Download the free CryEngine Community Edition

A group of CryEngine users led by indie developer Pterosoft Studio have released the CryEngine Community Edition, a free community-made update to Crytek’s AAA game engine.

The release, available as a patch for CryEngine 5.7, adds new features for post-processing renders, and fixes a number of critical issues with the ageing Long Term Support release.

But why does CryEngine need a Community Edition? Won’t Crytek update it itself?
One of the most technically advanced game engines of the 2000s, CryEngine began to struggle in the 2010s as rival tools, particularly Unreal Engine, increased in popularity.

Despite a number of changes of pricing model, Crytek at least managed to put out updates annually until the end of the decade.

However, the wheels really came off the wagon in the 2020s, as the release dates of updates began to be pushed back, and the public roadmap began to be scaled back.

CryEngine 5.7 was released in 2022, but had only a fraction of the features originally planned.

Crytek announced last May that it was developing a new version of CryEngine internally for use on Hunt: Showdown, and that the multiplayer shooter would “drive our strategy” for CryEngine.

However, there have now been no updates to the CryEngine developer blog for over a year, and the company laid off 15% off its staff in February.

While we haven’t been able to locate the actual Discord post, Games from Scratch reported earlier this year that Cryek has announced that CryEngine 5.7 will be the final public 5.x release.

CryEngine Community Edition: new post-processing features and critical bugfixes
A group of CryEngine users led by indie game developer Pterosoft Studio have now taken matters into their own hands, with the release of the CryEngine Community Edition

The unofficial patch for CryEngine 5.7 adds a number of new features, primarily for post-processing renders.

The main change is support for custom full-screen shaders: a comics shader, which stylized renders into comic-style art, is included as an example.

However, equally importantly, the patch fixes a number of lighting and rendering issues, including problems with rendering shadows under DirectX 12.

Public roadmap includes features originally planned by Crytek
The team has also posted its own roadmap for future releases, which include some of the new features originally planned by Crytek itself.

In particular, DXR Ray Tracing – planned for version 1.1 of the Community Edition – sounds eerily reminiscent of the hardware-agnostic ray tracing system originally scheduled for CryEngine 5.7.

Other planned features include a shader graph, voxel fluid simulation, and support for DLSS 4 and FSR 3, NVIDIA and AMD’s respective render upscaling and frame synthesis technologies.

Licensing and system requirements
The CryEngine Community Edition source code is available under an open-source MIT license.

It is distributed as a patch for CryEngine 5.7 LTS, so to use it, you will need to download and build CryEngine 5.7.

Although the Community Edition is being developed for free, if you want to support future development, you can back Pterosoft Studio on Patreon.

CryEngine 5.7 LTS itself is compatible with Windows 7+. Use of the editor is free, but Crytek charges 5% of the revenue from any project using the engine after the first $5,000/year.

Read more about the free CryEngine Community Edition on the project website

Download the CryEngine Community Edition source code from GitHub

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Features and bugfixes in the CryEngine Community Edition 1.0

Rendering Changes

• Full Screen Shaders: Added support for user‑defined full‑screen shaders, enabling advanced post‑processing workflows.
• Comics Example Shader: Included a new example shader showcasing stylized, comic‑inspired rendering techniques.
• Vibrance: Implemented vibrance adjustment via r_Vibrance CVar and Environment Editor integration.
• Texture Sharpening: Introduced r_TextureSharpening CVar for per‑texture sharpening. Requires r_Sharpening > 1 to activate.

Graphics Fixes

• DX12 Shadow Freeze Fix: Resolved an issue where shadows would freeze under DirectX 12.
• Normals on Glass Shaders Fix: Corrected normal map handling on glass materials for more accurate reflections and lighting.
• Merged Vegetation Shadow Fix: Fixed shadow rendering artifacts on merged vegetation assets.
• Decal Angle Based Fading Fix: Adjusted decal fading behavior to properly respect surface angles.
• Flash Dynamic Texture Fix: Fixed an issue with dynamic texture updates in Flash/Scaleform UI.