Crytek occupies a medium-sized booth space at this year's GDC show floor. The company, showing its CryENGINE2 to developers, announced that it found its first customer in Avatar Reality, Inc. Hoping to land more interest, the company is hosting a series of rotating presentations about its level editor, sound system, character animation, engine, and other features.
Harald Seeley, Development Director for Crytek briefly spoke with us about the engine and its outlook, saying that it's at alpha now for the PC, and they'll ship the SDK to AVI in four to six weeks. Seeley said that Crytek is working to bring CryENGINE2 to the PS3 and Xbox 360, but those plans don't mean that Crysis will be released on those platforms.
Modders and indie designers should look for a PC version of the development environment bundled with Crysis. Seeley said that the consumer tools offer nearly all of the features of the fully licensed engine, and that modders may be able to work out terms to release commercial software created with the free editor.
Seeley thinks that the commercial version of CryENGINE2 will lead other middleware engines because it was developed for DirectX 10 instead of being prettied up from an older version of the API. He said, "This will become the standard. ... [Gamers] won't be willing to settle for titanium trees any longer. If it looks breakable, if it looks like you should be able to pick it up, [you will.]"
