Details on the Future of CRYENGINE

Crytek has presented the most recent variant of their roadmap. The team wants to add support for DirectX 12, Vulkan, and ray tracing to CRYENGINE.

Features to be introduced in CRYENGINE 5.6:

• Mesh/Opaque Particle Casting Shadows
• Render Optimization Pass
• Tesselated Particle Ribbons
• Opaque Particle Z-Buffer
• Memory Footprint Reduction
• CPU Optimization

CRYENGINE 5.7 (spring of 2020):

• Support for Oculus Quest
• Improved VR Support
• Area Lights Implementation
• Improved Multiple View Rendering
• Opaque Particles/Deferred Lighting
• Optimized Dynamic Instancing
• DirectX 12 Implementation
• Vulkan Implementation
• Raytracing Implementation

In the short term, their main focus is said to be about increasing the stability and usability of the engine. There’s the new in-editor project management system coming to 5.6, for example, along with numerous optimizations in all areas including rendering, compilation, and memory footprint. More details about the features included in 5.6 will be mentioned in the release notes.

Their mid to long-term ambitions are focused on new features, tools, and support for additional platforms. “These goals will include the rework of the Schematyc system, which will also bring a modern and modular visual scripting framework that will allow you to create your own game logic without the need to code,” states the team. “The modular behavior of the visual scripting framework will enable other features to take advantage of this system, including, for example, our animation tools.”

The team also wants to integrate the new hardware-agnostic ray tracing technology into the engine, but you’ll have to wait for the release of CRYENGINE 5.7. Stay tuned for more news on ray tracing in CRYENGINE.

You can learn more here.