Today in the Big Brother house, Crytek’s in the diary room …
Numbers are so last year. Crytek’s new CryEngine isn’t going to be called CryEngine 4, it’s just plain ol’ CryEngine. And now the IncGamers content management system is going to shout at me for abusing the keyword ‘CryEngine’ too much.
This new release will, according to the press release, be an “an ever-evolving technology service” which is “always up to date access to the latest features in CryEngine for commercial game licensees.” If I’m reading that correctly, I think it means Crytek will just continually update this latest version of the engine with new stuff, rather than do specific, numerical releases.
Here’s what Crytek’s Carl Jones has to say about this latest version:
Since CryEngine 3 was launched in 2009, we’ve dramatically changed the engine so many times, with so many major new features, it’s not the same engine anymore. We have revolutionised many parts of the engine: we have overhauled our entire lighting system, built movie quality character rendering and animation solutions, vastly improved the speed and effectiveness of our Sandbox editor, and even our rendering has changed with tessellation, pixel accurate displacement mapping and now physical based rendering.
So it’s not so much a totally new engine as a significant rebranding of how Crytek views its technology. Or something. Still, it can do some fancy new stuff all the same.
What Jones doesn’t mention is the magnificent puddle-drying technology that the team has perfected, which you can see in the demo video below. Sure, puddle-drying isn’t really a stand-in for terrific narrative, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have lovely weather effects available for games to use.
