Cryengine

Cryengine V

By Kevin Dackow and Zach Dixon

Description

This software is a video game development engine. The Cryengine documentation contains valuable information about the engine's VR behavior, which fundamentally relies on individual drivers for each HMD. From the documentation:

As of CRYENGINE 5.3, Virtual Reality vendor implementations reside in individual plugins. Note: this is a BETA feature. This has been done to standardize VR device behavior and allow the decoupling of VR devices from the Engine when they are not needed for a project.

Additionally, Cryengine is known to support Playstation VR, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.

Tutorial for Hello World

Unable to get a Hello World up and running with approximately 15 hours working with the software.

Also unable to get VR running after a similar amount of time. -Zach

Minimum/Recommended System Requirements

For running and developing in the engine. For specifics, see the hardware page.

Minimum:

Processor

NVIDIA GeForce 450 series or AMD Radeon HD 5750 series or higher (minimum 1 GB dedicated VRAM GDDR5)

GPU

NVIDIA GeForce 400 series or AMD Radeon HD 6000 series

Memory

4 GB RAM

8 GB available space

Sound Card:

DirectX Compatible Sound Card with latest drivers

Operating system

Windows 7, 8.1, 10 (64-bit only)

Recommended:

GPU

NVIDIA GeForce 660Ti or higher, AMD Radeon HD 7950 or higher (minimum 2 GB dedicated VRAM GDDR5)

Processor

Intel Quad-Core (i5 2300) or AMD Octo-Core (FX 8150)

Memory

8 GB RAM


Metrics

I felt that I fell at the Intermediate level on the metrics scale, given my experience with C++ and C#, and thus I have scaled it accordingly

Accessibility: The estimated time for someone to create Hello World in VR

  • Beginner: No coding or graphics experience | 20+ hours

  • Intermediate: Some coding or graphics experience | 15+ hours

  • Advanced: Both coding and graphics experience | 10 hours

  • Expert: A lot of experience with computer graphics, specifically with this software | 2 hours

Power: The engine's power - i.e. how much one can do with this

  • High: Intended for developers with years of graphics experience. With that, it allows for stunning creations and competes with the best game engines on the market.

Usage: Evaluation of software's use for the following purposes

  • Game design - built for game design and used worldwide to create some of the most beautiful, well built games around

  • Other - not intended for science

Summary

Overall, Cryengine was extremely powerful and definitely had capabilities for game design far beyond what I did. Porting it to Virtual Reality - even with the pre-setup Vive in the lab - was astoundingly difficult. If a user is comfortable with Cryengine and Game Code development within it, then Cryengine affords a powerful game engine with many opportunities, however, for beginners this is not recommended.