CryEngine4 Teaser Demo

[TechBoyJK]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vF1zjDSqPoo

Frankfurt am Main (Germany) August 21, 2013 – Crytek have ushered in a new era for their state-of-the-art CRYENGINE technology, with the launch of the new CRYENGINE; an ever-evolving technology service, with always up to date access to the latest features in CRYENGINE for commercial game licensees.

CRYENGINE users will also benefit from the coming together of Crytek’s Engine Licensing and Research & Development teams; a move designed to double the level of one-to-one care game licensees can tap into, in essence offering Crytek’s R&D as a service for developers using the new CRYENGINE.

On top of these changes, the new CRYENGINE supports development on current and next generation consoles (Xbox One, PlayStation®4, and Wii U™), alongside PC, with further platforms to be added in the near future.

In line with the new services, the all-in-one development solution will no longer be identified by version numbers; reflecting the fact that constant updates and upgrades are always being applied to keep CRYENGINE at the forefront of its field.

Areil Cai, Director of Business Development – CRYENGINE said: "Supplying an engine is not about delivering a static piece of software. It’s about Crytek being an R&D team for our game licensees; providing the latest, greatest technology we can, all the time. As an industry, we’re all looking to deliver games as a service now – and we feel the same approach can be taken with game engines. Today's announcement reflects this progress, as well as our ongoing commitment to making sure CRYENGINE® licensees always stay well ahead of the game."

Also commenting on Crytek's announcement, Carl Jones, Business Development Director at Crytek, said: "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; all of this while maintaining our first principal: that making games should be real-time, all the time. CRYENGINE is a new engine from Crytek – and it always will be!”

This week also sees a major update to Crytek's free CRYENGINE® SDK; granting non-commercial users access to a raft of the new features that recently helped to make Crysis 3 a visual benchmark for gaming. It is two years since the launch of the free CRYENGINE® SDK. In that time, the engine has been downloaded over five million times and is used for non-commercial projects every day by a constantly growing community and more than 400 universities. The update to the free SDK will take user feedback on board and remove some restrictions, which prevented users from working offline.

These changes to the CRYENGINE service are being marked with a new website which can be seen at www.cryengine.com, and a new tech trailer that you can watch below. Over time, the site will grow to offer new options for game developers, and will ultimately become the central hub for all official CRYENGINE content online.



About Crytek

Crytek GmbH (“Crytek”) is an independent company at the forefront of the interactive entertainment industry, and is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of gaming by creating standout experiences for Xbox 360, PlayStation®3, PC, mobile devices and games-as-service using their cutting-edge 3D-Game-Technology, CRYENGINE®.

The company’s headquarters are in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). Crytek also has studios in Kiev (Ukraine), Budapest (Hungary), Sofia (Bulgaria), Seoul (South Korea), Nottingham (UK), Shanghai (China), Istanbul (Turkey) and Austin (USA).

Since its foundation in 1999, Crytek has consistently been recognized for excellence in its field, earning accolades such as the 2011 Develop Award for Best Independent Studio, and two Red Dot Design Awards (in 2010 and 2013). Its multi-award winning games include Far Cry®, Crysis® (awarded best PC Game of E3 2007 and Best Technology at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards), Crysis Warhead® (awarded Best Graphics Technology at IGN Best of 2008 Awards), Crysis® 2 (awarded Best Shooter of E3 2010 and Gamescom 2010), Crysis® 3 and Warface (awarded Best Social/Casual/Online Game of Gamescom 2012). For more information, please visit www.crytek.com.

 

[AFurryReptile]

Color me impressed. The wind moving objects around, the evaporation of water, the physics on that boat... seriously awesome.

Glad to see Crytek pushing some innovation again.

 

[toughtrasher]

Wind was definitely an effect I can woo for.

Definitely loving the improvements in graphical technology

 

[VulgarDisplay]

The thing I never understood is why so few games actually use Cryengine. I wish it had the market share that unreal does.

 

[Dankk]

The thing I never understood is why so few games actually use Cryengine. I wish it had the market share that unreal does.

I think Unreal is cheaper, easier to use, and it still looks very good, which is why so many people still use it.

 

[toughtrasher]

I think Unreal is cheaper, easier to use, and it still looks very good, which is why so many people still use it.

Was just about to say that..

Btw, I heard some ignorant fellas saying the Unreal engine is getting outdated. I was lke

 

[flopper]

Color me impressed. The wind moving objects around, the evaporation of water, the physics on that boat... seriously awesome.

Glad to see Crytek pushing some innovation again.

Frostbite 3 BF4 + a host of other games.

 

[BrightCandle]

A few games do use it but so far they don't seem all that able to extract the good looks and performance out of it that Crysis does. Mechwarrior online is an example of such a game but it performs terribly and doesn't look all that great despite using the Crytech engine. The difficulty in getting to the performance and the issues that some companies are clearly having with getting the engine to work well might well be the reason why its not all that popular. If one dev popped out a great looking game on it on a small budget then it would do better, but that so far hasn't happened as far as I know.

I was impressed with the puddles especially, they looked very good under rain and the reflections and colour of the tarmac underneath looked really good. The cardboard still looks too flat and plastic like and the buildings in the distance also seemed to lack detail as well. Presumably the later is due to a relatively short distance tessellation LOD setting which is there for performance reasons. Certainly looks like a decent step forward, assuming someone can use it and make a game that looks like that I'll be happy.

 

[SunnyD]

I think Unreal is cheaper, easier to use, and it still looks very good, which is why so many people still use it.

Lower barrier to entry plus their scripting language has a much larger established userbase and training materials. Hell, there are some universities that teach the unrealscript language for their 3D departments.

 

[Stringjam]

I believe the new SDK is going to release this week. Looking forward to downloading it and spending way too much time playing around......especially with the dynamic weather system. I've always found the CE SDK a huge bit of fun, and easy to use (especially with so many great CryDev member tutorials regarding nearly every aspect of the system).

I believe Unreal has been more straight forward and cheaper concerning licensing, which is most likely why you haven't seen much in the way of CryEngine games (and it seems the indie license has had problems of obfuscation, which I believe Crytek may be working towards remedying).

I think most developers really don't push the engine to the levels you see demoed from engine designers. I also haven't played any Unreal games that come even close to Epic's demo reels. I would guess it just isn't in their budget or best interest to spend that much time extracting every bit of tech available in the engine when their intent is to focus on making the overall game.

CryEngine wasn't even available for license when most developers had started using Unreal to make their games, so it just makes sense that they would stick with what they're skilled at / comfortable with using instead of learning a completely new SDK.

I think we'll probably start to see more CE titles in the next few years, Star Citizen being a prime example. Unfortunately, one of the showcase titles for the new engine technology will probably be Ryse, which is a console exclusive.

 

[SLU Aequitas]

Star Citizen makes good use of the engine

 

[Blitzvogel]

Looks to be more focused on world simulation than graphics improvement (but proper simulation is key to improving visuals and immersion!).

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Some nice effects, the evaporation of water I really liked.

 

[Zenoth]

Great engine, yet so few developers [will] use it.

CryEngine 4 will be used for what... Crysis 4 and ... one or two others, maybe? That's if we're lucky (I guess), and perhaps one of those extra titles will just happen to be Crysis 5 or some Crysis spin-off sort of game that has nothing to do with the base story and send us in some alternate reality similar to FarCry 3 Blood Dragon. Meh, time will tell.

The same goes for Dunia (FarCry 2), it has roots from CryEngine (and was then modified) but was mostly created for FC2, then used for the Avatar game and finally FC3. Are there any other Dunia-based games out there? It's a good engine but... so many just don't consider it. I'd say that back in 2005/2006 or so when we first saw the DX9 pictures of STALKER I, for one, thought that the X-Ray engine would have a good future, and upon playing SoC back in 2007 I could only think "Well! this is actually a pretty solid engine especially for FPS gaming!". Next thing you know... yeah, pretty much forgotten by now.

Unreal Engine 3 (and 4) on the other hand is being (will be) used by a very large portion of the gaming industry, and it's not just on consoles, I'm no even referring to ports. According to that list it's kinda of hard to imagine that "another engine" out there would even be able to remotely approach such a market share, be it CryEngine 4, Dunia 2, Source 2 or even Frostbite 2 and 3.

And maybe Source doesn't have a high number of games, but the ones under its belt (I guess can be argued) are good. From H-L2 to the Episodes, L4D and L4D2, TF2 and Counter-Strike Source, and of course a good bunch of mods out there running under Source some of which are known Indie games. And lately I've learned that Titanfall supposedly uses a "modified" (maybe heavily so) version of Source and seeing the game in motion is rather nice, they've done a good job with the otherwise aging Source. And arguably not aging well by now, although in my opinion TF2 still looks fabulous. But that's probably due to the Pixar movie art style that alleviates how really old it'd look otherwise (yet again, if the game-play is there you kinda tend to forget about graphics being old, although I know not many think that way but whatever, to each their own).

There's one thing to consider though, is that the Unreal Engine technologies have been with us in the gaming since... oh boy, quite some time. From Unreal Tournament '99 to this day that engine has been through so much evolution and revolution that it was bound to be part - in and of itself - of those moments in gaming history, it played its important role in "building" our games (well, "our games" I.E. a crap load of them over the years). Something like this can also easily be said about and attributed to id Tech engines over the years from the first step of DOOM and Quake to RAGE and eventually DOOM 4. Although for sure it seems still very difficult for OpenGL to pierce through the industry.

So, does CryEngine 4 look good? Absolutely.

Will we see 20+, 50+ or 100+ games using CE4 by one or two years time from now? I highly doubt it.

 

[Red Storm]

Dat puddle.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I think another reason, maybe someone hinted at it, but I didnt see it mentioned specifically, is that Unreal is fairly easy on resources, but still gives decent visuals. Some with high end systems appreciate CryEngine's high system requirements, but developers designing a game for a wide variety of systems may see it as a disadvantage.

 

[kreactor]

hopefully they fix the dainty like, elbows out running style aka "advanced character animation" feature from cry3 engine @0:32

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD9oVWOBFbs

 

[Atomic Playboy]

The weather and puddle effects are pretty cool. But they also seem pointless. Take, for example, the evaporation of a puddle as the weather shifts from rain to sunshine. Neat effect. But how long does that process take in the real world? A couple hours? Who is going to sit in a game watching a puddle slowly evaporate? No one. Literally not one person on Earth, because if we wanted to see that, we could go outside and do it ourselves. And if they speed it up in the game, it just looks fake. So I don't really get how implementing that sort of feature in a game improves it in any way. It's something that you'll never see unless the underlying gameplay is so incredibly dull that you'd literally rather watch a puddle evaporate.

 

[toughtrasher]

Great engine, yet so few developers [will] use it.

CryEngine 4 will be used for what... Crysis 4 and ... one or two others, maybe? That's if we're lucky (I guess), and perhaps one of those extra titles will just happen to be Crysis 5 or some Crysis spin-off sort of game that has nothing to do with the base story and send us in some alternate reality similar to FarCry 3 Blood Dragon. Meh, time will tell.

The same goes for Dunia (FarCry 2), it has roots from CryEngine (and was then modified) but was mostly created for FC2, then used for the Avatar game and finally FC3. Are there any other Dunia-based games out there? It's a good engine but... so many just don't consider it. I'd say that back in 2005/2006 or so when we first saw the DX9 pictures of STALKER I, for one, thought that the X-Ray engine would have a good future, and upon playing SoC back in 2007 I could only think "Well! this is actually a pretty solid engine especially for FPS gaming!". Next thing you know... yeah, pretty much forgotten by now.

Unreal Engine 3 (and 4) on the other hand is being (will be) used by a very large portion of the gaming industry, and it's not just on consoles, I'm no even referring to ports. According to that list it's kinda of hard to imagine that "another engine" out there would even be able to remotely approach such a market share, be it CryEngine 4, Dunia 2, Source 2 or even Frostbite 2 and 3.

And maybe Source doesn't have a high number of games, but the ones under its belt (I guess can be argued) are good. From H-L2 to the Episodes, L4D and L4D2, TF2 and Counter-Strike Source, and of course a good bunch of mods out there running under Source some of which are known Indie games. And lately I've learned that Titanfall supposedly uses a "modified" (maybe heavily so) version of Source and seeing the game in motion is rather nice, they've done a good job with the otherwise aging Source. And arguably not aging well by now, although in my opinion TF2 still looks fabulous. But that's probably due to the Pixar movie art style that alleviates how really old it'd look otherwise (yet again, if the game-play is there you kinda tend to forget about graphics being old, although I know not many think that way but whatever, to each their own).

There's one thing to consider though, is that the Unreal Engine technologies have been with us in the gaming since... oh boy, quite some time. From Unreal Tournament '99 to this day that engine has been through so much evolution and revolution that it was bound to be part - in and of itself - of those moments in gaming history, it played its important role in "building" our games (well, "our games" I.E. a crap load of them over the years). Something like this can also easily be said about and attributed to id Tech engines over the years from the first step of DOOM and Quake to RAGE and eventually DOOM 4. Although for sure it seems still very difficult for OpenGL to pierce through the industry.

So, does CryEngine 4 look good? Absolutely.

Will we see 20+, 50+ or 100+ games using CE4 by one or two years time from now? I highly doubt it.

Eh, at least we get a better looking Crysis 4, even though all the previous Crysis games have been phenomenal.

 

[Red Storm]

The weather and puddle effects are pretty cool. But they also seem pointless. Take, for example, the evaporation of a puddle as the weather shifts from rain to sunshine. Neat effect. But how long does that process take in the real world? A couple hours? Who is going to sit in a game watching a puddle slowly evaporate? No one. Literally not one person on Earth, because if we wanted to see that, we could go outside and do it ourselves. And if they speed it up in the game, it just looks fake. So I don't really get how implementing that sort of feature in a game improves it in any way. It's something that you'll never see unless the underlying gameplay is so incredibly dull that you'd literally rather watch a puddle evaporate.

I think the point is to go for realism. Nobody said you had to go and watch the puddle evaporate, but if I knew the game engine was doing all that stuff in the world while I played rather than it just being a static puddle that would never change no matter what? Games that use CryEngine are the ones where I actually expect and appreciate the attention to detail.

 

[Stringjam]

Great engine, yet so few developers [will] use it.

CryEngine 4 will be used for what... Crysis 4 and ... one or two others, maybe?

I believe the Crysis progression may actually be over (according to some comments made by Crytek).

That's fine with me, as I would rather see them develop a totally new IP....I think the whole Crysis concept (and I LOVED Crysis and Warhead) is tired and soulless.

Cevat Yerli mentions that they started developing a game a few years back that seemed very similar to "The Last of Us" in concept, because he wanted to create a game with more of an immersive, emotional experience, but for some unnamed reason decided to scrap the effort (why!!!???). We can see some of the results of it with the "Forest" level that comes with the free SDK download, as I believe it is comprised of a lot of assets from said game.

Here is a very interesting read about Yerli and the formation of Crytek.

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/7/11/4503782/crytek-x-isle-redemption


I think Crytek is going to go down as a great engine designer, and I think you're going to see more studios use the engine as the licensing gets worked out, but I really dislike the direction they're going with game development. Perhaps it's better if they end up like Epic.....just provide the tools and let somebody else make something great with them.

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

The weather and puddle effects are pretty cool. But they also seem pointless. Take, for example, the evaporation of a puddle as the weather shifts from rain to sunshine. Neat effect. But how long does that process take in the real world? A couple hours? Who is going to sit in a game watching a puddle slowly evaporate? No one. Literally not one person on Earth, because if we wanted to see that, we could go outside and do it ourselves. And if they speed it up in the game, it just looks fake. So I don't really get how implementing that sort of feature in a game improves it in any way. It's something that you'll never see unless the underlying gameplay is so incredibly dull that you'd literally rather watch a puddle evaporate.

I think youre going about it the wrong way

Obviously no one is gonna sit there and watch the puddle, but what might happen is you run past the puddle, and 5 minutes later you backtrack and notice the puddle isnt there anymore
It gives the feeling of an ever-changing/dynamic environment that feels "alive"

Stuff like dynamic weather systems add a ton of immersion to a game (Square added that to FFXIV in the latest beta and I loved it), its great to see how the same area looks completely different depending on whether its raining, sunny, foggy, etc

Anyway as for this demo, I liked it, though the Unreal 4 demo shown a few months ago was even more impressive
Fact is like many say, UE just works, it delivers great visuals with great performance... For instance that tech demo was being run on a single 680, yet it blew away any current game by a large factor

Btw I assume most people arent aware but Cryengine seems to be used a lot more in asian MMOs nowadays... Im not sure what lead them to pick it up but, aside from Aion using it a few years ago, Cabal 2 also uses Cryengine 3 and there was some other upcoming chinese MMO based around it

Its weird, I guess, not the first engine I would have in mind when making an MMO

 

[Stringjam]

Downloaded the new SDK tonight. It is now summer in the forest. Crytek loves their veggies.

 

[toughtrasher]

Downloaded the new SDK tonight. It is now summer in the forest. Crytek loves their veggies.