New CryEngine drops number for fourth iteration, shows appropriately spangly video

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Crytek's CryEngine already had most of the graphics sown up with its third iteration, and now its (unnumbered) fourth has returned for the stragglers, adding impressive-sounding things like "realistic deep facial skinning", "physically based shading" and "complex simulations" to its bulging bag of tricks. Thankfully, they also released a video demonstration to explain that those things mean 'better lighting, weather and physics effects", including puddles that will actually evaporate in the sun . To see this in action, either go outside or join me after the break.

PuddleTech aside, the highlight for me is talk of 'procedural weather', which I assume means wind and rain behaving in a somewhat random manner. The video also shows off a nicely polished floor, and some shiny armour on the dude from Crytek's Xbone-exclusive Ryse.

Crytek's Carl Jones explained the decision to drop the number at the end of 'CryEngine'. "Since CryEngine 3 was launched in 2009, we've dramatically changed the engine so many times, with so many major new features, it's not the same engine anymore."

"We have revolutionised many parts of the engine: we have overhauled our entire lighting system, built movie quality character rendering and animation solutions, vastly improved the speed and effectiveness of our Sandbox editor, and even our rendering has changed with tessellation, pixel accurate displacement mapping and now physical based rendering; all of this while maintaining our first principal: that making games should be real-time, all the time." I dunno, I think turn-based game development might be pretty fun.

Thanks to Eurogamer . For more, slightly less shiny Gamescom coverage, head here before it dries up in the sun.

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.