Crytek has been facing some troubles over the last few years, but the company’s impressive CryEngine is still being used for a number of very important projects, including Star Citizen and The Climb. However, perhaps some of the most iconic games that used this engine are those belonging to the Crysis series, all of which featured absolutely stunning visuals. Those of you who have a soft spot for this engine will be glad to know that its creators have now made it open source, which means that pretty much anyone can go ahead and download it. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind that future projects created using CryEngine are still subject to some licensing terms, which is why Crytek has issued a statement in which it clarifies this issue.
“The license is basically you can use the engine for free with no royalties. Our model is Pay What You Want. Basically you pay whatever you want, if you want, and have a choice of how much of that goes to the developers and how much goes to an Indie Fund that we use to fund indie projects that use the engine. We also offer “Insider Memberships” for studios that want some closer support from us, trainings, etc.”
If you’re interested in downloading the source code for CryEngine yourself, you can do so right here. Even though other engines such as Unreal Engine 4 and Frostbite are each impressive in their own way, it’s definitely good news for developers to have more choices at their disposal.
In May 2016, German game-development company Crytek made a decision to upload the source code of their game engine CryEngine V to Github. The engine is written in C++ and has immediately attracted attention of both the open-source developer community and the team of developers of PVS-Studio static analyzer who regularly scan the code of open-source projects to estimate its quality. A lot of great games were created by a number of video-game development studios using various versions of CryEngine, and now the engine has become available to even more developers. This article gives an overview of errors found in the project by PVS-Studio static analyzer: http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0417/