Tuesday, April 26th, 2011 Posted by Jim Thacker

Crytek to release free CryEngine 3 SDK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFISZHEME1Y
The current CryEngine 3 demo. Crytek’s new SDK will provide access to the full feature set of the engine.

Crytek is to release a free, Unreal Development Kit-style SDK for CryEngine 3.

The SDK, which the developer says will be fully documented and give access to all the functionality of the latest version of the engine, is due for release in August.

The news was announced in an open letter from Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli, posed on www.crymod.com. Ironically, the forums are currently down for maintenance, but we can’t imagine that the response from the community will be anything other than favourable.

Read the full text of the open letter below.

CEVAT YERLI’S OPEN LETTER
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