After deciding that Unity is my Engine of choice, a new contender threw their hat in the ring. Apparently Crysis is going to be freely available in August.
“In August 2011 we will be launching a free CryEngine SDK. If you want to use it for fun, like all our previous MOD SDKs it will be completely free of charge, to anyone who wants to play with it,” he added.
“We’ll be giving you access to the latest, greatest version of CryEngine 3 – the same engine we use internally, the same engine we give to our licensees, the same engine that powers Crysis 2.
“This will be a complete version of our engine, including C++ code access, our content exporters (including our LiveCreate real-time pipeline), shader code, game sample code from Crysis 2, script samples, new improved Flowgraph and a whole host of great asset examples, which will allow teams to build complete games from scratch for PC.”Documentation, written by those who made the engine, will also be available for all, Crytek said.
To be honest, this doesn’t affect my decision in the slightest. These mod turned engine releases normally are supported and documented so poorly as to be useless. More importantly, iOS and Android are IMHO the golden goose of the indy game markets, while Crysis is squarely aimed at the high end PC and console market. Of course, we still have no idea what the commercial license costs will be.
That said, pretty cool to have another entrant in the field, options are never a bad thing. Nobody sane would ever question the capability of the CryEngine.
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