Crytek looks to be targeting the indie scene with a subscription based service mirroring epics announcement at GDC earlier this week.
The new CRYENGINE update expected in May,
Will include the recently announced features such as Physically Based Shading, Geometry Cache and Image Based Lighting.
Whats this mean for developers, Is you can get a competing development platform for half the price of Epics offering, along with a no royalty based subscription service, with maintained updates. It might be hard to hold back the tears of joy! But wait there's more!
The "Engine-as-a-Service" (EaaS) program seems to allow more open access for those projects not looking at making a profit, making the engine extremely attractive to indies and start ups, that have no expected profits or forecasts and generally don't need further publishing expenses.
The other news to note is Crytek partnering with AMD on its Amazing mantle API, this means more direct access to the video hardware in your PC giving Crytek a possibly substantial edge come future tech and graphics performance.
We will keep you posted come the May release with a overview of the engine, the license details and a catalog of supporting development tutorials.
Till then here's some eye candy of the new rendering features in action.
See our Current CRYENGINE Games Listing or If you are working on a CRYENGINE powered Indie title Add your game to our listings.
What engine will you choose?
Wow...
Yeah at first i was like, oh its cheaper than Unreal thats pretty big, but its not out yet :(, however the AMD Mantle caught my eye and i had a read into it.
Basically it AMD's answer to direct x.
I think this is a big deal as if you can develop 3d software and plug into the gpu via the mantle api it could be similar to cuda only much faster.
For 3d artists this could be a big thing, why? If the software the artist uses can produce better more expressible artwork due to more rendering power, skys the limit with what awesomeness will come with 4k and the next gen graphics hardware.
Good looking times ahead for crytek, whats microsoft going to do with direct x and nvidia then?
Graphic tech is overtaking processors, and we are on the front line of this technology as indie gamers and developers, I think that's awesome!
Yeah I think Mantle has a lot of potential. I hope that Nvidia decides to use it, AMD is not making money off of it but Nvidia could lose money because of it.
I don't think Mantle's going to have much of a shelf life personally, Microsoft have answered the threat it posed by announcing DX12 and that includes low level access which was Mantle's only real advantage. Then take into account that Nvidia won't be adopting Mantle and they've pretty much said that just not in those exact words so as soon as DX12 is released I imagine interest in using Mantle will disappear. There not going to want to work on a Mantle release when they got the new Direct x api offering the same sort of advantages and working with all brands, DX covers the whole market, That's basically Nvidia, Intel and AMD as well as the new mobile company that's involved where as Mantle is just AMD which is less than half the market. Using Mantle means developing on two systems to cover the whole market, Double the work which won't be required if DX12 lives up to it's promises.
I think it might have a bit more shelf life than what it might appear.
EA, SquareEnix and Crytek are invested in it. Its backed and developed by AMD. Big boys with lots of dosh. They will want strong competition as it drives prices.
Then you have EPIC, Nvidia and Microsoft on v12 of a API put in place to give windows an edge over mac back when computers were powered by hamsters.
I think the take up will be slower, like linux has been for gaming but in the end, not being bottlenecked into using someone elses API, AMD / Crytek have more freedom to experiment.
Sure at the moment its a performance boost, but i'm keen to see what mantle based 3d tools come out, autodesk switched from dx11 to nitrous rendering and the performance doubled.
If this means you can get twice the detail from cryengine come 4k gen hardware, crytek will have the edge when everyone else is still in HD land.
If direct x cant keep up with what AMD are doing it might last longer than expected.
dx covers the dwindling windows market you mean, opengl covers the whole market.
Cryengine 4 will be on Linux which means OGL compatibility which means it will use Nvidia's new extensions bringing it on par with Mantle in all but multithreaded GPU. But NV's extensions deal with that pretty well.
DirectX 12 got anounced 2 days ago. So much for mantle.
Also from what I read elsewhere the engine remains free but you pay a subscription to get an extended version of it.
Yeah, after reading about this here, Crydev.net I concluded as much too. Kind of like what Unity has. On the other hand, I wonder what UDK's fate will be now that UE4 is here. Will it stay on UE3 or will it eventually come to use UE4 as well?
Like epic and the the udk/ the cryengine sdk will remain free but will not be updated to have the next gen tech.
So you can stay free and use 2012 tech or for the price of a happy meal you can get next gen, its not hard to choose.
Nvidia is not going to wait till mid 2015 for DX12. NV is pushing OGL very hard and will be entrenched by the time DX12 is out. With Mantle adoption and the OGL shift it would make zero sense to use DX12 because it will be platform locked to W9.
DX12 is DOA
Cross platform availability might turn out to be an advantage over DX as well since both the 4th-gen CryENGINE and Mantle API are planned to be available on Linux in the future.
Crytek is dirty bitch. I like it :D
Sorry to ask this pretty dumb question, but what does "royalty free" means?
Free for both commercial and non-commercial.
To copy what Epic said on the Unreal Engine 4. A royalty is what you would pay Epic after you earn money.
You will not pay royalties after publish a game on it. How extensive is that I don't know, haven't ready the new EULA.
En.wikipedia.org
do we get access to source?
Not sure. Star citizen did though.
Their might be different subscription plans.
It's not my favorite engine to work with, though it has cool features and did some stuff already years ago that UE4 is just getting now. But CrySDK has proprietary formats and lots of plugins to work with. I also don't like the shader system as much as in UDK or Unreal 4. More artist-friendly are Unreal and Unity, imho.
And now it seems they are splitting up with AMD versus EPIC (+the rest of the world^^) and NVidia. I'd really like to know if Crytek thinks they can smother the competition, or if it's just a business move. It's either gonna be big or a flop, I think.
Agreed, theres way too much proprietary stuff used with the engine, which makes everything unnecessarily complicated. Even if it may have some nice features, that's a huge putoff.
They have said CE4 is very different to CE3. If you are going on past experience with CE it may be outdated.
This is also why its CRYENGINE now not "CryENGINE 4" also, they registered/trademarked CRYENGINE as the next gen engine so i would imagine you will see support for the CE3 sdk lower, basically the same epic is doing with the udk and unreal4 and unity has sort of done with pro/ new versions, just Crytek are doing it in "Tiers"(tears :P). I'm waiting till may till its cleared up.
Ok ok yaya Cryengine v3.5.8 not to be remotely confused with Cryengine 3. :)
Would be no different then when Nvidia made an "us vs them" issue with PhysX. Just another option for developers to use.
The biggest plus I'm seeing with this engine licensing is that you don't need to keep super-detailed books for royalties.
Let's face it: if you're a Crytek fan you'll be using that engine, if you're an Epic fan you'll be using that engine. The number of indie developers that make serious $$ on these engines isn't that high, just helps them win the engine tech war.
I couldn't find anything about licensing CryEngine and the price. I've just seen "Engine-as-a-Service" (EaaS) and its $9,99 per month. Even it's been a good news, how about the license for whom which wants to sell their own games developed in this engine? Please, if someone could find this information and share the link, it would be very appreciated! thanks
This info will probably come out in May, I couldn't find any direct info also.
Its important to note, theirs been no mention of source code, so this might be why, they are still working out the legalities of a subscription based licensing model.
I would put that idea of a source code to rest at this leasing model. Pay full for source or you can just fiddle if with the tool.
Knowing Crytek, I'll wait to hear some experiences from people first before going into bed with them. It sounds a little good to be true. (I hope someone can show me it's not).
Crytek's CryEngine has always been a state-of-the-art engine with each version they released, hands down AAA quality. However they have always been very vague on licensing ("First make a game, then we'll talk about licenses") and even let several Indie-developers in the dark with not responding to their emails. ( Polycount.com ) Eventually they asked 20% of the game's revenue.
There is no way they are suddenly going to drop this 20% idea. That would be a huge loss of profit. Considering the link I've posted is from 2012, it is not that long ago that Crytek acted like this. So unless they've done a complete overhaul in their management which can be proved, I'm sticking to a different engine.
It's not just all fancy graphics that ease your development. It's the transparency from the licensee that is very important as well.
Soo true!
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The bad part about this is you need a big team of very good artists just to handle the overcomplex asset input. This engine was ment to be a solution for big Studios with FAT money. Im sry cryengine you are not indie friendly.