CryENGINE 3 Game Development: Beginner's Guide

Not every new computer game needs to start from scratch. A technique that's becoming increasingly common for most developers is to reuse existing game engines. This is where the CryENGINE 3 SDK comes in. The CryENGINE 3 SDK is a game engine which drives the visual actions taking place on the screen. Within this engine are the rules that dictate the way the game world works, and how objects and characters should behave within it. Due to the fact that creating the underlying code for the variety of systems within a game engine is usually very expensive and time consuming, the starting point of working with a game engine thus makes excellent financial sense for most developers. Throughout this book, and for all intents and purposes, we will be referring to the CryENGINE 3 SDK as the engine.

The CryENGINE has been developed over the past 10 years by the award winning independent developer, Crytek. Crytek has made major iterations to the original CryENGINE over a number of years and is currently on the third iteration, which is why we refer to this version of CryENGINE as the CryENGINE 3.

Arguably, the most prominent tool provided by a game engine is the level, or World Editor. The editor used with CryENGINE is known as the CryENGINE Sandbox, and it contains a whole suite of tools and sub-editors for developing games.

You can think of the CryENGINE Sandbox as a game compositing tool that acts similarly to any digital video compositing software such as Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, and even Windows Movie Maker. However, as opposed to inserting video and audio clips, the developer inserts art, design, and code that will all eventually come together to create a game.

Many people will have their own ideas for games. The first step on the path to manifesting that idea into reality is to undertake some basic research in order to expand the idea into a robust proposal, or "pitch" as it's in the game industry. There are simple considerations that a game designer can make in order to take their loosely defined idea into a solid concept. It might be tempting for some of us to jump straight into designing levels, characters, icons, and other fine details but as the saying goes, "the devil is in the details". It is best to avoid getting caught by this. If the basic premise of the game changes in the early development stages, much of the work on these small details will be wasted. A good practice is to spend a relatively short but valuable amount of time at the outset making sure the idea has the potential for development.

There are some genres that are inherently easier to achieve in CryENGINE simply due to the nature of its underlying design. Developers should consider that the CryENGINE has historically been used to create realistic and highly interactive experiences.

Creating a game that uses the first-person or third-person perspectives is relatively easy compared to creating something as a full scale real-time strategy game. To get some inspiration, let's explore the pedigree of the CryENGINE and what other visions have been achieved using it. As you browse through these games, remember that none of these were created in a day! These games were built with large teams over a number of years and thus, we should be realistic with ourselves about what we can achieve and how long it will take.

Far Cry by Crytek – first-person shooter

Far Cry, launched in 2004, sporting the first version of the CryENGINE used the technology that changed the face of gaming.

Tip

Downloading the color images of this book

We also provide you a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/2007_graphics.pdf.

Far Cry was the first full game developed on CryENGINE. It can be argued which came first, the engine or the game; but so as to not commit to either side, I would like to say the vision and requirements that were put forth for the game drove the technology, or the engine, into what would finally be known as CryENGINE 1.

This critically acclaimed game put to use the technology that allowed for a level of graphical fidelity, never seen before in games, such as huge view distances, high precision HDR lighting, and even more importantly, the game introduced a toolset for development that expressed the what you see is what you play (WYSIWYP) philosophy. This philosophy describes how Far Cry was created as the designers were able to enter in and out of game mode instantly using a shortcut key without having to wait for any saving, compiling, or baking. Designers were thus able to try as many iterations as it would take to create a particular aspect of gameplay in far less time than it would take in other game engines.

The game was truly a Sandbox first-person shooter. To be more precise, it was designed so that the player is directed to achieve certain goals, but the way in which they can accomplish these goal is completely up to him or her. The developer decides to give the player certain tools, which they can use or combine for a unique experience while accomplishing these goals. To be able to do this requires technology to be able to support huge maps and thousands of game entities.

Aion by NCsoft – massively online role-playing game

First released in Korea in 2008, Aion redefined the standard for the quality of art and rendering achievable in such a massive world, populated by thousands of players at once.

Aion was developed by NCsoft on the CryENGINE 1, with a significant amount of customization done to the engine to support the complex database and server requirements of a massively multiplayer online role-player game. It also demonstrated some unique gameplay features never before seen in an MMO. For example, the ability to fly and glide with your character's wings to travel in the world.

Expecting to create Aion in our spare time is largely beyond the scope of this book and likely also beyond the scope of any small development team. Aion was created by a large team and required developers who were experienced in creating MMO games.

This is a good example demonstrating how the engine is easier to adapt to certain genres than others. Of course, Sandbox and the CryENGINE can be used to achieve this; but it requires significantly more customization and innovation than a first-person shooter would.

Crysis by Crytek – first-person shooter

Crysis truly drove the next generational leap for the CryENGINE. Crysis, upon its launch in 2007, exceeded all expectations and set the new standard for real-time PC gaming.

CryENGINE 2 was made available for licensing shortly after the release of Crysis,due to popular demand of many developers in the industry.

The big technological jump for CryENGINE 2 was in sheer rendering fidelity and hyper-interactivity of its physical worlds.

This leap made it even more ideal for developing open-world Sandbox games. Though Crysis was a first-person shooter, the engine lent itself well to third-person adventure games and even vehicle simulations. In addition, visualization with CryENGINE 2 expanded as artists discovered the ability to create photorealistic scenes in comparatively less time than was considered possible at that point in time.

Crysis Warhead by Crytek – first-person shooter

CryENGINE 2 was further updated, in tandem, with the release of Crysis Warhead in 2008. This expansion took the player back to experience the same timeline of events from the original Crysis, but from a different protagonist's perspective.

In terms of technology, the engine's performance was further optimized to allow for a truly cinematic experience. It was designed to be a faster, more intense an experience than the original and it achieved its goal.

At this time, it was recognized by Crytek that to remain competitive, games must be able to run on the Xbox 360 and PS3, as such, development began in earnest of the console-friendly future generation CryENGINE 3.

Crysis 2 by Crytek – first-person shooter

Finally, we end our nostalgic journey at the current generation of CryENGINE 3.

Crysis 2 was released in March 2011 on Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. This was a huge milestone for CryENGINE, as it demonstrated that CryENGINE could achieve its historic rendering quality on this generation of gaming consoles, namely, Xbox 360 and PS3. Finally, the console users were able to experience the level of fidelity demanded by Crytek games, and other developers began actively pursuing their own AAA games using CryENGINE 3.

This brings us to the present as the package that you will be soon downloading and running, is the freely available CryENGINE 3 SDK, initially released in August 2011. It gives anyone with an Internet connection access to the CryENGINE 3 game engine. It continues to be updated to keep it in line with the same features and tools Crytek uses internally, bringing a huge advantage to anyone wanting to make high quality games and simulations.

The following screenshot is a depiction of a CryENGINE 3 creation:

The best way, in my opinion, to go about learning to use CryENGINE 3 SDK is by actually using it to create a variety of achievable genre-specific mini games or prototypes. These examples will then become the stepping stone that will give you the ability to create more complex games using the same skills and functions explored in simplified examples. You should be aware that these examples most likely won't make you millions of dollars, but will rather teach you the tools and techniques required to make your own successful game, should you have the passion and desire to do so.

The relatively straightforward examples in this book will give you a focus to concentrate your efforts as you learn CryENGINE 3 SDK, since attempting to master the engine all at once would be an extremely difficult and a time-consuming task for anyone.

This book will mainly focus on what you can do within Sandbox, but we will still explore the occasional need for external applications, such as 3ds Max and Photoshop. There are countless resources available to learn these applications.

Once you have gone through these examples, you will understand and even feel empowered by being able to create your very own game worlds within CryENGINE 3 SDK.

Before we dive in, we must ensure that our computer system meets the requirements for development with the CryENGINE 3 SDK. As opposed to some reports, it does not take a super computer to run the CryENGINE 3 SDK. It should be noted that the system requirements for a developer do differ from that of a player, otherwise known as the end user.

The system requirements for a developer are as follows:

The system requirements for end users are as follows:

To get our hands dirty, we are going to need to download and install CryENGINE 3 SDK. This will allow us to create and run new games and the included sample content. Following are the steps to download and install CryENGINE 3 SDK:

Let's rev it up! Let's see what the example level would look like from the end user or what we can call the player's perspective.

As discussed earlier, programmers basically rule the world when it comes to game development. For this reason, having C++ game code released in the Free SDK for the CryENGINE is an invaluable tool. I encourage everyone to download the freely available Visual Studio Expressto at the very least explore the provided game code. This game code is designed to be a template to create your own games and has a huge array of possible functions.

Later examples in this book will delve into how we can use the game code to make our games truly unique and explain how to download and install Visual Studio.

Crytek provides a downloadable file containing sample assets on http://www.crydev.net. These assets are in the form of uncompressed textures and source 3ds Max or Maya scene files. For many, it is valuable to use these to learn how to use complex asset features or to customize them to create your own amazing piece of interactive game art.

The examples in this book will exclusively use 3ds Max. However, the process for many asset creation procedures for Maya can be found online in the provided documentation at CryDev site.

The examples in this book will all use 3ds Max and Adobe Photoshop as the primary digital content creation tools, otherwise known as DCC tools. Since we will use 3D Studio Max for this book, let's install the tools we will need to open and export the sample models to the engine. The steps to do so are as follows:

Having installed the required tools, let's now download and open the source sample assets and to do so we will perform the following steps:

The textures we will create throughout the course of this book will be created or edited using Adobe Photoshop. CryTIF is a Photoshop plugin developed by Crytek that can load and save merged Photoshop images as TIF files. It's important to realize though that the .TIF format images are not used when rendered in the launcher or even the editor, but they are rather converted to a more optimized format, in this case from a .TIF file to a .DDS. The following steps show how to install the plugin and save files in the .TIF format:

The CryENGINE 3 Sandbox is the level compositing tool built for CryENGINE, which is used to create and edit the majority of the content for games, visualizations, and simulations. It is likely, if you are developing a game based on CryENGINE—whether you are an artist, programmer, animator, or designer—you will have to use it at some point of time. As such, you should have a basic understanding of the CryENGINE 3 sandbox and some of the subsystems contained within. Fortunately, you'll find it to be an extremely powerful tool with a deep assortment of subsystems available to just about anyone involved in a game's development process.

Let's open the editor so that we can see the sample level from a developer's perspective. Perform the following steps:

Now that we have run the two principal applications of the engine, we should take some time to learn the interface to the development application CryENGINE Sandbox. The ability to navigate levels is a basic skill with which all developers should be familiar. Thankfully, this interface is quite intuitive to anyone who is already familiar with the WASD control scheme popular in most first-person shooter games developed on the PC.

Now that you have learned to move the camera on its main primary axis, it's time to adjust the rotation of the camera. The following steps will indicate the same:

Levels in the CryENGINE Sandbox are composed of any number of entities, brushes, and other objects. These will each be explained later in this book, but for now we need to know how to manipulate and adapt these objects to our desires.

The following steps will help you to select and browse through objects:

Notice that when you selected the object, particular properties appeared in the RollupBar. The RollupBar is where entity parameters, settings, and controls are listed and accessed. These parameters will depend on the type of objects you have selected, but it should be known that this is the primary way to adjust any aspect of entities within the Sandbox.

The top of the RollupBar is split into four very different panels, which are accessed from their corresponding tabs. They are as follows:

Finalize the placement of your object and experiment by selecting and moving different entities within the sample level.

Having moved some objects around, we might be happier with the new placement of them, or simply want to save the level for further modification. In order to do that, perform the following steps:

We've come a long way in just a few pages! We can now open, edit, and save levels, giving us access to some of the most important tools to create games. The next chapter will take us deeper into Sandbox and will expose how we can use the interface to perform a enormous variety of modifications to our level.

We have learned a good deal already about the CryENGINE 3 SDK and how we can use the application within. We took our first few steps by opening a level in the launcher and in the editor, as well as installing some of the tools we will need in the later chapters.

Now that we are dangerous enough to load the sample level in the editor, we're ready to begin ravaging the example map and to learn a few of the useful functions available within the CryENGINE 3 Sandbox. In the next chapter, we will use some of the tools within the CryENGINE Sandbox to create our own levels and environment. It will guide through creating your own heightmap and terrain textures in addition to distributing vegetation and setting a time of day.