Crytek has announced that CRYENGINE 5.6 is available now for all game developers. According to the team, this major new release includes over 1,000 changes to the engine. Crytek has also released a CRYENGINE 5.6 technology video, showcasing just some of the new features in the engine.

CRYENGINE 5.6 includes new features, enhancements, and improvements across the engine. Thus, the engine gives developers more power, making game creation quicker and easier. The key features of this brand new version are: In-Editor Project Management, Area Lights, Particle Ribbons and Full-Body Ragdoll IK.

Here are the key features according to the press release.

CRYENGINE 5.6 Key Features

The Sandbox Editor now controls project creation and management, making getting started with a new CRYENGINE project faster and giving developers more flexibility with this new streamlined and improved workflow.

Micro-facet Multi-Layer Materials is also a new feature that advances the visual reproduction of metals and gives more artistic control over the creation of a range of materials. By describing materials as a stack of layers of varying thickness, each with different optical properties, users can, for instance, model a wet surface by defining a slightly absorptive layer on top, and spatially or temporally varying the thickness of that layer.

Area lights deliver a better representation of how light behaves than traditional punctual light sources. CRYENGINE’s new implementation makes use of pre-computed textures. This will calculate and model area lights far more accurately. It also allows for more flexibility when defining different kinds of light shapes.

The Render Ribbons feature has a new option called Tessellated. This enables the graphics card’s tessellation stage to smooth the joints in ribbon particles. This is achieved by generating new polygons in a curved shape which is also adaptive to distance. This feature benefits ribbon effects, including trails from flying objects and organic objects like worms or vines.

Inter-Entity Constraint Points Storage focuses on creating gears but also has other functions. It allows users to manually specify which entity will ‘own’ the constraint point. Since each constrained entity can have its own constraint point in place, it’s also possible to create objects like belts with this feature.

Closed cloth shapes can now have internal pressure based on the current shape volume in this extension to the existing cloth entity.

Ropes can now use bones and skinning and can be built from custom .cgf meshes, repeated several times. This enables a chain ‘rope’ to be created from a single link. It also allows for the rapid creation of vines or complex cables that fit naturally in the environment.

Ragdoll IK is a physics-aware, energy-based, full-body IK, which tries to satisfy constraints imposed on the physics skeleton with minimum effort energy-wise. The effect is similar to applying physics impulses to characters. However, the results are computed instantly, without the physics thread running.

CRYENGINE 5.6 now supports CRIWARE ADX2, a comprehensive and easy-to-use audio system.

The new Behavior Tree UI is a GUI interface which enables users to quickly create complex behavior trees for AI, bringing NPCs and enemies to life. This tool was developed by the Hunt: Showdown team, bringing yet more production-proven technology to the engine.

Enjoy!

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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