Friday 29 April 2011

CryENGINE 3 in Universities

Thanks to Lawrence Shaw for pointing out CryTek's recent press announcement celebrating the great academic uptake of CryEngine.



CryENGINE 3 - Great News

Great news for all CryENGINE fans (of which I count myself one) as CryTek announce the imminent release of a free Crysis 2 editor and CryENGINE 3 SDK.  The announcement was made by CryTek CEO Cevat Yerlion the CryMODForum.


Full text of this exciting development here and below


Be Free... Be Creative... Be the Developer

An open letter to the Crytek Modding Community.

Hello to all of you.
Here at Crytek we value our community, and we love what you do with our engine. In recent times our focus has been heavily on the development of Crysis 2, however our modding community has been, and remains, very important to us.

So, I wanted to tell you about our plans for supporting you in the future with some really exciting news, which I want to share with you now. Modding with the most powerful game engine is coming back!
We want to see what you guys can do with CryENGINE 3 and we hope we'll be as amazed with the things you create as we have been over the past few years. This time around, we're going to do things in a different way - offering you the right tools to achieve your vision.

First of all, we will be launching an Editor for Crysis 2 early in summer. This will allow you to build new maps, items and more custom content for Crysis 2. For teams looking for even more creative freedom, we have another option: The free CRYENGINE SDK.
Be Free

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! You just register, download the SDK with a personalized license key and you're good to go!
Be Creative

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.
Be The Developer

With all this power in your hands - we know you're going to do some amazing things with the engine, so we're working out how best to support you.

We'll also be sharing our documentation with you, which is written by the developers of the engine, and we'll be giving you a new and improved crymod.com. We'll update the Free CryENGINE SDK regularly, to make sure you have access to all the advances we make to CryENGINE 3.

If you want to use it to make a game to launch commercially, we'd like to help you with that. If you want to take your product down a traditional commercial route, we will offer an innovative low cost licensing model if you want to release your game digitally.

If you're looking to use CryENGINE for non-gaming purposes, we'll have a per-seat business model for the engine - please enquire at mycryengine.com for further details.

So to go over the details again:
Our next release will be the Crysis 2 Editor, this is for those of you who want to create content for Crysis 2. In August 2011, we will launch our Free CryENGINE SDK for all of you who want to create totally new content on CryENGINE 3. If you just want to make fun, free projects, you can do that free of charge. If you want to try and commercialise your game, we'll be here to help you with that.

I truly value the contribution you have all made to our company and I hope we can continue giving back to you in future.

All the best,

Cevat Yerli

CEO & President of Crytek


Thursday 14 April 2011

Igloo: Games and Installation Art

This week I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the work of artists Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli a.k.a. igloo who, in their own words create installations, video works, online projects & performances which have been shown in galleries and festivals worldwide.

Their installation VISITOR is currently at the Djangoly Gallery, Nottingham. Inspired by experiences of the Canadian Rockies, VISITOR fuses art and games, with part of the installation Vermilion Lake comprising a full-scale replica of a trappers cabin housing an interactive virtual environment navigated by visitors by the physical means of a rowing boat.



This is a fascinating and hugely creative use of game technology to engage with real and imagined landscape in a visually and physically involving way.  In the words of Richard Ducker Curator of the Fieldgate Gallery "The worlds they create are total simulacrums: there is no separation between the invented & the real, the site & the represented, the local & the imagined...Their work engages the particular of the site while undermining its place, the original & point of departure become one in a conceptual unravelling."