The CryEngine team has published a sneak peak at upcoming developments on the way to their 3D graphics engine. According to a new blog post CryEngine 5.4 will arrive by the end of July. Between now and then interested parties will be able to track the progress of this update via GitHub.
Perhaps the most interesting new facet of CryEngine 5.4 is its proposed support for the Vulkan renderer. According to the blog post, after work was completed on its DirectX 12 implementation, "the team has been hard at work implementing a Vulkan renderer". If you cruise over to GitHub you will already be able to take a peek at the code in Code/RenderDll/XRenderD3D9/Vulkan/. However, the code is currently not functional. The CryEngine team has just published it so that developers can review the code whilst it is is implemented and the 5.4 release is stabilised.
In other news that might be important going forward, CryEngine 5.4 expands upon the new entity component system introduced in 5.3, "exposing a large amount of new standard components such as the Character Controller Component for FPS style physics and animation".
Later on in the blog post it was confirmed that release 5.4 will come with the source code to Crytek's Sandbox editor. When 5.4 becomes available there will be "nothing hidden and no limits to what you can do" with the editor, we are assured.
Upcoming Crytek title Hunt: Showdown
As a reminder, CryEngine is a cutting-edge, 100 per cent royalty-free games development platform which can help you craft visually impressive games for PC, Xbox One, PS4, Linux, and Oculus Rift. This latest development could mean that upcoming Crytek titles will support Vulkan out of the box.
