a small pay AAA title on our hands :D
Awesome news, I really like CryENGINE but have been disappointed with the Crysis games that used them. It will be great to have another widely used engine besides Unreal to provide more variety. I really wish Valve would do something like this with their Source engine as well.

Perhaps the next era in game development is just using engines that are supported by the likes of Unreal and Crytek; hopefully it leads to better quality content in games.
Does this version also render tessellated water where it can't be seen and create million poly jersey barriers? :p
kalniel
Does this version also render tessellated water where it can't be seen and create million poly jersey barriers? :p

It does tessellated planets you cannot see above the skybox in the game!! :p
Out of this World! that is just WOW. I agree with you ExHail we just need more companies to fully utilze the CryEngine in their games, it can deliver so much, i'm bored to death of the Unreal engine, and their bogus Samaritan demo, those graphics wont see the daylight until 2014