3D Vision Blog

Great news everyone as today Crytek has released a freely available CryENGINE 3 SDK for non-commercial use, you can download it and try it out, you just need to do a free registration in order to be able to use it. The CryENGINE 3 Free SDK can be used for non-commercial projects, so you can use it for educational purposes or even to make your own games and distribute them as long as they are available completely free. And things get even better as the CryENGINE 3 Free SDK also offers full support for the stereoscopic 3D output modes that were available in the game Crysis 2 that is based on this engine. And although the game itself only contained the post stereo rendering, meaning not full dual frame rendering as a means to still provide decent feeling for volume of the objects on the scene almost without sacrificing any performance, the free SDK also offers you to use dual rendering mode. This means that you would be able to make full stereoscopic 3D rendering for both images intended for the left and right eye, but this comes at some cost, namely the bigger hit in terms of performance when in stereoscopic 3D mode.

The Post Stereo mode (SSRS or Screen Space Re-Projection Stereo) is the only option affordable for consoles according to Crytek in this SDK as Xbox 360 and PS3 generally lack the power to use dual rendering on more complex gaming environments that you’d be normally designing with the CryENGINE 3 engine. The trick behind this is that the image for the second eye is extracted from the one rendered for the first eye by offsetting pixels based on the depth, so the processing power required for rendering the frame for the second eye is significantly reduced and thus the drop in performance drop is hardly noticeable. However when working on a game for PC you’d probably prefer to use the Dual Rendering mode in order to get two fully rendered frames for each eye in order to have more convincing depth effect, of course provided that you have powerful enough video card that can handle the extra load. Both the Post Stereo and the Dual Rendering modes are fully implemented in the CryENGINE 3 Free SDK, so you will be able to experiment with them to see what the visual and performance difference are.

CryENGINE 3 Free SDK System Requirements [Developer]:

- Supported operating Systems: XP, Vista, Windows 7 (with Windows 7 recommended)
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 2GHz or better
- Memory: GB RAM (4 GB recommended)
- Video Card : Nvidia 8800GT 512MB RAM, ATI 3850HD 512MB RAM or better

CryENGINE 3 Free SDK System Requirements [End User*]:

- Supported operating Systems: Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista SP1 or SP2, Windows 7
- CPU: 32-bit or 64-bit processor (a multi-core processor is strongly recommended)
- Memory: 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
- Video Card: ShaderModel 3 capable graphics card (for example an Nvidia 6 series card)
* End Users who only use the game launcher without Sandbox have lower system requirements.

The only new feature that the CryENGINE 3 Free SDK still lacks is the support for DirectX 11, but apparently such will be added in a later version of the SDK, so you will also get to use that feature.

- You can download the CryENGINE 3 Free SDK with stereo 3D support form here…
- And this is the place where you can read more about the stereo 3D support in the SDK…

Meet Jens Schöbel, Technical Designer (and stereoscopic 3D wiz) for Crytek, developers of the upcoming Crysis 2 video game and CryENGINE 3 game engine. Crytek first made headlines in stereoscopic 3D gaming with a demo they did on an iZ3D monitor at GDC 2009. They later demonstrated CryENGINE 3 running in stereoscopic 3D on the big screen at SIGGRAPH 2009. Now Crysis 2 is getting set for release (this November), complete with native stereoscopic 3D support for the PC and Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 consoles. Neil Schneider from MTBS3D began a mystery tour of finding out what Crytek have been cooking in 3D by asking Jens Schöbel a lot of interesting questions.

- Read the first part of the interview with Jens Schöbel from Crytek here…
- Crysis 2 is already available for pre-order with a release date of November 23rd…

Crytek has just announced some very interesting news. It seems that the company is planning to show their CryENGINE 3 in stereoscopic 3D (S-3D) at this year’s GDC expo in San Francisco (11–13 March). It is interesting to note that this actually appears to be the first announcement about something S-3D to be showcased during GDC this year, as I was beginning to wonder if suddenly everyone forgot about Stereoscopic 3D. Lets hope that there will be much more to be seen during GDC in terms of Stereo 3D support, after all the developers need to be aware of the advantages that S-3D can bring into gaming along with how to properly implement game graphics and effects.

But back to the CryENGINE 3, one of the key features of the new engine is the “LiveCreate” feature, which will also be showcased at GDC, and what it does is to allow designers to work with a single editor, but see and play the results in real-time on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. With CryENGINE 3, scalability across multiple platforms is a revolutionary development to enable the creation of truly great-looking games – regardless of the target platform. Hopefully this will help a lot to stop seeing some crappy port of a game for one or another platform, especially if other developers adopt similar approach to their game engines.

“After the successful introduction of CryENGINE 3 at last year’s GDC, we are really excited to show the latest version of our all-in-one game development solution this year in stereoscopic 3D. Over the past few years, S-3D technology has emerged as one of the key trends both in movies and games. With CryENGINE 3, developers will have the ability to create their content in 3D on all platforms. There are basically no longer any limits to a designer’s creativity. CryENGINE 3 features many innovations to accelerate development, cut production costs and ensure teams are able to maximize their own creativity without delays,” says Carl Jones, Director of Global Business Development CryENGINE.

It is worth to note that CryENGINE 3 seems to support Stereoscopic 3D natively and does not require additional drivers, or at least that is what Crytek demonstrated during Siggraph 2009 with the engine. And then again even before Siggraph, during GDC 2009, Cytek has also demonstrated working Stereoscopic 3D support with CryENGINE 2 on iZ3D display. Maybe it is about time for Crytek to become a bit more serious and active about S-3D and join an organization like The S3DGA, as there are still not a lot of game engines designed to support stereo 3D gaming. And while the Stereoscopic 3D support in CryENGINE 3 seems to be for PC only at the moment, with PS3 going to be 3D-ready soon and because of the LiveCreate feature of the engine we might see console S3D support too, and not only limited to PS3, but on Xbox 360 too. Still nothing official about stereoscopic 3D support for consoles coming from Crytek…